Day 20 - Baden-Baden

I just lost my entire email because my computer crashed. I suppose that I will have to start writing these in Microsoft Word, where I can save them more frequently than I can in GMail, which is supposed to automatically save email drafts every minute or so. I absolutely hate computers.

I suppose that I will tell this differently from the way in which I planned to tell it. I woke up today to light rain, which was a relief. By "light," I mean something like ten tiny droplets, but it was better than nothing, and the whole sky was clouded over - southern Germany was finally going to get some cooler weather.

I got up late today, an hour later than yesterday, and once again felt well-rested. Once again I took the tram to the train station, this time without any help, and I bought a Baden-Wurtemberg (regional) train ticket that would take me to Baden-Baden.

What followed was a continuation of failed interactions that had begun this morning. When I went across the street to get a pastry this morning and the woman working behind the counter asked if I wanted to have it there or to go, I said, after a failed attempt to say "to go," "No here. No here." I can reliably repeat the words "to go" right after hearing them, but I have a hard time doing so unprompted, and the woman herself had not said them. When she seemed confused by my answer, I said "I to eat not here," at which point she asked, in English, "So you want to have it here?" When I replied that I did not want to eat it there (partly because I did not want it at that very minute, and partly because one pays extra to eat on site rather than taking one's food with on), she asked if I wanted it wrapped in a paper bag. I would have told her, "No, I'd like to smear sugar and pastry dough all over everything in my backpack," but I was pretty sure that that would make the situation worse.

The failed communication at the train station was partly because of my linguistic ignorance and partly because of the railway personnel's mistakes. When I had gotten my regional train ticket from a machine, I went to the information desk to ascertain the schedule of trains going to and from Baden-Baden; while one gets one automatically when one buys a ticket at the counter, one has to do so separately when one uses a machine. The first woman with whom I talked refused to tell me anything until I had proven to her that I already had a ticket, at which point she started telling me about my ticket rather than giving me a schedule. When I had finally convinced her to give me a schedule, I said that I wanted to "go to Freiburg" at six or seven o'clock PM, as I did not yet know the word "to arrive" (I should have said "return," as I already knew that word.). As a result, she gave me a schedule that would have me leaving Baden-Baden between six and eight o'clock in the evening, which was useless to me.

I learned the word "to arrive" very clearly and explained what I wanted to a second person working at the information desk, highlighting my desire to return to Freiburg at five or six PM. (This is a fine point - I decided to name earlier times because, if I decided to stay in Baden-Baden for longer, I would end up taking whatever train was next when I got back to the train station regardless; however, if I decided to leave earlier than planned, I would want to know the train schedule in advance, as I could choose a target time to meet rather than waiting for longer than necessary in the train station.) The man confirmed that I was talking about trains from Baden-Baden to Freiburg and printed me a schedule of trains going in the wrong direction, which I only noticed when I was standing on one of the platforms.

None of these individual instances was by any means a disaster, but they combined to put me in a rather foul mood. The first one in particular was frustrating, as I felt that I was being treated as Parisians stereotypically treat foreigners, refusing to speak French to them unless they have a perfect command of it. Given that I managed over a week ago to arrange with a woman at the railway station who spoke no English to give me a ticket that would take me to Oppenheim, allow me to see the city for a couple of hours, and then take me back to Frankfurt, I felt that the woman in the bakery should have trivially been able to understand my request today, now that my German is better. While it is not these people's fault that I do not speak their language, I feel that they should be able to respond to me at least as easily as I do to people in Vancouver who speak basic English and need directions or help. It seems to me that people here, at least in restaurants and cafes, get exponentially dumber with respect to their knowledge of English; I have had no trouble talking to people who speak no English, yet those who speak some English almost always have diminished understanding of my broken German.

Part of the reason for my ire over today's failed communications was my having fairly high expectations for my interlocutors. Due to the fact that tons of Germans seem to know everything that a tourist would want to know about their cities and to be generous with their knowledge, I have come to expect a great deal of help from most people with whom I talk. When people fail to live up to my expectations, I feel that I am not being rewarded for my attempts to speak German, when, in reality, I am rewarded most of the time. As is often the case in life, it is the negative instances that make a stronger impression than the positive ones, so that one feels as though people who fail to understand one are intentionally vexing one and thumbing their noses at one. I said this in a more interesting and succinct way in the email that my email provider cruelly destroyed.

Baden-Baden itself was a royal disappointment. The train ride there did not take me through the Black Forest, as I had expected that it would, but, rather, took me through mostly-flat farmland and industrial regions crowned by gentle hills. I saw a great many vineyards and the ruins of one castle up on a hill, and some of the cities along the way had nice churches, but I did not see any more of the Black Forest until we pulled into Baden-Baden.

When I got off of the train, I looked at the map of the town, which was illegible, and decided to set off at random. I passed through residential areas, bought a sandwich (which I ate immediately - more on this later), walked through another residential area, walked past a construction site, asked someone for directions, walked back to the train station, and left. I was unable to find the city center, anything even remotely related to the historic city center, or even any information that might help me find any of those things. I would call Baden-Baden a nice area in which to live, as it is chock full of trees, but I could not find a single bench, water fountain, or bathroom in any of the parts of the city that I traversed. The city highlights were a small statue of a dancer, a standard-issue church, and a stream.
I came back to Baden-Baden feeling mildly defeated but not altogether unhappy. I got a good view of the Black Forest and saw another castle ruin (in the hills) while in Baden-Baden; the trip to Berne would have been much longer, more tiring, and more expensive than the one to Baden-Baden; I could not have predicted that it would be so miserable and, thus, did not make a bad decision (only an uninformed one) in deciding to go there; and Konstanz, like Berne, would have been too far out of my way to be worth seeing today, as I should get a chance to see it, and Berne, on a different trip. I felt somnolent as I returned from Baden Baden and dozed off on the train ride back, and I got to read for awhile as I waited for the train. What I got out of my trip to Baden-Baden was a rather expensive walk and an excursion that gave me something to do but did not drain too much of my energy.

