I again have little time to write - one always has too little time! I forgot to mention, in yesterday's email, that the churches in Rothenburg were much more spare than those that I have seen in other German cities. Perhaps sumptuousness was not in vogue when the churches in Rothenburg were made. I also forgot one of the key questions associated with my disquisitions on Germany's legal history: have we, as a species, grown less barbaric than we were several centuries ago? It interests me that learned behaviors, such as refraining from using violence in disputes, can permeate a society despite the fact that we have the exact same DNA as the people who lived in the Middle Ages. If you take the same people and bring them up in different circumstances, they will turn out to be vastly different. I suppose that that is self-evident, but it is still curious to me that a group of people from the year 2013 would be vastly different from a group of people in the year 1313 despite our starting, in theory, from the very same place. Behavioral adaptations (such as crows' cracking oyster shells by dropping them from a height onto rocks) are fascinating.
I am going to have to cut this post short and finish it in the morning, as I am exhausted and my roommates (only two of them) are likely to go to bed soon. I have had a sudden change in my plans for the next several days: due to the fact that my intended host in Friedrichshaffen is moving and has been overloaded with work, I will no longer be able to stay there. As a result, I have booked a hostel in Freiburg (in the middle of nowhere - 3 miles from the train station) for 3 nights and a relatively-cheap hotel in Nancy, France, for 3 nights, from which I plan to explore Metz, a nearby city, and Luxembourg. I am not too worried about using the French language, as I can do that functionally without a phrasebook, and my German rail map covers the far eastern part of France. I will send myself notes for tomorrow's email and will write the rest of the email tomorrow morning, before I depart for Nordlingen. I might have to finish this post in Augsburg, where, I believe, I will have internet access.
Sorry for not finishing my post!
I am going to have to cut this post short and finish it in the morning, as I am exhausted and my roommates (only two of them) are likely to go to bed soon. I have had a sudden change in my plans for the next several days: due to the fact that my intended host in Friedrichshaffen is moving and has been overloaded with work, I will no longer be able to stay there. As a result, I have booked a hostel in Freiburg (in the middle of nowhere - 3 miles from the train station) for 3 nights and a relatively-cheap hotel in Nancy, France, for 3 nights, from which I plan to explore Metz, a nearby city, and Luxembourg. I am not too worried about using the French language, as I can do that functionally without a phrasebook, and my German rail map covers the far eastern part of France. I will send myself notes for tomorrow's email and will write the rest of the email tomorrow morning, before I depart for Nordlingen. I might have to finish this post in Augsburg, where, I believe, I will have internet access.
Sorry for not finishing my post!
It looks like I finished telling you about Rothenburg (ab der Tauber) in my last (partial) post, though I neglected to mention that not all of the ceilings of the churches in Rothenburg, if my memory holds, had vaulted ceilings like most other churches in Germany. None of them had a great deal of stained glass windows, and the stained glass that they did have did not represent much of anything. It is curious how the styles in church architecture changed over the next few centuries.
I got up very unwillingly yesterday, having considered, as I was going to bed, how much simpler it would be to skip Dinkelsbuhl altogether and just see Wurzburg. Alas, my ambitious side won out, as one can sleep in on any given day, but one can only see Dinkelsbuhl once in a lifetime. I had a breakfast of peas, strawberries, flavorless yogurt, and a glass of milk - a poor breakfast for a palate accustomed to German pastries. While I had already broken my resolution not to eat pastries roughly twelve hours after making it (and have since broken it twice more), I had resolved to break it no more than once a day, and I have mostly stayed away from ice cream.
I got up very unwillingly yesterday, having considered, as I was going to bed, how much simpler it would be to skip Dinkelsbuhl altogether and just see Wurzburg. Alas, my ambitious side won out, as one can sleep in on any given day, but one can only see Dinkelsbuhl once in a lifetime. I had a breakfast of peas, strawberries, flavorless yogurt, and a glass of milk - a poor breakfast for a palate accustomed to German pastries. While I had already broken my resolution not to eat pastries roughly twelve hours after making it (and have since broken it twice more), I had resolved to break it no more than once a day, and I have mostly stayed away from ice cream.
And so I got up, again miserably sick with hay fever, and started out for the train station. The only notes that I took concerning the train ride to Ansbach, the city in which I transferred to a local bus, are that I passed more fields full of solar panels and poppies. When I got on the bus, having happily discovered that my day-long train pass also covered my bus fare, I discovered a heretofore-unseen side of Germany. The bus rumbled down the street at less than twenty miles per hour, shuddering over the cobblestones, and swung into the oncoming lane to make a turn right, almost taking out a "yield" sign. We passed through the sleepy Sunday town of Ansbach - I should never have done this on a Sunday, as everything shuts down on Sundays in this country - and turned onto the highway.
