Max's Summer Travel Journals: Days 44-48: Lindau, Memmingen, Konstanz, Ravensburg, and Biberach an der Riß

I am again swimming in notes, so I will have to present my observations in piecemeal fashion.

I noted, as I left Italy, that I had only learned something like thirty words in the language, including several of the cardinal numbers, a few words of courtesy, some basic phrases, such as "Where bathrooms?", and a few words related to trains and buses. By contrast, I had learned roughly as many of words within five or six days of my first trip to Germany with a phrasebook, the reason for the difference being that I wanted to talk to Germans, while my Russian (specifically, the swear words) covered everything that I wanted to say, beyond covering my basic needs, in Italy.

The mountains between Milan and Zurich were, as I had expected, fabulous. We passed stone buildings and churches, wooden mountain huts (some on stilts in case of snow), churches with tall, narrow, pointed spires, and buildings with paintings on the side (almost like outer murals) that looked like guild designs. At the border, four unregistered passengers were thrown off of the train, while the women across from me, both Armenian, did not even have their passports checked (I did, perhaps because of my then-thick beard.). We passed a few castles, including one with a crenellted roof that reminded me of Ferrara’s castle, and we passed an emerald lake, where people were sailing and swimming. The train had left Milan late, naturally, but was, by the miracle of Swiss railways, on time in Zurich, enabling me to make my connection to Lindau without difficulty. I was delighted to be in a clean, efficiently run train station with clear signage, even floors, escalators, and only the slightest scent of cigarette smoke, though I also noted that my side-trip to Germany was going to be way more expensive than was justifiable and that I could have saved a lot of money by just staying in Italy for a little longer.

In Schaffenberg, where I had another connection, it seemed that absolutely everyone smoked, making up for the cleanliness of Zurich, which was just a front; I took to hating Switzerland and keenly awaiting my passage into Germany. I do not know exactly when I crossed the border or what, particularly, I saw on my way there—rather, I do remember; my notes have gotten scattered. I remember the apple trees, cornfields, and shaggy-haired conifers with drooping branches like a bloodhound’s jowls (perhaps firs? I have to learn my trees one day); I remember the neatness and order of the towns that we passed on the way to Lindau. I caught glimpses of Lake Konstanz here and there until we reached Lindau, which is a promontory reachable by a strip of land only a few dozen meters wide. Lake Konstanz burst into view, glittering in the late evening light against the pale blue mountains in the distance.

The next few days were marked largely by trips to towns like Lindau—small, provincial German towns with interesting histories. I decided, on my first day, to skip my day-trip to Saint Gallen, partly because it would be expensive and I was tired of day-trips, and partly because I wanted to see more of Lindau itself, which was, as it turned out, celebrating a city holiday (like Canada Day, B.C. Day, &c., only in honor of the city). As soon as I started walking into town (my hostel being just outside of it), I was flooded with the optimism attendant with reentry into the first world. Trains ran smoothly; well-kempt houses stood in tidy rows, each separated from its neighbor, along the street; there were sidewalks, on which nobody drove cars or mopeds; and there were playgrounds everwhere for children. I passed a small church and what looked like an old mansion, a fancier version of, say, the Aberthau Community Centre, offest from the street by a large lawn and a ring of trees, like a hedge. Since Lindau is a small town, one walks right across the train tracks, rather than over or under them, and, when a train approaches, little bells go off at the crossing, signalling the lowering of the restraining beam (Do these have a name? I mean one of those beams that blocks off parking lots, &c.). I approached the strip of land joining Lindau with the mainland and again had to wait for a train—quaint as the bells were, the waiting would grow tiresome in a hurry. This gave me time to look around. People kept little garden plots in an enclosure next to the train tracks, and I even saw patches of wild strawberries growing near them. The water was a rich aquamarine color, its green tint, I would later learn, the product of algae that came in at that time of year, and it was dotted with little white sailboats under a cloudless sky. Drivers here are sane; streets have clearly marked signs; there are separate paths for bikers and walkers; and people stick to the prescribed paths. As I waited for the train to pass, people told jokes to one another across the tracks. The people of Lindau (or those visiting) looked vastly more fit than anyone whom I had seen in Italy; they had, evidently, learned the value of exercise. (They also smiled, which never ceased to amaze me. I think that only two or three people in total smiled at me in Italy.)

I would love to describe Lindau in depth, but I would like to get through my notes on Salzburg and Ljubljana so as to more or less catch up on my letters (ignoring the one about the Dolomites). It was fantastically beautiful: it has old towers and churches, including one from the eleventh century; it has the timber-framed houses that I have come to love so well; and it has a great many elaborately decorated (perhaps boroque?) buildings, including the city hall, which has murals drawn on the outside about the city’s history. Lindau was historically rich due to being a centre of trade between Italy and the city-states north of it, and, because it had little manufacturing, it is much less industrial than the bigger cities near it, such as Friedrichshafen. It has grown little in the past few centuries, and, while it has a few apartment buildings (outside of the peninsula), none of them appaers to be more than three stories high. The tallest buildings in the city are the churches and the old lighthouse, which probably makes one feel the city’s history a little more keenly.