The reason for which I ate my sandwich so quickly today was that I almost had to pay for some poor dietary choices yesterday. My first mistake was to leave a sandwich containing mayonnaise in my backpack for four hours before eating it, and my second one was to drink a small carton (something like 250 ml - half of a pint) of coconut milk yesterday evening. I had gotten worried about getting food poisoning after eating the sandwich and had drunk the coconut milk mostl for the sake of novelty, as I like some foods that have coconut flavoring. Unfortunately, I ended up feeling queasy for the rest of the evening, as I should have been able to predict would happen given my sensitive stomach. I had some black bread later on to try to neutralize my stomach's contents, but it was a little acid and may not have helped. To make a long story short, I went to bed sweating profusely and wondering if I would be violently sick during the night. I got up feeling fine, and, since more than twenty-four hours have passed since I ate the sandwich and drank the coconut milk that might have given me problems, I now assume that I am fine. I have been taught an inexpensive lesson not to play with fire when choosing what to eat and will avoid future such mistakes (at least, in the immediate future, after which I will either forget or stop caring until I have another such episode as last night).
I have a whole bunch of notes and not much time to try to cover them all before I go to bed; I want to get plenty of sleep (which will be easy, as I do not have to be at the train station until midday) before tomorrow's visit to the oral surgeon, as I will have a long, expensive trip to Nancy after the visit and two very full days of travel starting on the following morning. I plan to see both Metz and Nancy, in an unfortunate (somewhat) turn of events, on Saturday - I call this unfortunate because it is a lot for one day, though, given their propinquity to each other, I should have no difficulty spending an hour getting to Metz, three hours walking around it, an hour coming back, and the rest of the afternoon and early evening seeing Nancy; it will merely be a lot of sightseeing for one day - and Luxembourg on Sunday. I had been hoping to see Nancy and Metz on separate days, making my stay in Nancy more leisurely, but I will not get the chance to see any of the city tomorrow, as I will not reach it until the evening, perhaps even towards sundown. While my timing and the geographic particulars of this part of the trip are far from ideal, no long-term trip passes without some hiccups, and things should turn out fine, especially once I reach central Europe, where everything will be cheaper. I still have to find out how to get from Budapest to Eger and from Eger to Kosice, but once I have done that, I should have no further logistic problems. My only worry is that I may have scheduled too much time for Leipzig, but that might just mean that I get to relax a bit before moving on to Berlin.

I will have to keep my remaining notes genuinely brief, though I often say that. I find it interesting, as I tried to note the other day, that German towns on the border with France are so distinctly German and French towns there are so distinctly French. I do not much know how national identities are formed or how they are inculcated in people - rather, I have an idea of their modes of formation and their ties with history and societal values, but I am still fascinated by the degree to which they show up, even in cities that have historically enjoyed a great deal of cultural crossover (due to the Alsace's having been German for awhile). I also found it curious when, on the bus trip to Dinkelsbuhl, I saw a department store and thought of it as being American. I am sure that there are people who study the history of consumer architecture, as somebody has to decide how to decide a supermarket or gas station, and people surely put thought into their design, as better design should increase profits. I think that Americans are the kings of large-scale consumerism and first came up with the idea of the shopping mall, which may be why I immediately thought of the department store that I saw in Germany as being less German than the buildings in the surrounding villages - I saw it as American in spirit. I would be curious to know if one basic blueprint for department stores (that is, for their exteriors) was conceptualized some years ago and has copied ever since.

I suppose that I should fill you in on some of the people whom I have been meeting; specifically, I should tell you about the professor (of something) whom I met the other day. When I walked into the kitchen yesterday, a woman sitting at the table said hello to me and asked where I was from. She told me that she was from Harrisburg, Pensylvania, and, when I mentioned that I had considered applying for a conference there, we got to talking about my work and summer plans. The woman, whose name I never learned, said, "You poor thing!" when she learned that I had moved from Vancouver to Fayetteville for graduate school, as she had done her graduate degree in Athens, Georgia, another miniscule college town in the South. It was refreshing talking to someone who has seen enough of the world to know that Fayetteville is a cultural backwater and curious to me, as it always is, how easy it is for academics (for I can consider myself an academic for the time being) to find a common tongue. I have found it easy talking to a wide variety of types of people in hostels until now, but there is nothing quite so effortless as striking up a conversation with someone else from the academy. I suppose that universities collect a wide number of like-minded people - i.e., people of a similar intellectual disposition - though, like anywhere else, there is a wide range of people who work at them, with some of whom it must be quite difficult to talk.

My final comment is that my trip is one-third of the way through, which is encouraging. I am not ready for it to be over, and I am not tired of travelling, but I have to admit that it would be tough to keep this up forever, as it involves a lot of rushing about and logistic challenges, such as getting from Nancy to Salzburg on Monday (which will cost a pretty penny). I feel good about the way in which this trip is going overall, and I mostly feel secure about seeing so much of Germany rather than venturing into other countries. I sometimes feel anxious about the idea of focusing so much on one country at a time, as someone with different goals from mine could have found time to see parts of Italy, Spain, Greece, and even Turkey in the time that it will take me to see only a few countries. With luck, I will get to see every one place that I want to see over the next few years and will not suffer for being so thorough in my exploration of individual countries. I often feel anxious about fulfilling my travel wish list and think that the only reasonable way to quell this anxiety is to assume that everything will turn out fine and to trust in my planning. The only other alternative would be to sit and worry, which would do me no good. (Rather, a third alternative would be to jump from country to country, which would burn a hole in my pocket, as I am going to learn tomorrow and on Monday.)

In short, I will try to trust that my plans will be fulfilled and not to doubt the propitiousness of the choices that I have made. My next email to you will be from my hotel in Nancy.

I am sorry to have added a postscript to this email, as I have already promised to end it, but I may as well bring up one final point. My hearing a baby's cries as I wrote the email that my computer's crash destroyed reminded me how much I despise small children. I consider it a pity to dislike them, as, in theory, they are delightful and arouse unequalled amounts of love in us, but I cannot help thinking of them as selfish nuisances. I wonder if it is more a product of my temperament or of my age and lifestyle that leads me to dislike babies to such a degree. Perhaps past generations' love of babies was culturally instilled, or perhaps loads of people never liked babies much in the past but could not voice their dislike because of gender roles. It is partly common to eschew child-rearing until ones thirties these days because of changes in the workforce, while it seems that the expectation that every married couple have kids is also weakening, freeing people who are uninterested in them not to have them. What I am trying to say is that, in the past, one had them whether one wanted to or not, while one has them only if one wants to (at least, in the areas in which I have lived) now. I tend to hear an inhuman note in the shrieks and squeals of young children that make them totally uninteresting to me despite my analytically recognizing them as growing, incredulous beings. My disinterest in nurturing children reminds me of my disinterest in teaching: I lack a passion for helping the weak get stronger. It is possible that this will pass, while it is possible that it is a fundamental part of my character. As in many things, only time will tell.

Now I am truly done!

God damn it! I forgot to mention how hard it is to get a good look at birds through the window of a moving train. I have seen (and heard) some phenomenal birds on this trip, but I most often only get a second or two to see them through the window. I only caught a glimpse of the gigantic hawks that I saw, for example, and, when I saw a smaller hawk with white markings on the undersides of its wings (which I found fascinating; the idea that the underside of the wings could have specialized markings makes my jaw drop), I wished that I could have looked at it for longer. I have seen a great many hawks and birds with light-brown or hay-colored feathers, but I have seen very few of them for long enough to tell what they were.

I am, for the umpteenth time, done with this letter.

Baden-Baden had a lot of trees.