The rest of the bus ride was a taste of the German countryside - the real thing. I remember little else besides the rolling hills, giant windmills, excellent highways, and distances between villages. When someone at the front of the bus driver asked him something in Russian, I figured that I should confer with him about my trip back to Ansbach. It was written on my train schedule that I could take the bus back at 11:38 (getting there at 10:20), but the bus driver insisted that the bus would only come at 12:38, as it was a Sunday. He told me how to get to the bus stop - "Take a right, then go straight, then take another right, go down the stairs, and wait there for me. Got it?" - and, a few minutes later, right on schedule, he dropped me off a stone's throw from the historic city center of Dinkelsbuhl, a town so small that it does not even have a train station.
I wish, as usual, that I had more time to write. Dinkelsbuhl was more or less a model town from the 16th century. It had the same city walls, towers, cathedral, churches, pharmacies, town hall, and "half-timbered houses," as the ones with slats of wood across their fronts are called, as towns would have five hundred years ago; it was roughly a less-touristy Rothenburg ab der Tauber. I saw it on a somewhat unique day, as it turns out: while Sunday is a terrible time for travelling, it is also when locals get together for the weekly market in Dinkelsbuhl, where one could find silverware, household appliances, furniture, old Barbie dolls, DVDs, remote controls for the TV, trinkets of various sorts, and all other kinds of assorted junk, which people eagerly examined. It was hot enough that one old man took his shirt off; I heard a bunch of people speaking Russian; and I even saw some other tourists who had found out about Dinkelsbuhl. The houses in it each had facades of different colors, and they had the shuttered windows, with flowerpots beneath them, that I find so pretty. (These types of windows are growing less popular, but the reason for their being so common in touristy areas is that they were genuinely very common in times past. Many houses today, though a minority, still have them.)
My main reaction to seeing Dinkelsbuhl was to wonder if towns were really like that so long ago. I tended to have the impression that a city would consist of a nobleman, his servants, a giant number of farmers and serfs, and a couple of patricians. I now realize that towns may very well have achieved a population of a few thousand people (though I have no idea how cities first emerged; I should probably know this). The town must have been full of shopowners, merchants, doctors, barbers, restauranteurs, teachers, civil servants, clerks, lawyers, butchers, bakers, tailors, cobblers, blacksmiths, and all other sorts of people; I had not realized that until I learned about Rothenburg ab der Tauber's legal history and realized that a complicated, bureaucratic legal system needs a lot of people to support it.
I wish, as usual, that I had more time to write. Dinkelsbuhl was more or less a model town from the 16th century. It had the same city walls, towers, cathedral, churches, pharmacies, town hall, and "half-timbered houses," as the ones with slats of wood across their fronts are called, as towns would have five hundred years ago; it was roughly a less-touristy Rothenburg ab der Tauber. I saw it on a somewhat unique day, as it turns out: while Sunday is a terrible time for travelling, it is also when locals get together for the weekly market in Dinkelsbuhl, where one could find silverware, household appliances, furniture, old Barbie dolls, DVDs, remote controls for the TV, trinkets of various sorts, and all other kinds of assorted junk, which people eagerly examined. It was hot enough that one old man took his shirt off; I heard a bunch of people speaking Russian; and I even saw some other tourists who had found out about Dinkelsbuhl. The houses in it each had facades of different colors, and they had the shuttered windows, with flowerpots beneath them, that I find so pretty. (These types of windows are growing less popular, but the reason for their being so common in touristy areas is that they were genuinely very common in times past. Many houses today, though a minority, still have them.)
My main reaction to seeing Dinkelsbuhl was to wonder if towns were really like that so long ago. I tended to have the impression that a city would consist of a nobleman, his servants, a giant number of farmers and serfs, and a couple of patricians. I now realize that towns may very well have achieved a population of a few thousand people (though I have no idea how cities first emerged; I should probably know this). The town must have been full of shopowners, merchants, doctors, barbers, restauranteurs, teachers, civil servants, clerks, lawyers, butchers, bakers, tailors, cobblers, blacksmiths, and all other sorts of people; I had not realized that until I learned about Rothenburg ab der Tauber's legal history and realized that a complicated, bureaucratic legal system needs a lot of people to support it.
