I have sweated more today than on any other day in recent memory - southern Germany has continued to get hotter. The heat was manageable when I left the hostel this morning at roughly 9:00 AM. I bought breakfast at a nearby café and arranged a pair of train tickets that would take me to Ulm, give me just over three hours to explore the city, and take me to Freiburg for 40 Euros - a good deal for so much travel.
I remember next to nothing of the train ride to Ulm. The city had some highlights, such as its fishermen's district, old wall, and cathedral, but it was underwhelming compared to the ones that I had seen recently. Like Augsburg, Ulm had a dearth of trees in the city center; the air was scorching, and cigarette smoke hung thickly in it, motionless. I was surprised not to find Albert Einstein's old house despite his being from Ulm: while Bonn and Augsburg make the most of Ludwig Beethoven's and Bertolt Brecht's hailing, respectively, from them, all that Ulm has is a rather new-fangled museum, rather than Einstein's house itself, and a statue or two. Bonn has maintained Beethoven's house despite the fact that he hated the city and left it when he was twenty-four years old, never to return.
I spent most of the train ride to Freiburg drowsing off. When we reached a hub station (of sorts) at which most people got off, I came to life a little, and a fellow traveler, seeing that I had stayed on the train and had a suitcase with me, sidled up to me and started talking with me. We spoke of Uganda, where he was from, and talked about places in Africa that would be accessible to a western traveler. He was a medical engineer and, having just finished a business deal in Tuttlingen, was coming to the Black Forest to relax a little. He said that the people whom I would meet (if I went - I am not actually that keen to do so) in Kenya and Tanzania would be more welcoming than the citizens of any other part of the world.
The train ride from Neustadt (Schwartz) to Freiburg was the greatest that I have so far experienced. Almost as soon as we started heading south-west, we passed into a landscape of ravines, hills, cliffs, and valleys, all carpeted by conifers. The tree cover in most places was so thick as to appear to be one big mass, and all of the trees forming that mass appeared to be of one species: pines, perhaps, for they were tall and thin and had foliage only near their very tops. With the exception of occasional settlements, rivulets, and grassy areas rife with wildflowers, the tree cover extended for mile after mile, unbroken. At times, the trees nearest the train (which were of various species; it was only at the edge of the forest that other species, bushes, and ferns could compete) would block my view of the rolling hillocks and valleys beyond them, and I would carne my neck, hoping for a sudden peek at the vast, more distant forests; or, when we shot into a tunnel, I would count the seconds until we shot out again just as abruptly and my view once again opened out onto the mighty forest.
I wish that I had a vocabulary for discussing the architecture of the Black Forest, for I am sure that there is something distinctive about it. When we stopped at a town, the name of which I have forgotten, that was near Freiburg, I noted that its cathedral, though vastly smaller than Freiburg's, was similar in style to it: both cathedrals have little knobs of stone sticking out of the sides of their spires. The timbered facades and decorated windows of houses in the Black Forest are, as such, in no way unique, and yet there appears to be something different about them. It might be a certain type of wood used in their adornments, as houses' colors in the Black Forest seem to center heavily on white and a very dark, almost pitch brown, or it might be certain color combinations that one notices subconsciously but cannot describe. Whatever the case, the architecture of the region has a very distinctive and pleasant flavor, whatever that might be.
The flavor of my walk from the train station to my hostel was, alas, one of suffering. I started out by walking in the wrong direction, then quickly righted myself and headed towards the highway that went in the direction of the hostel. I asked two locals, the second of whom helped me, for directions; the second of them explained how to get to the hostel and said that it was very far for a walk. I agreed but tried to explain that I had only my two legs for getting me there, and she wished me luck. I walked along a bike path next to the river running between the two sides of the highway for awhile, then I transferred to a gravel path to get out of the way of the bikers. I continued for some ways, asked another local how to find my hostel, walked along some side streets for awhile (at least my map was accurate - a rarity), and finally made it to the hostel after an hour-and-a-half.