 

Day 19 - Colmar

It seems that one relaxed day was enough to restore my energy! I woke up at 9:00 AM today thinking that it was much later; although the room was torrid and my allergies were bad, I had slept soundly and felt rested. I had leftovers from yesterday's dinner (a pasta dish with gorgonzola, tomato-based sauce, and the first spinach that I have had in ages - 2 meals' worth for 8.50 Euros) for breakfast and was going to buy lunch from a deli across the street when I saw the number 5 tram, the one that I was supposed to take, pull up to the nearby tramway stop. I hopped on the tram, said that I wanted to get off at the main train station, and was off.

Two locals helped me get to the train station, the first explaining that it would be faster to take the number 3 tram from an upcoming stop and the second telling when to get off of the number 3 (she was headed in the same direction). The first of those locals, a gregarious old man, engaged me in my first-ever real conversation in German. He asked me where I was from, if I was travelling alone, where else I was going, and what my lodgings were like, and, with the help of the dictionary in my phrasebook, I was able to answer each of his questions more or less coherently. One trick for speaking in a language with which one is barely familiar is to simplify one's syntax and to stick with words that one knows. For example, instead of asking for a table at a restaurant, I always say, "I want to eat here," which is understood; if I were asked whether or not I wanted to be in the non-smoking section (which no longer really exists - smoking seems to be banned, surprisingly, indoors), I would simply say, "No cigarettes, please," which would also be understood. Once one gets used to parsing the words that one already knows from a stream of foreign syllables, one can understand more words than one can produce; while I struggle mightily to say numbers, I can understand almost any price that is mentioned to me now, and I can more or less understand directions that I could never hope to give another person. With these tricks in hand, I was able to explain my style of travel to my interlocutor and impress upon him that I loved the German countryside. We parted ways amiably, and, a few minutes later, the woman who was helping to guide me told me that we had reached the main train station.

I got a great deal on my rail ticket to Colmar, again by talking to the railway personnel rather than trying to buy a ticket on my own, though I checked in advance to see if it would be easy to get a ticket from one of the machines. The train ride to a German border town, the name of which I have already forgotten, was mostly anticlimactic, as it took me away from the Black Forest into flatter land that looked decent for farming. It was when I stepped onto the bus that was to take me to Colmar that the world around me changed: the bus driver was bilingual, and, within a few stops, everyone was already speaking French. We passed through little towns much like the ones in the German countryside (so much for my world's changing) near Dinkelsbuhl - many of them had attractive houses, statues (including one of a pair of storks), and churches, but all of them were miniscule. Papery-thin mountains showed blue in the distance, but there were none of the hills or tree cover that I had seen the day before. Instead, we passed over rivers that astounded me for their color - turquoise, rather than the brown of every river that I had seen in Germany (Perhaps this has more to do with water depth, speed, and mineral content than pollution.). Soon before reaching Colmar, we passed a great many walls that seemed to have no purpose at all - they looked almost like the foundation of a former city. They were a little like the walls of Seattle's underground passageways: roughly ten feet in height, they ran for hundreds of yards at a time and seemed to do nothing but separate sections of grass from one another and bastion other sections of grass. It might be fanciful to think of them as ancient ruins, yet I do not know what else they can be, as nothing else is built on or around them, and they all rise to the same approximate height.

As usual, I have little to say about the town itself, Colmar, that I saw, except that I walked around and looked at old buildings. Food in Colmar is far too expensive, so the only thing that I bought was a croissant, which was reasonably-priced (one Euro); the churches in Colmar were closed for viewing more often than not; there were too many cars in the city center; the city had some very nice statuary and fountains, and it had a section of canals, called Little Venice, that gave it a little flavor; almost all of the bathrooms cost money, like in Germany, except for one that had half-doors, like in a saloon, and no sink; there was nowhere to get free water (luckily, I had a liter-and-a-half); and it was cooler, to my relief, in Colmar than in Freiburg, though I cannot say why. My hatred of the sun has grown into a burning coal in the pit of my stomach, causing me to heat doubly whenever the weather is hot. I rediscovered the extraordinary beauty of Freiburg's historic city center when I went to buy lunch before leaving for Colmar, but I was unable to explore it for long when I returned from Colmar, as Germany has not yet invented the water fountain. I may return to it tomorrow for a short stroll if I am in the mood, but the heat may dissuade me from going anywhere except back to my hostel once I have seen Baden-Baden.

As usual, I have left out a great deal in my account, and I want to go over some finer points of the past few days. My return from Colmar was almost as interesting as my trip there. The bus from Colmar to the German border town was late, and, when we got on, the bus driver said that he would try to make it to the train station in time by driving really fast. This was not good news, as the French are crazy drivers to start out with. The driver gunned it as soon as I sat down, jolting me, and for the rest of the ride we careened towards Germany. We made it to the train station just in time, as it turns out, perhaps in part because of the driver's celerity, but mostly because the train itself was delayed. It is interesting that bus drivers who drive through old towns in the countryside manage not to crash. From the perspective of a passenger, it looks like the bus will hit everything, as one cannot imagine its turning without slamming into objects lying in its general vicinity, and yet bus drivers always seem to miss them, perhaps by inches; they are good at what they do. Driving a bus seems like altogether too stressful a career for me, but I suppose that it suits some people.

Another curious point is that the grocery store across the way from the hostel in which I am staying is full of Russian goods. It has Russian buckwheat, Russian condensed milk, Russian cocoa powder, Russian sour cream, and a wide variety of other Russian goods. When I asked the store owner where he and his daughter were from, he said, "Afghanistan," and he told me that he spoke a little Russian. My trip to the store was profitable, all told, as I got a decent quality of fruit and dairy products for under ten Euros, though they did not have many breadstuffs or anything that one could eat for dinner. I ended up getting a hopeless-looking sandwich from the local deli, as the nearby Turkish place looked abysmal, and have decided to go back to nearby Italian restaurant for dinner tomorrow and breakfast (i.e., leftovers) the day after tomorrow. One boon to staying in residential areas is that one can always find a grocery store and reasonable places to eat nearby. (I did not notice that there was an ordinary grocery store, which I may very well visit before heading to Nancy, as the high prices of food in France may extend to groceries.)

I forgot to give Colmar a rating as a tourist destination. It is vastly less attractive than Strasbourg, all told, as it is much less diverse, has less to offer in total, and does not have a tourist information center that one has a hope in hell of finding. I enjoyed its main sights and liked listening to its songbirds (surprise, surprise), but I found it limited, on the whole. One of its main strong points was its verdure: there were a ton of trees in the city center, like in Freiburg, and the French even play sports and games on the grassy areas, which might give France a leg up over Germany as my favorite country. As much as I enjoy smoking cigarettes, worshipping the Lord, and standing around like a water buffalo as trains clatter past me, I think that I may prefer staying active, which the French do much more proficiently than Germans. My only real knock on Germany, in fact, is the lack of water fountains and free bathrooms and the fact that people smoke like chimney stacks - the Christian propaganda and idiotic behavior in train stations I can put up with. French seems more secular and supportive of physical fitness than Germany, which might make it the more advanced country of the two.

