I may as well start this post with administrative matters while they are still on my mind. I have decided that the best substitute for my bike trip along the Danube, if the river continues to flood, will be to briefly visit the North of Croatia, as that would not throw my plans off too much and would be more convenient, logistically, than seeing eastern France or northern Italy. It would be most natural of all for me to take a jaunt into the Tyrolean Alps, but I do not, alas, have hiking boots with me.
Worms is the most astounding medieval city that I have ever seen. Large sections of its original walls are still intact, its cathedral is as impressive as that of Cologne (in a different way - its solidity), it is full of statues, fountains, churches, and old houses, it has an incredible amount of greenery and plentiful pedestrian walkways, and a giant medieval arch stands over the entrance to the city by freeway. I had as pleasant a time in Worms as I have in any other city in Germany (though not as quite as good a time as in Salzburg last year). Oppenheim was, by comparison, an utter disappointment. While it had comely, narrow streets, houses with old-fashioned shutters, a few old churches, and the ruins of a very, very old structure of some sort, it was too small to be interesting. Its streets were eerily silent as soon as one stepped off of the main road from the train station; I only saw one another person after several minutes of wandering along side streets. Its being so uninspiring was a lesson to delete all small towns from my itinerary and, instead of visiting them directly, visit bigger cities in their general vicinity, as small towns are best viewed in passing from a train window: they look very nice when one is on the move but are no fun to actually walk around. I have been reviewing my itinerary for the next several days to make sure that every destination listed on it will actually be worth visiting.
Worms is the most astounding medieval city that I have ever seen. Large sections of its original walls are still intact, its cathedral is as impressive as that of Cologne (in a different way - its solidity), it is full of statues, fountains, churches, and old houses, it has an incredible amount of greenery and plentiful pedestrian walkways, and a giant medieval arch stands over the entrance to the city by freeway. I had as pleasant a time in Worms as I have in any other city in Germany (though not as quite as good a time as in Salzburg last year). Oppenheim was, by comparison, an utter disappointment. While it had comely, narrow streets, houses with old-fashioned shutters, a few old churches, and the ruins of a very, very old structure of some sort, it was too small to be interesting. Its streets were eerily silent as soon as one stepped off of the main road from the train station; I only saw one another person after several minutes of wandering along side streets. Its being so uninspiring was a lesson to delete all small towns from my itinerary and, instead of visiting them directly, visit bigger cities in their general vicinity, as small towns are best viewed in passing from a train window: they look very nice when one is on the move but are no fun to actually walk around. I have been reviewing my itinerary for the next several days to make sure that every destination listed on it will actually be worth visiting.
My trip to Oppenheim did, nonetheless, have two highlights. One was simple: since it is located on a hill, it allowed for a bit of walking, which included a walk through a small copse up into the city's grape fields. The upper Rhine is, like Trier (but to a much greater extent), wine country, and a walk through fields of grapes is often pleasant. The second highlight of my trip to Oppenheim (besides leaving it) happened at a pub. While on my way up the town's hill to its "city center," I spotted a beerhouse with a few modest numbers listed outside of its door next to the names of various dishes. When I entered it half of an hour later, it was empty, and no one was standing behind the front counter. I saw a woman staring out of the window with her back to me and assumed that the place was closed, but, when the creaking of my footsteps on the floor got her attention, she assured me that it was open.
What followed was an experience that one can only really have in a small town. The woman took my order, unhurriedly dictated it to the cook (i.e., said something into a door), and proceeded to ask where I was from and answer the slew of questions that I was asking her (in English) about German and Austrian food. I still have not tried all of the dishes that are listed in the phrasebook that I took to Germany last year and doubt that I will manage to do so until I take that bike tour along the Danube. Ignoring minor local variations, most places in Germany seem to make the same basic set of dishes; I would hazard to say that the food in Austria is better.
