I forgot to mention a few things in my last email, one of which is that I learned in a church in Strasbourg (in multiple languages, no less) that God had taken me into his heart and that I should thank him for the joy that he bestowed on me two days ago. I failed to do this and consider it too late to be worth it, but I am sure that God will forgive me if he is really as benevolent as he is made out to be. The churches in Strasbourg are different from those in Germany mainly in having much more vividly-colored stained glass windows, as though those in Germany were watered-down watercolors and those in France were rich pastels. Strasbourg's cathedral was like a cross between Cologne's cathedral and Lenin's mausoleum: it had the same fancy curlicues and little embellishments as Cologne's cathedral, and it had the same signs saying "this way only" and naming a maximum amount of time in the cathedral as Lenin's mausoleum had. It was clearly more for show than for worship, in contrast with most of Germany's religious buildings, and had a more sumptuous interior than German's older cathedrals (those of Worms, Speyer, &c.).
Strasbourg was much more vibrant than any of the German cities that I had recently seen (except for Dusseldorf, which may have been on par with it). While I mentioned this in my email, I did a poor job of emphasizing it. I saw many youth and schoolchildren right outside of the city center; I saw signs describing city planners' efforts to make Strasbourg a greener city; I saw adolescents playing soccer, which disappointed me, as being physically fit makes you worse at smoking; and, while this does not exactly point to vibrance, I saw someone smoke a cigarette while riding a bike, I sight that I had not beheld since I was in Vienna last year. Strasbourg was full of university buildings and medical research centers and had a very modern tram, and people treated the historic city center just like any other part of the city, which had its pros and cons. On the plus side, it prevented the city center's feeling like a mummified museum, while on the downside, it meant that the city center was somewhat dirty and grimy, much like the rest of the city. On the whole, I felt that Strasbourg had an atmosphere of growth and development that I had not so far observed in any cities except for Dusseldorf and, perhaps, Maastricht, in Holland.
I started my day today by taking a walk up to Heidelberg's castle and skirting the castle grounds (for free). I have little to say except that it afforded me spectacular views of Heidelberg and a chance to see the woods closer up. It turns out that there are lots of walking (not really hiking) trails through the wooded hills of Heidelberg, but I only took a few steps along one of them, as I wanted to get started off for Stuttgart. As I walked around Heidelberg's castle, I heard (and saw) yet another warbler, grey and with a yellow throat, that easily outperforms the cardinal, and I must have heard half of a dozen other fabulous bird calls. Heidelberg, and Germany as a whole, would be a birdwatcher's paradise. (My only note about the castle itself is that it is being reconstructed and is currently partly in ruins, which makes it more majestic, in a sense, as one sees the castle as it truly is and can imagine its history more vividly by seeing what it is like today. Also, there was a bus to take tourists who were too lazy to walk up to the castle.)
My command of German is now strong enough that I can ask increasingly more sophisticated questions, with the result that I sometimes get confounding answers in return. While I had a perfectly successful exchange with a railway personnel, in which I negotiated a train ride along the Neckar, today, I often get in over my head. When I asked a woman the other day how to reach Speyer's cathedral, she said something like, !$adfsf#@#!$#! left !#jfdjffs#&# street !fadfsfdr#$%%^^% cathedral, and she continued trying to explain herself when she saw the look of confusion on my face. My only way out of the situation was to tell her, "Thank you very much" ad nauseum and nod my head vigorously whenever it appeared that she was asking me a question. On other occasions, like when I was finding out the price of raspberries at the store, I find that my increased understanding of numbers (although I cannot say them very well myself) and the extraordinary amount of information communicated by tone of voice and body language are easily enough to let me navigate my new linguistic space. It is exciting to now know enough to be able to engage people in casual, if mundane, conversation and to get around when using English is not an option. Also, it is more absorbing to learn a country's language than to continue using English non-stop; it makes the experience more fun.