My remaining notes are scattered. There were a lot of beggars in Ulm, which I forgot to mention (and only one that I saw in Colmar). While there were not many flowers between Freiburg and Colmar, the ones that proliferated were poppies, which was curious to me. Though they have become inexorably associated with death (and, thus, life's transience, wistfulness, delicacy, and so on) by the famous war poem "In Flanders' Fields," poppies must actually be incredibly hardy, as they seem to be able to grow almost anywhere. It is curious to me that the very quality that we consider to be ornamentally beautiful is just what makes them (at least, in part; I know nothing of the shape and quantity of their reproductive organs) so competitive: the brightness (and arrangement) of their petals. Petals are not, in fact, ornamental, but serve a very functional purpose: the attraction of seed carriers. This same point can be made of birds and their song: the part of them that is beautiful in what would seem to be an ornamental way is strictly pragmatic from the non-human point of view. I suppose that this is the type of quality that makes men like Richard Feynman state that the beauty of the world lies partly in its science - that is, our understanding of the workings of science gives us a much deeper appreciation for the beauty of the natural world.

I have only three more points to make. One of them is that I saw Wurzburg, like Dinkelsbuhl, at a somewhat unique time: I got there at 4:16, after the horde of tourists had seen most of what they wanted to see (and the heat of the day had passed, and Mass had ended - my timing, spurred by my missing the bus, was good). As a result, the streets were almost preternaturally quiet (like in Oppenheim, only without the sense of a potential threat that accompanied the silence there) as soon as I stepped out of the main tourist areas. I have noticed this quality in one or two other cities, and it was particularly striking in Wurzburg.

My other point is yet another rhapsody on the virtue of the German people. For all of their emphysema and arteriosclerosis, they are incredibly helpful people. Not only have they given me directions multiple times on every day of my trip, but one of them, seeing the Ugandan man and me looking a little lost when we got off of the train in Freiburg's central train station yesterday (I was trying to help the Ugandan man find a payphone.), tried to help us find out where to find a phone and then offered to let the Ugandan man use his. Germans' willingness to help people may be matched only by that of the Polish. For all of my carping about Poland (and, specifically, its infrastructure), the people who live in it are very helpful.

My last anecdote of the day - I have written more than I expected - is one that will interest and surprise many of you. I want to plant the germ of a new stereotype about Russian people that has probably not reached the ears of any North American, non-Russian person - it has nothing to do with bears, vodka, the balalaika, or Vladimir Lenin. A trait of Russians that is unknown to Westerners is their absolute inability to decide on anything if they are in a group of three or more people. Three seems to be the minimum number of people for this inability to kick in (I forget the term in chemistry used for a minimum amount of energy needed for a chemical reaction - the term "critical mass," unrelated, comes to mind.), as a pair of people can often agree on things. When three or more Russians are grouped in one place, though, something very special happens, and I had the pleasure of witnessing it the other day in Augsburg when I sat down to eat near a group of Russians trying to decide when to fly back to Moscow.

The first thing that happens when a group of Russians (hereafter referred to as a "GOR") tries to decide something is, naturally, that someone makes a proposition. This first speaker usually makes a few key arguments that he expects to sway his readers' opinions - he thinks that they are as solid as the supporting columns of the cathedral at Worms. The second speaker in a GOR usually makes a point that shows the problem at hand from a different point of view from the first speaker's, like one of those side streets that joins a neighboring street in one of Germany's many five- or six-street intersections. This point is not so much an attempt to undermine the point of the first speaker as it is an attempt to show its possible shortcomings; it is a modification of the first point, if you will. Once that point is made, it may be rebutted by the first speaker, but, whether or not that happens, a third speaker inevitably makes his voice heard. The third speaker, a maverick, asks something (He rarely makes a new declarative statement.) completely unrelated to the topic of discussion, such as the price of peanuts at the Berlin Zoo, after which all hell breaks loose. The original two speakers forget what they were arguing about and instead start talking about peanuts until one of them realizes that the question at hand has not yet been decided, at which point one of them curtly ends the side discussion and reopens discussion of the original question.

If a fourth person is involved, the situation gets even more complicated, so much so that we would need the world's top graph theorists to help us solve it. A fourth person will usually repudiate outright all of the points made by previous parties and propose a radical new solution, which the first person will reject, leading to further disputation. The process can go on and on, sometimes for more than half of an hour, without any decision's being made until all parties run out of steam and the first person's decision, having been proposed anew, is accepted as the correct one, not having changed one bit since its original formulation. Russians' inability to decide anything whatsoever used to drive me to distraction. When my friends tried to make collective decisions, the only one that I would ever voice is that we should "stand around [wasting time] (and, if it was cold, freezing our asses off) for another thirty minutes," which they would chuckle at before resuming their logomachy. It was only yesterday, when I realized that the inability of GORs to make decisions was just another of their inbred traits, such as their ability to stay goodbye to one another in any less than twenty minutes, which I had to accept as pleasing in its idiosyncrasy. The only alternative, after all, was to continue standing with smoke coming out of my ears every time they tried to decide anything; one does much better to enjoy the show and not let it get to one.

The answer, then, to the question, "How many Russians does it take to decide whether to go to the park or watch a movie?" is "two," as any number greater than that will lead to their arguing until the movie is over and it is already dark out, at which point they will drink vodka, wrestle with bears while playing the balalaika, and write eulogies in honor of Vladimir Lenin. I hope that a new chapter has been added to the book of stereotypes about Russians.

[Edit: I should have highlighted the colorfulness of the language that Russians use when arguing. They always make their points soberly, with a completely straight face, and are either dead-certain that everyone else involved is an idiot or so involved with daydreams about peanuts and the Berlin zoo that they do not care what decision is eventually reached in the debate. They will sometimes laugh at one another's points or say things like, "Are you kidding me?" while making diametrically-opposed points to one another. The fact that this happens every time they try to decide anything at all and that they do not realize that things could be done differently is amusing.]

This is one of Colmar's winding, touristy streets.

 

This is a view of a church from a tram stop in Freiburg.

 

Day 18 - Ulm and Freiburg

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 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!

 

(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.

 

Day 17 - Nordlingen and Augsburg

My luck has taken a turn for the worse. As you know, I had to make some rushed hostel bookings to accommodate a sudden change of plans. As it turns out, I did not get the best hostel and hotel arrangements available, but that always happens when one has little time to plan things. One of my hostels, the one in Freiburg, is almost 3 miles from the train station; while I realized this when I booked it, I did not know until today that reception there was only open from 3:00 to 7:00 PM (Another hostel in Freiburg, by comparison, is open from 9:00 AM to 1:00 AM.). I will not be able to get there before 7:00 PM, but, thankfully, the hostel manager responded to my request to stay there until 8:00 PM, and he said that he would await my arrival. (Checking in to the hotel in Nancy should be simpler.)