I have failed to convey the degree of discomfort that I felt as I walked, though, to be fair, I was mostly just mad at myself. The facts of the situation were that it was blazing hot; I was walking next to a very pretty river, on the banks of which locals were relaxing; I did not know if I would actually end up at my hostel, as maps can be wrong and people working at reception can screw up; and I was sweating so much that I had soaked through my shirt. When I need to make a decision in a short amount of time, I tend to make a worse decision than any regular person could have dreamed of, a worse decision than would even seem to be one of the options. This appeared to me to be the case as I walked to the hostel: I had chosen a hostel in the middle of nowhere because I was accustomed to the idea that one stayed in hostels (i.e., I did not even look for hotels in Freiburg; it did not enter my head) and because I figured that 4.6 kilometers (as Google maps described the distance) was not much worse than the 3 or so kilometers from the train station in Heidelberg to the hostel in which I stayed there. I had not accounted for the fact that the walking in Heidelberg was through a pedestrian-only region filled with tourists, while the walking in Freiburg would be along a highway and would feel like it was in a desert, and I had not accounted for the fact that I only spent two days in the hostel in Heidelberg, meaning that I only had to make the walk four times, and not six. I cursed myself for my failure to ever learn anything without first learning something unpleasant by experience (E.g., do not haul a giant backpack from the university campus of Moscow Humanity University to the subway station at Vykhino rather than spending 30 or so rubles to take the bus) and wondered how best to ask the person who greeted me at the hostel if I could shorten my stay to one night, explaining that I had made a grave mistake in planning and did not know what I was getting myself into.
To cut a long story short, I arrived at the hostel, got checked in, ate dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant, discovered a Turkish fast food place, a grocery market, and a delicatessen across the street, and learned that the number 5 tram had a stop right out front and went directly to the train station. My stay here will not be all that bad, though this hostel is the worst that I have so far visited. Besides being isolated from Freiburg's train station, it has limited bathroom facilities (like the place in Nuremberg), no storage lockers, poor internet access (this is no surprise), and generally little help from reception, which is only option from 3:00 to 7:00 PM each day. I am going to spend more time relaxing over the next couple of days than I usually do, though I still plan to see Colmar tomorrow and Baden-Baden, which I chose over Konstanz and Berne for its closeness and its topicality, so to speak (it is part of the Black Forest region), the day after tomorrow. Colmar should be a smaller version of Strasbourg, while Baden-Baden should be a nice place to go strictly for pleasure (as its cultural value is fairly low, to my mind). In Baden-Baden I will be able to listen to an extraordinary number of Russian tourists, according to one of my friends, and see if I like the feel of spa towns, which will inform my decision whether or not to go to Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic. I am mostly going to treat these next two days as a reprieve before my trip picks up again in east France and I am whisked off to Austria. I still do not know if conditions along the Danube will permit my biking there, as I have not been able to find any real updates about the area, but I get the impression that things are once again all right there.
I turned out to have more to say than I expected! I have been feeling a little tired out over the past few days and have not been bursting with new impressions as I was over the first couple of weeks of my trip. Perhaps this is part of the natural ebb and flow of travelling: one gets tired at certain points and needs a reprieve. I have been thinking a lot about future trips that I would like to take and have some pretty good ideas that should pan out, though my abhorrence of weather hotter than 80 degrees may force me to time my visits to certain countries very carefully. I can suffer weather this hot for short stretches at a time as long as I am seeing places of salient cultural relevance, but a week or more of this without respite might lead me to an early grave - I would die of exposure if I faced this type of weather for very long.
I remember next to nothing of the train ride to Ulm. The city had some highlights, such as its fishermen's district, old wall, and cathedral, but it was underwhelming compared to the ones that I had seen recently. Like Augsburg, Ulm had a dearth of trees in the city center; the air was scorching, and cigarette smoke hung thickly in it, motionless. I was surprised not to find Albert Einstein's old house despite his being from Ulm: while Bonn and Augsburg make the most of Ludwig Beethoven's and Bertolt Brecht's hailing, respectively, from them, all that Ulm has is a rather new-fangled museum, rather than Einstein's house itself, and a statue or two. Bonn has maintained Beethoven's house despite the fact that he hated the city and left it when he was twenty-four years old, never to return.