The train ride from Heidelberg to Stuttgart was magical, much like the one along the upper Rhine. I arranged to take a train that passed through two small villages that I had initially planned to see and had a transfer at a larger village, Heilbronn, that I decided not to visit; I got to see everything that I would have seen had I visited all three places, only without the hassle of walking along the streets and snapping photos. The hills east of Heidelberg look marvelous. They are covered in a very thick canopy of deciduous trees with clumps of red-trunked pine (or cedar?), naked from the waist down, thrown in; farther south-east, grasses, shrubs, and rows of wine grapes replace the trees, and farther still, the hills smooth out a little, and the landscape grows boring. We passed tiny, picturesque towns in the German countryside, complete with - you guessed it - churches and old city walls, and I even saw a couple of castles. Life in such a provincial setting would be suffocating, much like life in a small town outside of Kelowna (for example), but it must be tolerable for people who grew up with it. The houses themselves that people own are well-built and well-tended, with little pots of flowers on the windowsills between the windows' old-fashioned wooden shutters.
One thing that interested me, as I rode the train, was that the trellises on which grape vines are grown are both spaced a certain distance away from one another and placed on strips of grass separated by stone buttresses, little fences that someone built by hand. While I can understand their being far apart from one another so that each of them individually gets enough nutrients, I do not see what the stone buttresses have to do with anything. It is possible that their root systems are weak enough that they would collapse on the steep slopes on which they are grown, but then why not grow them on flat patches of land? The hills near Heidelberg were, in fact, steep, with bare stretches of red, clayey rock here and there.
Stuttgart is a spectacularly ugly city, the ugliest and most unpleasant that I have seen in all of Europe (if one discounts Slovenia; it is its own little world). As soon as I got off of the train here, I stepped through a haze of cigarette smoke into the road, as there were no functional sidewalks out front. I crossed into a pedestrian-only area that was tolerable, but trying to find my hostel was a nightmare, even with directions from a woman working at the tourist office. I ended up walking along a highway - the city is full of highways - on a sidewalk that, like the one outside of the train station, trailed off right into the road itself, which I had to walk along, pressing myself against its outer barrier, for some fifty yards. There were no crosswalks at the nearest stoplight, so I had to run across the road at times that seemed appropriate, whereat I walked along a smaller road that did have a sidewalk and found my hostel.
If I had to sum the city up, I would say that Stuttgart was a city without a soul. It is clearly an area full of commerce, as there are expensive stores and cars everywhere, but there is nothing of any cultural, intellectual, or spiritual worth within a ten-mile radius of the city limits. The city is terrible for walking, has very few statues, has nowhere decent to eat, and is more or less one big construction site (full of highways). This is what happens when you take a city with Cologne's, Frankfurt's, or Dusseldorf's economic growth and gut it of any vestiges of culture: its intellectual life ends up stunted, and everything in it becomes oriented towards money. People in Stuttgart seem to smoke even more than those in other German cities, although that seemed impossible, and there are beggars on every street corner, who also crowd around some of the city's few cultural monuments. Stuttgart seems to me to be the German equivalent of Philadelphia: there is no sane reason to visit it.
My only other points today are about cuisine, as a visit to a bakery today stimulated me to think further about the differences between French and German food. I have probably already mentioned that for 12 Euros one can buy enough food for two people in Germany (or for two people for two days in Poland), while in France, that is enough money to whet one's appetite. German pastries are superior to French pastries not only for their preponderant focus on taste rather than presentation, but also because of their variety. At any good German bakery, one can get apple strudel, layered cakes, sweet-dough pastries filled with poppy seeds, a shortbread-like dough covered in streusel, Danishes with fruit or pudding toppings, doughnuts with jam filling, tarts with pudding, fruit, and gelatinized jelly on top, croissants like the ones made in France, and the obligatory variety of breads found in bakeries. In a French bakery, one has a far more limited selection of base types of pastry, and while the French make custard better than the Germans, one has only to look as far as Austria to find better custard-based and cream-filled pastries than the French could dream of. The limitation of German cuisine is that, while it has a wide variety of different dishes that are offered regionally, the base dinner that one can find is some combination of pork (often in sausage form), potatoes, and pickled cabbage. In Poland, dinners would consist of multiple types of soup, various types of cold salad, goulashes, rolls filled with meat and cabbage, stewed meats, dumplings, and a range of other types of food; Polish dinners are, on the whole, much more multifarious than German ones. Moreover, while German dinners often have a richer feel to them, that may be because of their higher salt content; they might leave one more full than French dinners (or Polish ones, if one orders too few dishes), the combination of flavors that they encapsulate may not be as broad as that of the dinners of their neighbors. I do not yet know enough about French cuisine to appraise it any more thoroughly than I have done, but I would not be surprised if it had more variety than German cuisine. (That being said, there are some very good, rare German dishes that one can sometimes find by luck, and there are still some dishes that I have never tried at all, as every restaurant seems to offer the same two or three base dishes!)