I started my day by sleeping in a little, but I got going so slowly that I was not able to purchase breakfast before I left Nuremberg. I had enough food to prevent my starving to death on the way to Nordlingen, and the train ride was wonderful. We passed hills covered entirely by trees, hills covered in grass, with sections of bare rock (which reminded me of Ring Mountain), and one hill that had a very fancy castle on it. There were more poppies, more giant complexes of solar panels, and even hawks here and there. I heard the second pair of people whom I have heard on this trip speaking, or attempting to speak, English and sounding like they were speaking German.

Nordlingen itself was like a low-rent Dinkelsbuhl. I was unable to leave my baggage anywhere when I got there, as I had foreseen might happen, and so I carted it with me to the center of the city. Nordlingen, like Dinkelsbuhl, is a very ancient German city with its entire city wall still intact. Beyond that, there was little to see besides cafes and bakeries. I saw my fill of the city within an hour and returned to the train station o make my trip to Augsburg.

Augsburg is the least impressive of the regal cities surrounding Nuremberg (Regensburg, Wurzburg, Bamberg, and Augsburg) that I have seen. It had fewer residences, churches, and other old buildings of note than the above-mentioned city, and its city center was spread out not in a pleasant, relaxed way, like Heidelberg's, but in more of a diluted way, so that one would pass blocks of relatively uninteresting buildings before getting to one of note. While it mostly escaped bombing by the Allied forces in World War II, Augsburg's city center is nonetheless the most modern of any of the cities surrounding it in a glitzy, commercial way - it is full of expensive stores and little else. The city does have a great many placards celebrating people who have lived in various of the residences still existing there, and it contains the very first low-rent housing district (i.e., low-rent houses in an attractive setting, rather than slums) in the world, but it has little else of interest..

I am about out of things to say, unfortunately. The weather here has been hideous, and the city center smells like warm garbage. The temperature today reached almost 90 degrees Farenheit and may get hotter tomorrow before cooling off again - it is hot enough that one feels as though one had stepped into the depths of hell. I spent the whole day sweating oceans, with sweat pouring down my forehead and temples and forming pools in my eye sockets before gushing down my cheeks. I have been perspiring so much that, when I tried to apply a second layer of sunscreen to my face, I just ended up smearing sweat all over my face. Even indoors, where it is vastly cooler, I am still coated with a sticky layer of sweat, like dried-out apple juice, from which I will only escape for five minutes when I shower, as I will just start sweating all over again in bed.

I suppose that I have complained enough. Augsburg has an incredible dearth of trees and is way too hot in the summer. I went to a local beer garden that the hostel owner recommended only to order a dish that was much smaller, as it turned out, than what I could have gotten for an equivalent amount of money, and did not even fill me up despite costing 7.80 Euros (a rarity in Germany); one always knows after the fact what to have ordered. This hostel is a million times better than the last one that I visited, making me regret that I can only spend one night here, but such is life. The hostel owner printed out maps to my next hostel and hotel for me; I am going to spend most of tomorrow on trains. At this point, I need to take a shower and get to bed. I am also going to briefly look up the climates of other countries that I was hoping to visit in future, such as Greece and Turkey, to see if I had better visit them in winter to avoid these kinds of temperatures. I wish, as always, that I had more time to write!

 

(Also, I do not know if the hostel to which I will soon be going will have internet access, so I may not ending up posting anything for the next few days.)

 

The facades of some buildings in Nordlingen.

 

Behold the oldest low-rent housing settlement in the world!

 

Day 16 - Dinkelsbuhl and Wurzburg

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!

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Day 15 - Rothenburg ob der Tauber

I may have to keep this post genuinely short, though I tend to say that a lot. I made the mistake of scheduling too much total sightseeing for the brief time that I have spent, two days from now, in Nuremberg. I took it easy when I got here, getting up late two days in a row, as a result of which I will not have time to see the Nazi party rally grounds or the documentation center about the rise of Nazism in Germany. It is a pity, given the uniqueness of the site, to have to miss it, but such is life: I scheduled too much time for Frankfurt and too little for Nuremberg. I am going to see Dinkelsbuhl and Wurzburg tomorrow and Nordlingen and Ausburg on Monday, more or less as planned; the distance of the smaller two of those four cities from any transport hub will have me spending lots of time going back and forth on trains.

My only notes from past days that I forgot to mention are short, and I can make them shorter. First off, I forgot to mention - though this is based on a very small sample size of experience - that service in French cafes is slightly better than that in German restaurants. I say this because the French - again, based on my one experience - make one feel welcome no matter what one orders and do not make one feel guilty for not ordering drinks, which are inevitably overpriced. While waiters in unpretentious beerhouses outside of the city center do not hover over one as they offer one something to drink, I noticed waiters in Heidelberg glancing balefully at me as I refused their offers of drinks. Perhaps this was more a reflection of that city itself or of eating in touristy areas than it is of national character or Germany's restaurant culture; though, since I was eating in a touristy part of Strasbourg, which is a touristy city, and was still treated with the utmost respect and cordiality, I would not be surprised if my experience reflected the slight superiority of French waiters over German waiters.

My only other query from days past that I did not mention was whether or not the people working at the train station like their jobs. I admit that one cannot solve all of the problems in the world and that not everyone can be made to like his job, but I cannot help pitying people who have to answer more or less continual customer inquiries for eight hours per day. It is possible that some people are perfectly fitted to such work and would not like anything better; it is likely that many people look at any job as a necessary evil and would not see working at a train station as being worse than anything else; and yet I wonder, whenever I approach the counter at the ticket office (or when I am at the airport, &c.), if the people working behind it are not tired and harried. This is not an issue that has any ready answer; it is more of a preoccupation than anything else.

Again, since I need to get up early tomorrow (and might even get to the train station before the ticket office opens; hopefully not), I will have to keep this post short. One of my most interesting observations on the way to Rothenburg ab der Tauber (hereafter referred to in this post as "Rothenburg") was that we were passing through little villages, including fenced-in communities of little shanties, within ten or fifteen minutes of leaving Nuremberg. We passed a few fields full of solar panels, poppies, and white and yellow wildflowers; we passed through gently rolling hills, pink and lilac wildflowers, and bluebells; and we passed through wooded regions and the same attractive towns that I have seen all over Germany, filled with nicer houses than one could buy or rent in the city. The train ride into Rothenburg - i.e., the last leg of the journey there - was a bit of a farce, as there were only a few Germans left on the train. I remarked to my neighbours that we were going to take the city by storm, having come from all over the world to look at a town of some ten thousand people and snap photos of its historic buildings.