I have digressed, though. When I asked the woman about a particular cabbage dish and she could not remember the word "cumin," she said, "Hold on, I might have some in the back," went into the kitchen, and came back with a few cumin seeds on the palm of her hand for me to smell and taste. She later served me a fairly good dish of sausage, potatoes, and mixed vegetables doused in cheese (Germans seem to love cheese.); I ate my fill for 7.5 Euros, a very good price in Western Europe for a non-fast food joint. When I had finished dinner, the woman offered me some sort of brandy or liqueur on the house, which I had to turn down, regretfully, as I would not have liked it no matter how good it was. I gave the woman a handsome tip and headed back to the train station, following the directions that she had given me at the end of my meal.
I suppose that my lack of energy may be a little evident in this post. I am party a little tired, and I have partly had a Rhineland overload. It was natural for me to schedule excessive amounts of travel through Germany for this summer: in my desire to avoid perfunctorily seeing the few biggest cities in each of the countries that I wish to avoid, I have arranged to see a gigantic number of smaller cities, as well. To do this without eventually finding it monotonous may be impossible, as it would be very impractical to see, for example, large amounts of Germany without seeing them all in a row; I expect to have an Italy overload next summer, a France overload the summer after that, and a Spain overload in three years, as it is too impractical to spend a week in one country and then a week in another, moving around continuously.
I have two more issues to address in this email. The first is that a positive effect of my seeing more than the outer façade that most visitors of Germany would see has been the realization that Germany has problems, just like any other country. While I still consider Germany the most advanced country that I have ever visited, its regional trains are significantly delayed on a frequent basis, and it is full of homeless people, perhaps because of having low wages or unskilled labor and a high cost of living, possibly because of having inadequate programs for treating mental illness. I have not noticed any other global problems within the country, though. Racial tension in the places that I have visited appears to be non-existent, which is especially striking to me because of my having spent so much time recently in the United States; despite its very successful efforts to erase the effects of some two hundred years of racial discrimination, the aftertaste of all of all of those years of discrimination can still be felt in day-to-day interactions between people of different races and in wealth inequality between blacks and whites. While I expect that the many immigrants to Germany from the Near East are poorer than their German counterparts, I do not think that the country has any deep-rooted history of racism. Its small towns are peopled by neat, clean two- and three-story houses with gardens and look entirely livable; and, while it is fantastical to claim that everyone in Germany likes his job, people in various spheres of life are so friendly that it is hard to imagine otherwise. A woman at the train station in Worms spent several minutes helping me work out the best way to take the train to Oppenheim and, from there, to Frankfurt, which was non-trivial, as I had already bought a two-way train ticket to Worms that turned out to be more or less useless. A woman from whom I asked directions in Worms spent a couple of minutes explaining things to me, much as the young man with the French accent had done just two days previously in Bonn. Unless I am mistaken, Germany is at the forefront of various new developments in industry and technology and is continuously modernizing. While my recent experiences have knocked it down in my eyes, conveniently, from the level of God-country to earthly, but very successful, country, I do not see too many areas of life in which it falls behind any other country that I have visited.
The second point of the day is to consider why it is that people from North America (that is, some people - those who end up in places like Worms) are so fixated on seeing Old Europe. It is clear that people like me can easily grow weary of churches and former town halls, yet we keep on streaming across the ocean to see them. No matter how much we consider visits to medieval cathedrals and the ruins of Roman amphitheaters to give us a "window into the past," they do not actually put us in contact with Gauls or Romans, and they do not show us how ordinary people in ancient France or Rome lived their day-to-day lives; it is possible that they teach us fairly little, all told, though seeing that Mainz has a train station next to the ruins of some Roman structure or other taught me today that the Romans made it all of the way to the Rhine. Looking at old buildings is an intensely-pleasurable
I doubt that I have convinced anyone that travelling to foreign lands (specifically, with the goal of cultural enrichment) is a good or a bad idea, but I cannot help wondering, as I do most of the time, what the point of this all is. On the plus side, I am having fun, seeing a lot of new stuff, meeting new people, and writing a decent amount, so I cannot complain. I am going to bed soon; what I would like best is to watch a movie, but it is too noisy in the lobby of this hostel, and I am told that the WiFi does not work so well upstairs. I am off to Mainz and Weisbaden, both of which are big and varied enough to be worth visiting, tomorrow, and I will visit Wurzburg on Sunday, when I will not need any help with train tickets (Services will probably be limited on that day.) I am not exactly waiting to leave the Rhineland entirely, as each of these cities has a slightly different nature from the rest, and even the churches have differences to them, such as different types of columns, different amounts and types of statues, different amounts of other accoutrements (such as pictures, engravings, objects made of precious metals, &c.), and different types of stained glass. I should probably describe my stays in Russian villages to readers who did not get my emails last year, but I am too tired at the moment. Rather, I will give it a shot.