I spent most of the train ride to Freiburg drowsing off. When we reached a hub station (of sorts) at which most people got off, I came to life a little, and a fellow traveler, seeing that I had stayed on the train and had a suitcase with me, sidled up to me and started talking with me. We spoke of Uganda, where he was from, and talked about places in Africa that would be accessible to a western traveler. He was a medical engineer and, having just finished a business deal in Tuttlingen, was coming to the Black Forest to relax a little. He said that the people whom I would meet (if I went - I am not actually that keen to do so) in Kenya and Tanzania would be more welcoming than the citizens of any other part of the world.
The train ride from Neustadt (Schwartz) to Freiburg was the greatest that I have so far experienced. Almost as soon as we started heading south-west, we passed into a landscape of ravines, hills, cliffs, and valleys, all carpeted by conifers. The tree cover in most places was so thick as to appear to be one big mass, and all of the trees forming that mass appeared to be of one species: pines, perhaps, for they were tall and thin and had foliage only near their very tops. With the exception of occasional settlements, rivulets, and grassy areas rife with wildflowers, the tree cover extended for mile after mile, unbroken. At times, the trees nearest the train (which were of various species; it was only at the edge of the forest that other species, bushes, and ferns could compete) would block my view of the rolling hillocks and valleys beyond them, and I would carne my neck, hoping for a sudden peek at the vast, more distant forests; or, when we shot into a tunnel, I would count the seconds until we shot out again just as abruptly and my view once again opened out onto the mighty forest.
I wish that I had a vocabulary for discussing the architecture of the Black Forest, for I am sure that there is something distinctive about it. When we stopped at a town, the name of which I have forgotten, that was near Freiburg, I noted that its cathedral, though vastly smaller than Freiburg's, was similar in style to it: both cathedrals have little knobs of stone sticking out of the sides of their spires. The timbered facades and decorated windows of houses in the Black Forest are, as such, in no way unique, and yet there appears to be something different about them. It might be a certain type of wood used in their adornments, as houses' colors in the Black Forest seem to center heavily on white and a very dark, almost pitch brown, or it might be certain color combinations that one notices subconsciously but cannot describe. Whatever the case, the architecture of the region has a very distinctive and pleasant flavor, whatever that might be.
The flavor of my walk from the train station to my hostel was, alas, one of suffering. I started out by walking in the wrong direction, then quickly righted myself and headed towards the highway that went in the direction of the hostel. I asked two locals, the second of whom helped me, for directions; the second of them explained how to get to the hostel and said that it was very far for a walk. I agreed but tried to explain that I had only my two legs for getting me there, and she wished me luck. I walked along a bike path next to the river running between the two sides of the highway for awhile, then I transferred to a gravel path to get out of the way of the bikers. I continued for some ways, asked another local how to find my hostel, walked along some side streets for awhile (at least my map was accurate - a rarity), and finally made it to the hostel after an hour-and-a-half.
I have failed to convey the degree of discomfort that I felt as I walked, though, to be fair, I was mostly just mad at myself. The facts of the situation were that it was blazing hot; I was walking next to a very pretty river, on the banks of which locals were relaxing; I did not know if I would actually end up at my hostel, as maps can be wrong and people working at reception can screw up; and I was sweating so much that I had soaked through my shirt. When I need to make a decision in a short amount of time, I tend to make a worse decision than any regular person could have dreamed of, a worse decision than would even seem to be one of the options. This appeared to me to be the case as I walked to the hostel: I had chosen a hostel in the middle of nowhere because I was accustomed to the idea that one stayed in hostels (i.e., I did not even look for hotels in Freiburg; it did not enter my head) and because I figured that 4.6 kilometers (as Google maps described the distance) was not much worse than the 3 or so kilometers from the train station in Heidelberg to the hostel in which I stayed there. I had not accounted for the fact that the walking in Heidelberg was through a pedestrian-only region filled with tourists, while the walking in Freiburg would be along a highway and would feel like it was in a desert, and I had not accounted for the fact that I only spent two days in the hostel in Heidelberg, meaning that I only had to make the walk four times, and not six. I cursed myself for my failure to ever learn anything without first learning something unpleasant by experience (E.g., do not haul a giant backpack from the university campus of Moscow Humanity University to the subway station at Vykhino rather than spending 30 or so rubles to take the bus) and wondered how best to ask the person who greeted me at the hostel if I could shorten my stay to one night, explaining that I had made a grave mistake in planning and did not know what I was getting myself into.