My feelings about being a tourist are ambivalent. That is, while I like to look at cities (and natural reserves, &c.) in other countries to see how people live there, I feel that there is something a little false about looking at towns that have been preserved as in amber: I prefer being a tourist interacting with a living environment to being a tourist seeking to recreate the pictures on postcards. I had been to one fort, as a child in elementary school, and two historical cities, Konstantinovo and one outside of Perm, the name of which I have forgotten, prior to coming to Rothenburg. In all three instances I felt that I had been more deeply informed about something. The fort stirred my imagination about life on the frontiers of Canada; the town outside of Perm was made completely of wood and showed me what towns in Russia in past centuries looked like; and Konstantinovo, the trip to which was the worst of the three, taught me what it meant to be a Russian tourist and showed me the environs in which Sergey Yesenin, my favorite poet, grew up. Since all three of the aforementioned trips had value despite being unequivocally touristy, I was able to fairly quickly overcome my misgivings about having gone to Rothenburg, a city which I decided, when I got there, would not be worth the time that it took to see it.

 

 

As I started off in the direction of Rothenburg's historic city center, an older woman told me that I was going the wrong way and recommended that I see the "criminal museum," or something like that - she did not know its name in English, and, as I had gotten a map in German from the tourist office in case I had to ask a local for directions, I also did not know what it would be called, though I divined (incorrectly) that it was a museum of torture instruments, as I thought that I remembered having read about some such museum in Rothenburg. Given the time constraints of this post, I will write strictly about that very museum.

Rather, I will write about something else first: Rothenburg has free bathrooms! It is only the second German city, the first being Bonn, that I have visited that has had at least one free bathroom (Rothenburg had several). For this it deserves the highest praise.

I was just as skeptical of the "criminal museum" (written all in one word, as is the German way) as I was of Rothenburg itself when I entered it: I feared that I was doing something needlessly touristy and throwing away my money by visiting it. I quickly discovered, though, that the museum was much larger and all-encompassing than I had thought: it was a museum of Germany's legal history. It was full of all sorts of old legal documents, instruments of torture, descriptions of punishments for crimes, official court seals, and so on, and so forth, and it gave me some new insights into medieval jurisprudence. It seems to me that the word of law, until the 19th century, was fickle and arbitrary; that one could be tried for a crime at any moment for more or less no reason and then convicted of it; that legal proceedings were incredibly draconian and involved an unfathomably-large bureaucracy; and that, while most laws were designed to allow the rich to suppress the poor, some of them, such as those relating to sanitation, were designed to help even the poor (though, ultimately, it was in the interests of the rich to help them; the rich could not stay rich if the poor all died of disease). I left the museum with little other than these vague impressions, a mass of facts in my head (such as that an unmarried man's touching an unmarried woman's hand resulted in a fine), and the knowledge that one of the popes was known for working extremely had to improve the lot of the poor and that people complained enough about the cruelty of legal practice in the 18th century that, by around the end of the 19th century, torture was no longer a codified part of legal proceedings. I also learned a lot about class structure - people were not allowed to wear clothes that reflected a different class from the one to which they belonged - misogyny, public shaming, and all sorts of other related things. My interest in medieval history has been sparked, as there were so many punishments for so many different types of crimes that one wonders how people ever got on with their daily lives - everyone must either have been in a torture chamber, in jail, or dead! I am sure that the laws as they were written down were, for pragmatic or selfish reasons, not always practiced as they were supposed to be.

That more or less covers my journal entry for now, I think. I have noticed that Germans are punctilious about recycling (Did I mention this already?)... I have to get up at around 7:45 tomorrow (I admit that this is not so bad; many people get up earlier than that for work.) to catch a train to Dinkelsbuhl. I can always go to Weimar when I am in Leipzig if I want to make up for having missed out on learning more about the Nuremberg trials and Nazi rallies, though, having seen Dachau and Auschwitz, I probably already have a decent grasp of the course of Nazi history. I regret having booked too few days in Nuremberg less every time I step into this abysmal hostel. I only have one more night here after this one!

I forgot to mention having bumped into the woman who recommended that I visit the criminal museum in the criminal museum itself and having chatted with some Russian tourists who were delighted that I was working on translations and wished me all of life's joys and the best of luck with my translations as we parted ways. Also, my sole roommate last night was a classical flutist from England who had bought a 3-month rail pass for all of Europe and was going to auditions in different German cities, in addition to travelling. One meets interesting people on these trips!

This is a view of part of the city from the side.

Day 14 - Bamberg

I am a little tired, but I doubt that this post will be any shorter than usual. Almost every time I expect to watch a movie in the evening and unwind, something seems to come up. Today, I had seen so much of Bamberg by midafternoon that I had planned to even do a little work back in the hostel, but time flew, I came back home and had dinner, and, having relaxed at my computer for a few minutes, I suddenly found that it was 8:00 PM.

I forgot to mention a few things about Nuremberg in my last post. Firstly, I forgot its smell: for some reason or other, parts of the city smell like excrement, especially in the neighborhood of the old city wall. This might have to do with the Germans' having improperly disposed of waste until the invention of indoor plumbing, though that seems unlikely, as much of the city was raised in World War II, and all of its sewage should have gone the way of all of its old buildings. It is possible that I have had the misfortune of being too near to garbage trucks a couple of times, but it seems unlikely that that would have happened enough for an impression of the city's rank odor to stick with me. Perhaps I should attribute the smell to recent gardening projects involving large amounts of fertilizer.

Before I forget to do so, I should mention that Germans are, at least in big cities, very punctilious about recycling, of which Russia, for example, has never even heard. The issue of big cities is on my mind a bit: I am wondering, given that I have mostly seen big cities, if I am getting a bit of a skewed perspective of German society. One thing that has struck me is that Germany appears to discuss its past societal misdoings much more openly than, say, the United States or Canada, but I am probably wrong. While it seems to me that black and Middle Eastern German immigrants are not made to feel different from native German citizens, I bet that some people, when interacting with blacks in the United States, feel the weight of 200 years of systematic oppression in the eyes of their interlocutors. This is probably too strong and too general a statement, and it may have been much more true thirty or forty years ago than it is today, but one cannot help thinking, given the number of synagogues now in Germany (again, in the big cities) and the number of sculptures and memorials devoted to victims of the Holocaust, that Germans discuss their racist past more openly than Americans or Canadians. Again, this may be untrue, as Canadians learn a great deal in school about interactions between white pioneers and the indigenous peoples of North America in the 16th through the early-20th centuries, yet teachers of Canadian history do not seem to bluntly acknowledge that the native peoples were massacred and unsuccessfully forced to assimilate, and while there may be monuments here and there in celebration of the emancipation of the slaves and the Civil Rights Movements in the United States, I wonder how much deeper appreciation for the wrongs committed against blacks in the United States goes than recognition of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

The reason for my making these generalizations is probably twofold: first, I have not seen too many historically-rich cities (Richmond, Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, &c.) in the United States, so I am mostly comparing the cream of the crop of German cities to the fairly average American cities that I have seen; secondly, I have not seen too many average German cities. In fact, not having been educated in the United States (for very long), I cannot say for sure what children learn in school or the types of views that they espouse about racism and racial equality. The only way to redress past wrongs is to ensure that they are not repeated, and the only way to do that involves studying them. It is clear that the German people do not live in guilt over what they did seventy years ago, and I am sure that no more than a few of them on any given day think of the fact that large parts of many of the cities that I have been seeing were destroyed, or at least attacked, in World War II, and yet I wonder if an appreciation of the atrocities committed in World War II is nonetheless interwoven into their overarching societal worldviews. I have not, in my memory, seen any memorials for the Civil Rights Movement or, for that matter, very many synagogues in the United States, yet I have seen a synagogue in most of the German cities that I have visited without even having to leave their historic centers, and I have seen multiple monuments honoring the Jews killed during World War II, including a very prominent one near the heart of Nuremberg's city center.