That more or less concludes my disquisition on food. I failed to try "snowballs," perhaps a local specialty of Heidelberg, for having failed to find out what they were - I forgot to ask. I had a Turkish wrap (often called "donair" or "shawarma," though neither of those words appear in the dictionary) for dinner today, as I doubted that one could find decent German food in Stuttgart and did not want to walk far to find it. My culinary and cultural experiences will continue (resume? They more or less stopped in Stuttgart) in Nuremberg tomorrow!
I started my day today by taking a walk up to Heidelberg's castle and skirting the castle grounds (for free). I have little to say except that it afforded me spectacular views of Heidelberg and a chance to see the woods closer up. It turns out that there are lots of walking (not really hiking) trails through the wooded hills of Heidelberg, but I only took a few steps along one of them, as I wanted to get started off for Stuttgart. As I walked around Heidelberg's castle, I heard (and saw) yet another warbler, grey and with a yellow throat, that easily outperforms the cardinal, and I must have heard half of a dozen other fabulous bird calls. Heidelberg, and Germany as a whole, would be a birdwatcher's paradise. (My only note about the castle itself is that it is being reconstructed and is currently partly in ruins, which makes it more majestic, in a sense, as one sees the castle as it truly is and can imagine its history more vividly by seeing what it is like today. Also, there was a bus to take tourists who were too lazy to walk up to the castle.)
My command of German is now strong enough that I can ask increasingly more sophisticated questions, with the result that I sometimes get confounding answers in return. While I had a perfectly successful exchange with a railway personnel, in which I negotiated a train ride along the Neckar, today, I often get in over my head. When I asked a woman the other day how to reach Speyer's cathedral, she said something like, !$adfsf#@#!$#! left !#jfdjffs#&# street !fadfsfdr#$%%^^% cathedral, and she continued trying to explain herself when she saw the look of confusion on my face. My only way out of the situation was to tell her, "Thank you very much" ad nauseum and nod my head vigorously whenever it appeared that she was asking me a question. On other occasions, like when I was finding out the price of raspberries at the store, I find that my increased understanding of numbers (although I cannot say them very well myself) and the extraordinary amount of information communicated by tone of voice and body language are easily enough to let me navigate my new linguistic space. It is exciting to now know enough to be able to engage people in casual, if mundane, conversation and to get around when using English is not an option. Also, it is more absorbing to learn a country's language than to continue using English non-stop; it makes the experience more fun.
The train ride from Heidelberg to Stuttgart was magical, much like the one along the upper Rhine. I arranged to take a train that passed through two small villages that I had initially planned to see and had a transfer at a larger village, Heilbronn, that I decided not to visit; I got to see everything that I would have seen had I visited all three places, only without the hassle of walking along the streets and snapping photos. The hills east of Heidelberg look marvelous. They are covered in a very thick canopy of deciduous trees with clumps of red-trunked pine (or cedar?), naked from the waist down, thrown in; farther south-east, grasses, shrubs, and rows of wine grapes replace the trees, and farther still, the hills smooth out a little, and the landscape grows boring. We passed tiny, picturesque towns in the German countryside, complete with - you guessed it - churches and old city walls, and I even saw a couple of castles. Life in such a provincial setting would be suffocating, much like life in a small town outside of Kelowna (for example), but it must be tolerable for people who grew up with it. The houses themselves that people own are well-built and well-tended, with little pots of flowers on the windowsills between the windows' old-fashioned wooden shutters.
One thing that interested me, as I rode the train, was that the trellises on which grape vines are grown are both spaced a certain distance away from one another and placed on strips of grass separated by stone buttresses, little fences that someone built by hand. While I can understand their being far apart from one another so that each of them individually gets enough nutrients, I do not see what the stone buttresses have to do with anything. It is possible that their root systems are weak enough that they would collapse on the steep slopes on which they are grown, but then why not grow them on flat patches of land? The hills near Heidelberg were, in fact, steep, with bare stretches of red, clayey rock here and there.