I probably went running on my first day in Lindau—either that or on my second. The trails along the water were well-marked and took me through more orderly German towns, past apple, pear, and plum orchards all neatly lined up and covered with netting (Lindau was the first place that I visited that seemed to enjoy the benefits of mordern agriculture.). Other people were out walking or walking their dogs; very few cars passed. I reflected, as I ran, that, if I wanted to see beautiful shoreline again, there was no reason to go as far as Italy. The evening light was just beginning to fail when I returned from my run. I marvelled at the tranquility of the place.

While I went a little nuts on pastries in Lindau (many of them were based on sponge cake), I was preparing myself for self-abnegation (I have, somewhat to my regret, not eaten a single pastry since I left Lake Konstanz.), and I discovered the joys of black bread and of dark bread with seeds, both of which have enough flavor that, while one prefers to eat them with meat, cheese, or a combination of the two, they are just fine on their own with a pint of milk. The fruit on Lake Konstanz was good but not as good as I had remembered from previous trips to Germany—it included such rarities as gooseberries and red currants, with which I fell in love for their tartness and my not having eaten them on the trip. The meat store that I visited in Lindau had two lines (one needs a ticket from a machine in order to be served), one for meat and the other for sausage, and the smoked meat here is fantastic and various, though I did not get a full sense of it, as the one time I bought four different types of smoked ham for comparison, I also got some god-awful cheese, which looked innocuous enough behind the glass but had a strong enough flavor to negate that of the meat. There are reminders, in the form of little plaques saying that such-and-such a person lived in thus-and-such a house until 1943 or 1944, of the Holocaust everywhere, though fewer of World War II itself (or, at least, those memorials are not nearly as grandiose or obvious as the ones in much of Italy). There are few defensive castles here but many large residencies (simpler palaces) with white walls and ruddy roofs. The wading birds, raptors, and songbirds here are all impressive. People are friendly. There is even the occasional Asian foods store, as in the rest of Germany, suggesting, to me, that it is economically much better off than Italy (as if one did not already know), where I saw none. (Why would one set up a store where no one would buy anything?)

I admit that a few of the trains around Lake Konstanz were late, never by very much, but enough that one might miss one’s connection; I had forgotten just how many connections I would have to take to get from one small town to the next, and I forgot that constant train travel could be exhausting. (This is a key note for my future travel plans.) Looking back, I realized that what got me started on this mad point-to-point travel in the first place was having a spare day in Frankfurt—horror of all horrors—a couple of years ago and feeling that I could have filled it with something worthwhile if I had planned it better, as well as my not liking Cesky Krumlov and feeling that I spent more time in the Czech Republic than was necessary. It was then, given my hunger to see as much of the world as possible, that I conceived of going from place to place to place without rest days so as not to waste any time.

Of my day-trips from Lindau I have, luckily, little to say. Memmingen is where I got the fantastic roast meat and lousy cheese; lots of the towns that I saw had old towers, parts of of their town walls, churches, timber-framed buildings, and other such things that I like. I have noted the decent fuit here and the pastries. I noted, again, that I was spending too much money, and I also noted that I had been trying, since I was in Bologna, to figure out which day-trips I could skip instead of looking for more stuff with which to fill my trip, which was a sure sign of travel fatigue (and of having tried to hard to see it all). I visited a museum in Lindau that showed me how wealthy residents of the city used to live (they had very elaborately decorated furnaces), which included a painting modeled after a Rembrandt, whose style is so distinctive that, when I saw the painting and had not yet seen the name attached to it (I do not know if it was a reproduction or just an imitation.), I thought, “This guy’s been to the Netherlands!” I met a lady there who worked at the museum and showed me around a bit, pointing out where she lived on my map of the area and enjoining that I not forget her, and I had a great many pleasant interactions in general, including in Lindau’s old lighthouse, from which I could see the whole surrounding area (for just under two Euros), and in the library, where the lady working apologized for the noise coming from outside (the city holiday featured lots of heavy metal bands) and said that the buliding was usually an escape from the outside world.

I told a joke, during my first day-trip, when the trian was late that such a thing was impossible in Germany, and the lady to whom I told it laughed and said that it was normal. Jokes told by foreigners in halting speech are always funnier, somehow—that is, standards for them are lower—than when people fluent in a language speak them, probably because one is somewhat of a child when one cannot speak the language, making one’s ejaculations all the more unexpected. The only note of any real philosophical purchase that I seem to have made is that I saw a bunch of logs being watered, which seemed strange to me, on the way to or from Memmingen. This reminded me of how key agricultural innovations are and how far we are from the land and the production of the food that we eat—I always joke that milk comes form the supermarket, as that is where one buys it. I suppose that the final point of note is that I almost surely past a “hospital” or two. Hospitals used to be either almshouses or guesthouses for pilgrims; the best that I have ever seen was surely in Canterbury, where I learned around priest holes, or little bunkers where Catholic priests were hidden so that they would not be found and killed for preaching the wrong faith, and was reminded that the idea of having large numbers of medical professionals in one place where patients can be treated is a relatively new one (conceived god knows when or by whom). My trip to Lindau was peaceful and unremarkable, filled with small joys like the view of Lake Lindau from the cathedral in Konstanz and the sense that I was seeing Europe as it was five hundred years ago.