What followed my visit to the old town was a little unfortunate: at 11:30, I had seen essentially everything that I wanted to see, but I trusted the bus driver's assertion about his arrival time (It was funny, I thought, that the lady at the train station had misled me; apparently, they occasionally made mistakes.) and decided to explore a little further. At roughly 11:50 I left the old city and sat down on a bench to have a snack (some apricots that I had bought the day before) and read a book. The birds of Dinkelsbuhl rivaled those of Heidelberg and included the camera-shutter birds that I heard in Poland.
At 12:25, I used one of Dinkelsbuhl's free bathrooms (good on them) and went to wait for the city bus. I saw that the schedule said that buses came only at 11:38, 1:38, 3:38, and so on, and I started to get worried. Ten minutes passed, and no one had come; fifteen minutes passed, and no one had come. I was reminded of waiting in the middle of nowhere for a bus that might not come when I visited the town, the name of which I have forgotten, outside of Perm with a friend of mine. At 12:55 I concluded that the lady at the train station had been right, as they invariably are, and went to read some more of my book, disappointed that I had sacrifice two hours of time that I could have spent in Wurzburg in order to see only a tiny bit more of Dinkelsbuhl. When the bus came and started to make a circle around the bus depot, I started running after it until the other people waiting reassured me that it would come to the stop at the end of its circle. We got on, and I spent the ride back praying that the bus would not unexpectedly get rerouted and fail to take me back to civilization.
I do not remember much of the train ride to Wurzburg, and I have to keep this short regardless, as I have another post to write and have to shower before I go to bed. I mentioned the trees in my notes for this post - I suppose that I enjoyed them (I think that there were dense forests outside of Ansbach and, farther in the direction of Wurzburg, slopes covered in apple trees.). The main things that struck me about Wurzburg were that its architecture was very magisterial, reminding me of Vienna, and that some of its churches had interiors done all in white. I wonder if we would find interiors done all in red, for example, just as striking as those done in white if red had come to be culturally associated with purity: I think that our association of white with purity is purely a product of culture, rather than some innate quality of the color itself.
At 12:25, I used one of Dinkelsbuhl's free bathrooms (good on them) and went to wait for the city bus. I saw that the schedule said that buses came only at 11:38, 1:38, 3:38, and so on, and I started to get worried. Ten minutes passed, and no one had come; fifteen minutes passed, and no one had come. I was reminded of waiting in the middle of nowhere for a bus that might not come when I visited the town, the name of which I have forgotten, outside of Perm with a friend of mine. At 12:55 I concluded that the lady at the train station had been right, as they invariably are, and went to read some more of my book, disappointed that I had sacrifice two hours of time that I could have spent in Wurzburg in order to see only a tiny bit more of Dinkelsbuhl. When the bus came and started to make a circle around the bus depot, I started running after it until the other people waiting reassured me that it would come to the stop at the end of its circle. We got on, and I spent the ride back praying that the bus would not unexpectedly get rerouted and fail to take me back to civilization.
I do not remember much of the train ride to Wurzburg, and I have to keep this short regardless, as I have another post to write and have to shower before I go to bed. I mentioned the trees in my notes for this post - I suppose that I enjoyed them (I think that there were dense forests outside of Ansbach and, farther in the direction of Wurzburg, slopes covered in apple trees.). The main things that struck me about Wurzburg were that its architecture was very magisterial, reminding me of Vienna, and that some of its churches had interiors done all in white. I wonder if we would find interiors done all in red, for example, just as striking as those done in white if red had come to be culturally associated with purity: I think that our association of white with purity is purely a product of culture, rather than some innate quality of the color itself.
It is not actually all that late, but I have a long day ahead of me, so I will bring this to a close, regretfully. I have said a lot of negative things about the U.S. in recent posts, partly because of more or less apotheosizing Germany. It struck me that I have a tendency to demonize places, people, or ideas because of seeing them from only one narrow point of view and making broad-reaching judgements based on limited data. In fact, the U.S. is one of the most democratic countries in the world (as far as I can tell), is at the forefront of developments in medical and environmental technology, and has some of the best universities in the world. While it is intelligent to compare countries and cultures based on what one has seen, it is important not to make hasty judgements about them or revile them. That being said, I have a penchant for making hasty judgements and reviling things, but I can preach about not doing so as much as I want.
My day ended with my eating a fairly lousy Turkish wrap, discovering that I needed to make new hostel bookings, and thanking fate that I would not have to spend another night at that terrible Nuremberg hostel.
Part of the wall and two towers in Dinkelsbuhl.
Part o f the royal residence in Wurzburg.
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