Stuttgart is a spectacularly ugly city, the ugliest and most unpleasant that I have seen in all of Europe (if one discounts Slovenia; it is its own little world). As soon as I got off of the train here, I stepped through a haze of cigarette smoke into the road, as there were no functional sidewalks out front. I crossed into a pedestrian-only area that was tolerable, but trying to find my hostel was a nightmare, even with directions from a woman working at the tourist office. I ended up walking along a highway - the city is full of highways - on a sidewalk that, like the one outside of the train station, trailed off right into the road itself, which I had to walk along, pressing myself against its outer barrier, for some fifty yards. There were no crosswalks at the nearest stoplight, so I had to run across the road at times that seemed appropriate, whereat I walked along a smaller road that did have a sidewalk and found my hostel.
If I had to sum the city up, I would say that Stuttgart was a city without a soul. It is clearly an area full of commerce, as there are expensive stores and cars everywhere, but there is nothing of any cultural, intellectual, or spiritual worth within a ten-mile radius of the city limits. The city is terrible for walking, has very few statues, has nowhere decent to eat, and is more or less one big construction site (full of highways). This is what happens when you take a city with Cologne's, Frankfurt's, or Dusseldorf's economic growth and gut it of any vestiges of culture: its intellectual life ends up stunted, and everything in it becomes oriented towards money. People in Stuttgart seem to smoke even more than those in other German cities, although that seemed impossible, and there are beggars on every street corner, who also crowd around some of the city's few cultural monuments. Stuttgart seems to me to be the German equivalent of Philadelphia: there is no sane reason to visit it.
My only other points today are about cuisine, as a visit to a bakery today stimulated me to think further about the differences between French and German food. I have probably already mentioned that for 12 Euros one can buy enough food for two people in Germany (or for two people for two days in Poland), while in France, that is enough money to whet one's appetite. German pastries are superior to French pastries not only for their preponderant focus on taste rather than presentation, but also because of their variety. At any good German bakery, one can get apple strudel, layered cakes, sweet-dough pastries filled with poppy seeds, a shortbread-like dough covered in streusel, Danishes with fruit or pudding toppings, doughnuts with jam filling, tarts with pudding, fruit, and gelatinized jelly on top, croissants like the ones made in France, and the obligatory variety of breads found in bakeries. In a French bakery, one has a far more limited selection of base types of pastry, and while the French make custard better than the Germans, one has only to look as far as Austria to find better custard-based and cream-filled pastries than the French could dream of. The limitation of German cuisine is that, while it has a wide variety of different dishes that are offered regionally, the base dinner that one can find is some combination of pork (often in sausage form), potatoes, and pickled cabbage. In Poland, dinners would consist of multiple types of soup, various types of cold salad, goulashes, rolls filled with meat and cabbage, stewed meats, dumplings, and a range of other types of food; Polish dinners are, on the whole, much more multifarious than German ones. Moreover, while German dinners often have a richer feel to them, that may be because of their higher salt content; they might leave one more full than French dinners (or Polish ones, if one orders too few dishes), the combination of flavors that they encapsulate may not be as broad as that of the dinners of their neighbors. I do not yet know enough about French cuisine to appraise it any more thoroughly than I have done, but I would not be surprised if it had more variety than German cuisine. (That being said, there are some very good, rare German dishes that one can sometimes find by luck, and there are still some dishes that I have never tried at all, as every restaurant seems to offer the same two or three base dishes!)
That more or less concludes my disquisition on food. I failed to try "snowballs," perhaps a local specialty of Heidelberg, for having failed to find out what they were - I forgot to ask. I had a Turkish wrap (often called "donair" or "shawarma," though neither of those words appear in the dictionary) for dinner today, as I doubted that one could find decent German food in Stuttgart and did not want to walk far to find it. My culinary and cultural experiences will continue (resume? They more or less stopped in Stuttgart) in Nuremberg tomorrow!
The iconic shot of Heidelberg is actually from the other shoreline.
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