To cut a long story short, I arrived at the hostel, got checked in, ate dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant, discovered a Turkish fast food place, a grocery market, and a delicatessen across the street, and learned that the number 5 tram had a stop right out front and went directly to the train station. My stay here will not be all that bad, though this hostel is the worst that I have so far visited. Besides being isolated from Freiburg's train station, it has limited bathroom facilities (like the place in Nuremberg), no storage lockers, poor internet access (this is no surprise), and generally little help from reception, which is only option from 3:00 to 7:00 PM each day. I am going to spend more time relaxing over the next couple of days than I usually do, though I still plan to see Colmar tomorrow and Baden-Baden, which I chose over Konstanz and Berne for its closeness and its topicality, so to speak (it is part of the Black Forest region), the day after tomorrow. Colmar should be a smaller version of Strasbourg, while Baden-Baden should be a nice place to go strictly for pleasure (as its cultural value is fairly low, to my mind). In Baden-Baden I will be able to listen to an extraordinary number of Russian tourists, according to one of my friends, and see if I like the feel of spa towns, which will inform my decision whether or not to go to Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic. I am mostly going to treat these next two days as a reprieve before my trip picks up again in east France and I am whisked off to Austria. I still do not know if conditions along the Danube will permit my biking there, as I have not been able to find any real updates about the area, but I get the impression that things are once again all right there.
I turned out to have more to say than I expected! I have been feeling a little tired out over the past few days and have not been bursting with new impressions as I was over the first couple of weeks of my trip. Perhaps this is part of the natural ebb and flow of travelling: one gets tired at certain points and needs a reprieve. I have been thinking a lot about future trips that I would like to take and have some pretty good ideas that should pan out, though my abhorrence of weather hotter than 80 degrees may force me to time my visits to certain countries very carefully. I can suffer weather this hot for short stretches at a time as long as I am seeing places of salient cultural relevance, but a week or more of this without respite might lead me to an early grave - I would die of exposure if I faced this type of weather for very long.
I forgot to mention, the other day, that I saw far fewer statues in Germany's small cities than I had seen in the bigger ones; statues appear to be a more recent invention, so to speak. While I expected that statues were erected mostly in the honor of people to whom a city was bound to pay fealty (Kaiser Wilhelm I, military leaders, &c.), it is possible that statues are more of an expression of reverence or creative whim than they are of forced, slavish devotion to one's leaders (Consider the example of a frog on a street corner - what purpose does it serve?) It is also possible that making statues became technologically much easier between the years of, say, 1300 and 1500 AD, that they grew in perceived importance, or that people did not have enough leisure to expend resources on any but the most important statues (e.g., to God, as He is pretty popular in Germany) until around the time of the Renaissance.
I have noticed very little of note about religious architecture of late except that the cathedral at Ulm had a striking amount of bright red stained glass; it was done more in the tradition of Cologne's or Frankfurt's cathedrals, the former of which it rivaled in sumptuousness and the complexity of its interior, than in the tradition of the cathedrals that I had seen of late (spare). I forgot to mention, the other day, how a few panes of red stained glass in a church in Augsburg caught the evening light and cast it on the floor. I have seen some more wonderful birds, including some enormous hawks at the edge of the Black Forest and another one of those black birds with long tails and white wingtips, and I continue to be impressed by the relish with which Germans smoke cigarettes. Today one blew the smoke of a freshly-lit cigarette right in my face as I stepped off of the train in Neustadt (Schwartz), probably as a sign of respect, or something.
I hope to find as much to say about the next few days of my trip!
I hope to find as much to say about the next few days of my trip!
(Also, I have drunk more than four liters of water today. I seem to be able to avoid the effects of heat stroke, which I have not felt since I was in Frankfurt, that way.)
This is Ulm from up above.
This is the river along which I walked in Freiburg.
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