I got a little sidetracked in my comments, and I do not mean to make Germany seem like the center of the world and the greatest country ever created, yet it often seems to me more culturally advanced than any other place that I have seen. The train station at Nuremberg not only has little bumps and tracks allowing the blind to get around; it even has a whole map of the train station written in Braille at its very entrance! I am sure that Germany has political and social problems, like any country, but it appears, at least on the surface, to have very few of them.

My final point about Nuremberg is that there are tons of Russians here. Now that I have gotten my allergies more under control by using more and different antihistamines, I think that Nuremberg would be a city in which one could live.

 

My trip to Bamberg was notable for two key events, but I refuse to divulge them just yet. I have not written many anecdotes of late, and this seemed like an opportune time for one. While my German skills are improving day-by-day, they still leave a lot to be desired, and my linguistic failings came in to play both today and yesterday. When I was on the train going from Stuttgart to Nuremberg, a woman said a whole lot of words at once on the intercom partway through the train ride. Usually, when one hears a torrent of words, it means that it is time to get off. Unfortunately, we were at a tiny stop that could not possibly be Nuremberg. As we approached our destination, I tried to ask one of the so-called "controllers," or people who go up and down the aisles to check one's ticket, if the train was going all of the way to Nuremberg, but I could not understand her reply, as she probably tried to explain what was going to happen (that there would be a short break in this other city). When I should have checked the section of my  phrasebook headed "transportation" and tried to find the ready phrase asking if I had to transfer trains, I instead scrambled to find useful words at the back of my phrasebook, which is a little dictionary. I tried saying such things as "I go?" and "Can I sit here?", but I could not successfully get my point across. I asked multiple times if the train was going to Nuremberg, and the controller was able to sufficiently reassure me that I stopped asking her questions.

Today my experience was a little different, as my problems started right from the get-go. At this point I need to interrupt my narration: whenever you want to buy rail tickets in Germany, do it in the ticket office, with a human being, as often as possible. I was told in Cologne that it was cheaper to buy them from the machines than from people, as a result of which I probably saved a Euro once or twice but then bought an over-priced two-way ticket that did not actually include my fare back (to Frankfurt). Today, when I tried to buy a ticket to Bamberg, I discovered that the machine was only offering one-way tickets for 10 Euros and change. When I went to the ticket booth (after a short wait; I read a book), I was given a two-way ticket for only 16 Euros and some number of cents. I resent that I was given such bad advice in Cologne, but I am happy that I only followed it for a few days.

I had no problem getting a ticket to and from Bamberg, and I even managed to do it in German, but I got worried when I reached the platform from which my train would be departing; it said "zug [train] in Bamberg wird; geteilt," or something to that effect. "The train gets weird in Bamberg; get out" did not strike me as a welcoming invitation to the city, though one could interpret it to mean that getting out at Bamberg, which was scheduled as one of the stops, would be advantageous, a claim that would suit my needs just fine. I asked the woman sitting next to me, who was in her 60s, if the train was going to Bamberg, and she replied affirmatively. When I said, "What is 'wird'? What is 'geteilt," she told me that Bamberg was very beautiful. I replied, "Why is writes "in Bamerg wird; geteilt?", and she apologized, admitting that she did not know. I asked her once or twice more if it was going to Bamberg, as I have a phobia of getting on the wrong train, and was, like the previous time, assured that everything would be fine.

My visit to Bamberg was delightful: the weather was, for the first time in two weeks, tolerable; the city had an even more medieval feel to it than Nuremberg; and the historical parts of town were easy to navigate, although, like Nuremberg, Bamberg had a dearth of crosswalks. Unlike Nuremberg, which has so few cars in the city center that people manage by jaywalking, Bamberg also had fairly poor sidewalks in some areas - the roads were so narrow that cars sometimes drove onto the sidewalks, and the sidewalks themselves often trailed off into the road, as though they had dissolved. The city's churches were curious: several of them had no stained glass windows whatsoever. Their ceilings were different, too: some were unadorned, others decorated with the curved arches that I saw in Polish churches, and one or two constructed with a honeycomb crisscross of pieces of different arches, such as I saw in Strasbourg. The level of adornment of churches' interiors varied, as well: some were austere, while others were over-the-top sumptuous, with bulky statues containing gold and even marble abutting their supporting pillars. When I say "statues" here, I mean statues that, like bookcases, could be taken in and out of the church: separate pieces from the church itself. When statues are engraved in the church's columns or walls, I tend to see them as pious, while, when they are made separately and stuck on to the columns, walls, or altar, I see them as idolatrous of invidious wealth.

Bamberg attracted a lot of Russian tourists, including some who were part of a wedding party. The two important events of which I meant to write were, I think, that I got tired of eating pastries and that I went shopping. The first of these points deserves especial attention, as it has a detailed backstory. (The second event was that I bought more strawberries - oops.)

My history of eating German pastries goes back to my very first day in the country. Rather than cover it in detail, I will present you with a synopsis of it: pastries are cheap; pastries fill one up; pastries are delicious; pastries give one a taste of local cuisine; pastries can often be bought in conjunction with milk or, less commonly, high-quality juice; pastries can be eaten on the run; pastries take no time to prepare from the point of purchase. All of these factors combine to make them a very tempting food to eat during travel. During the middle of the day - that is, until I have already seen a whole city - I have next to no desire for a sit-down meal. The Russians have a proverb by which I abide during my travels (and should abide in day-to-day life): do your work and then relax. The work of travelling is to explore new cities; the relaxing part is to sit down to a meal. At least, that is how I see it. To sit down and have lunch at a café each day would not only be more expensive than eating at bakeries; it would also be more time-consuming, and one cannot very well enjoy one's meal when a new city is calling out to be explored. If I could make myself ordinary lunches and grab a pastry here or there as a treat, as I do with ice cream, then I would be content, but, alas, perishable foods are not convenient on the road (i.e., when one changes cities every day or two), and lunches made of non-perishable foods are non-trivial to make if one factors in the procurement of their base components. Buying and eating pastries, by contrast, takes no effort.