I have spent a total of around 30 minutes in two Russian villages. I visited the first of them with a friend's parents, aunt, and uncle. It had broken-down houses and fences, dirt roads, and no areas where anyone could conceivably do paid work (except by making milk, honey, &c., as the people whom we were visiting did). A man stumbled, blind drunk, down a path and fell flat on his face at one point; another got a rifle out of a shed and started shooting at the nearby magpies. None of this was considered unusual. The second village I visited with a friend, his sister, and his grandfather, who, along with the friend's grandmother, had a summer cottage near the village. It consisted of a few abandoned-looking houses, something like an apartment building, and a large clay lot. I do not remember if there were any cars around, though there must have been; I distinctly remember that there was nothing even resembling a general store in sight and that the drapes of several units in the apartment building moved almost imperceptibly, as though a cat's leg had brushed up against them, when the lot of us arrived in town - people had been watching us and had noiselessly moved their peering faces away from the window panes when we looked their way. "Well, that's the village," my friend's grandfather said, and we turned around to walk back to his summer cottage.
I bring up this anecdote as prove that life in villages can be much worse than what I saw from the train window in Germany; it is much more advanced than many other large countries. That sums up my post for today. (I am sorry that it grew a little long-winded.)
What followed was an experience that one can only really have in a small town. The woman took my order, unhurriedly dictated it to the cook (i.e., said something into a door), and proceeded to ask where I was from and answer the slew of questions that I was asking her (in English) about German and Austrian food. I still have not tried all of the dishes that are listed in the phrasebook that I took to Germany last year and doubt that I will manage to do so until I take that bike tour along the Danube. Ignoring minor local variations, most places in Germany seem to make the same basic set of dishes; I would hazard to say that the food in Austria is better.
I have digressed, though. When I asked the woman about a particular cabbage dish and she could not remember the word "cumin," she said, "Hold on, I might have some in the back," went into the kitchen, and came back with a few cumin seeds on the palm of her hand for me to smell and taste. She later served me a fairly good dish of sausage, potatoes, and mixed vegetables doused in cheese (Germans seem to love cheese.); I ate my fill for 7.5 Euros, a very good price in Western Europe for a non-fast food joint. When I had finished dinner, the woman offered me some sort of brandy or liqueur on the house, which I had to turn down, regretfully, as I would not have liked it no matter how good it was. I gave the woman a handsome tip and headed back to the train station, following the directions that she had given me at the end of my meal.
I suppose that my lack of energy may be a little evident in this post. I am party a little tired, and I have partly had a Rhineland overload. It was natural for me to schedule excessive amounts of travel through Germany for this summer: in my desire to avoid perfunctorily seeing the few biggest cities in each of the countries that I wish to avoid, I have arranged to see a gigantic number of smaller cities, as well. To do this without eventually finding it monotonous may be impossible, as it would be very impractical to see, for example, large amounts of Germany without seeing them all in a row; I expect to have an Italy overload next summer, a France overload the summer after that, and a Spain overload in three years, as it is too impractical to spend a week in one country and then a week in another, moving around continuously.
I have two more issues to address in this email. The first is that a positive effect of my seeing more than the outer façade that most visitors of Germany would see has been the realization that Germany has problems, just like any other country. While I still consider Germany the most advanced country that I have ever visited, its regional trains are significantly delayed on a frequent basis, and it is full of homeless people, perhaps because of having low wages or unskilled labor and a high cost of living, possibly because of having inadequate programs for treating mental illness. I have not noticed any other global problems within the country, though. Racial tension in the places that I have visited appears to be non-existent, which is especially striking to me because of my having spent so much time recently in the United States; despite its very successful efforts to erase the effects of some two hundred years of racial discrimination, the aftertaste of all of all of those years of discrimination can still be felt in day-to-day interactions between people of different races and in wealth inequality between blacks and whites. While I expect that the many immigrants to Germany from the Near East are poorer than their German counterparts, I do not think that the country has any deep-rooted history of racism. Its small towns are peopled by neat, clean two- and three-story houses with gardens and look entirely livable; and, while it is fantastical to claim that everyone in Germany likes his job, people in various spheres of life are so friendly that it is hard to imagine otherwise. A woman at the train station in Worms spent several minutes helping me work out the best way to take the train to Oppenheim and, from there, to Frankfurt, which was non-trivial, as I had already bought a two-way train ticket to Worms that turned out to be more or less useless. A woman from whom I asked directions in Worms spent a couple of minutes explaining things to me, much as the young man with the French accent had done just two days previously in Bonn. Unless I am mistaken, Germany is at the forefront of various new developments in industry and technology and is continuously modernizing. While my recent experiences have knocked it down in my eyes, conveniently, from the level of God-country to earthly, but very successful, country, I do not see too many areas of life in which it falls behind any other country that I have visited.
The second point of the day is to consider why it is that people from North America (that is, some people - those who end up in places like Worms) are so fixated on seeing Old Europe. It is clear that people like me can easily grow weary of churches and former town halls, yet we keep on streaming across the ocean to see them. No matter how much we consider visits to medieval cathedrals and the ruins of Roman amphitheaters to give us a "window into the past," they do not actually put us in contact with Gauls or Romans, and they do not show us how ordinary people in ancient France or Rome lived their day-to-day lives; it is possible that they teach us fairly little, all told, though seeing that Mainz has a train station next to the ruins of some Roman structure or other taught me today that the Romans made it all of the way to the Rhine. Looking at old buildings is an intensely-pleasurable
I doubt that I have convinced anyone that travelling to foreign lands (specifically, with the goal of cultural enrichment) is a good or a bad idea, but I cannot help wondering, as I do most of the time, what the point of this all is. On the plus side, I am having fun, seeing a lot of new stuff, meeting new people, and writing a decent amount, so I cannot complain. I am going to bed soon; what I would like best is to watch a movie, but it is too noisy in the lobby of this hostel, and I am told that the WiFi does not work so well upstairs. I am off to Mainz and Weisbaden, both of which are big and varied enough to be worth visiting, tomorrow, and I will visit Wurzburg on Sunday, when I will not need any help with train tickets (Services will probably be limited on that day.) I am not exactly waiting to leave the Rhineland entirely, as each of these cities has a slightly different nature from the rest, and even the churches have differences to them, such as different types of columns, different amounts and types of statues, different amounts of other accoutrements (such as pictures, engravings, objects made of precious metals, &c.), and different types of stained glass. I should probably describe my stays in Russian villages to readers who did not get my emails last year, but I am too tired at the moment. Rather, I will give it a shot.
I have spent a total of around 30 minutes in two Russian villages. I visited the first of them with a friend's parents, aunt, and uncle. It had broken-down houses and fences, dirt roads, and no areas where anyone could conceivably do paid work (except by making milk, honey, &c., as the people whom we were visiting did). A man stumbled, blind drunk, down a path and fell flat on his face at one point; another got a rifle out of a shed and started shooting at the nearby magpies. None of this was considered unusual. The second village I visited with a friend, his sister, and his grandfather, who, along with the friend's grandmother, had a summer cottage near the village. It consisted of a few abandoned-looking houses, something like an apartment building, and a large clay lot. I do not remember if there were any cars around, though there must have been; I distinctly remember that there was nothing even resembling a general store in sight and that the drapes of several units in the apartment building moved almost imperceptibly, as though a cat's leg had brushed up against them, when the lot of us arrived in town - people had been watching us and had noiselessly moved their peering faces away from the window panes when we looked their way. "Well, that's the village," my friend's grandfather said, and we turned around to walk back to his summer cottage.
I bring up this anecdote as prove that life in villages can be much worse than what I saw from the train window in Germany; it is much more advanced than many other large countries. That sums up my post for today. (I am sorry that it grew a little long-winded.)
This is the arch that I mentioned a couple of times.
No comments:
Post a Comment