There is a problem with buying and eating pastries, though: it makes one fat and does not furnish one with a very wide range of vitamins, minerals, and proteins. I had, until yesterday, been eating well-balanced breakfasts at hostels, milk and pastries (or, if they looked any good, sandwiches, but those are often less attractive and more expensive than pastries) for lunch, and reasonably-healthy restaurant food for dinner. Yesterday, that trend ended, as I did not want to pay 4 Euros for breakfast and knew of a bakery around the corner. (I forgot to mention that I would often buy fresh fruit at local grocery stores and would occasionally buy ice cream in the afternoon.) The turning point in my habits might have been my accidentally buying a croissant-based sandwich that appeared to me to be made of regular bread. When I bought a couple of pastries of types that I had not tried before today, I decided that my spree of eating pastries had to end.

Two main considerations of logistics swayed my decision to change my eating habits for the rest of this trip. (Plus a third consideration: I have now tried most types of German pastries and am not dead-set on trying them all.) One consideration is that I will have access to a fridge for the next few days; the second consideration is that one can make decent lunches made of non-perishable foods if one can find, for example, decent canned meats or spreads that will more or less last. While I was not keen on the idea of carrying peanut butter and jam around with me across all of Europe, I have realized that I could buy something like cream or cream cheese and simply store it in successive hostels for the few days that it would take to consume it. Each hostel in which I have stayed (I think) has had a fridge; my reluctance to buy perishable goods was a product of my not wanting to have to take them on the train with me, as I was under the implicit impression that such goods could not leave the fridge once they had been in it - I was thinking in terms of finishing them over the course of a given hostel stay (and I also was not yet tired of eating pastries). The fact that cheese will not go bad if it is out of the refrigerator for a few hours, as long as one consumes it within a few days, opens up a whole range of opportunities to me, and the suggestion that I buy dried fruit will enable me both to always have a source of fruit at hand, and to eat boring foods, such as plain yogurt, with more alacrity.

My first shopping trip was probably a failure because I stepped into an organic foods store (it was the closest one on hand; I was lured in by its 99-cent, 500-ml bottles of fizzy apple juice), and because, in the interests of parsimony and maximum salubrity, I bought painfully-boring foods. This time around, I decided to buy a variety of non-disgusting yet healthy foods, and I ended up paying only 10.34 Euros, roughly the cost of one Euro, for enough food to last me for several days. I realized that one barrier to buying food at the grocery store was that one does not want to cook it, yet it takes just as much time for a chef to prepare one's food as it takes to cook it oneself. I had a dinner of strawberries, tortellini, and peas, and I even had the pleasure of watching a quartet of young Chinese women make the kitchen their own. By this I mean not that they hogged the kitchen, but that they started cooking - at least, as far as I could tell - as though they were back home; this interested me because I make no effort to replicate a home environment or home cooking when I am travelling. The women had gotten some rice noodles at an Asian market and were cooking something involving garlic, lettuce, red onions, multi-step preparation of the noodles that sloughed off their outer covering of starch, and other ingredients, I am sure, that I did not stick around to see. I was fascinated by their swooping into the kitchen as a team and immediately setting to work, each woman handling a different task, as though they worked at a restaurant.

I have two more points to cover, the first of which is that I bought more strawberries today despite yesterday's misadventure. I can justify my choice easily: the vendors were not like cormorants waiting to pick off unsuspecting tourists, and the strawberries were less than half of the cost of the ones that I got yesterday. It turned out that my mistake yesterday was, predictably, to consider buying anything at all at a market in the center of Nuremberg, as everything sold there is bound to be overpriced. The market in Bamberg was an honest market, by which I mean one at which ordinary, sane people - locals - would buy goods. I got some very good strawberries for only 2 Euros at the market (I am key on strawberries because they are high on antioxidants, and because one has to go to Richmond or the Okanagan to get good ones back home.) and had a very pleasant exchange with the vendor in which I explained that I was from Canada. I also bought four peaches at a local grocery store for just over a Euro and plan to finish them tomorrow; fruits, it turns out, are not so hard to come by when one is travelling as I expected. I should make them one of the centerpieces one my new healthy eating plan (and cannot believe that I did not think of this earlier), especially as they do not spoil too easily within a day or two of purchase.

I think that one source of resistance inside me to buying fruits was that I was having the worst allergies that I had had in recent memory until today, when I started to get them more under control (by switching from Claritin to Reactine in the mornings and taking two Benadryls twice per day, in the afternoons and evenings). The idea of worsening by allergies by eating raw fruits or vegetables did not appeal to me. I did not want things that I had to peel, as I saw that as too much trouble (as I am accustomed to peeling fruit with a knife; while not a necessary procedure, it is part of my subconscious); I was too fixated on maximal convenience. I wish that there were options other than donairs/shawarmas (Turkish wraps) for quick, handy meals in Germany, but, so far, I have not found any alternative between the extrema of eating at restaurants and eating at bakeries, not counting my new-found initiative to make my own lunches. (I am sure that my not having free breakfasts at the hostel, and therefore not seeing lunch as a mere stopgap between breakfast and dinner, has partly influenced my decision, as has the monotony of always eating the same basic things.)

 

 

In short, I have a new food plan, and coming up with one is very difficult when one travels as I do (jumping from place to place, rather than staying in one city for days at a time).It is funny both that I came up with this soon before it would become temporarily irrelevant, as I am about to visit a friend's parents for several days, and that I was so shocked by everything's cheapness in the grocery store. In fact, paying around a dollar for a dollar for a small loaf of bread, 1 dollar (i.e., a Euro) for a liter of milk, and $1.39 (or thereabouts) for a largish can of peas is not even that good a deal, but the price of groceries is so negligible compared to the price of prepared food that even over-priced groceries can surprise one.

I am eager to end this post, take a shower, and go to bed, and I might need to shave (I have to look in the mirror.). Unfortunately, I have not yet told you a thing about the people whom I have met on this trip. In Heidelberg, I met a girl from Texas who admitted that Houston was too much of a metropolis to be part of the South, and who knew a great deal about African safaris. In Stuttgart, I met a man in his early 30s from Melbourne who, like me, made lists of places on earth to see and, having crossed them off, did not return to them. His having similar travelling habits to mine made me feel less insane for doing things this way (and for having such a long list). Finally, last night I shared a room with a young man from Taiwan who taught special education classes. While his English was far from fluent, it is a lot better than most people's second languages, I should think, and I enjoyed talking to him. It is notable that there were only two of us in the six-person room (and it appears that I will only have one roommate tonight): this place must not be that popular.

I am now off to perform my ablutions! I guess that I fell in love with high-falutin language in this post; the desire to use big words sometimes overtakes me. I would take advantage of being alone in the room to do some push-ups and other basic exercises, but I already did some this morning, and I am no longer feeling so energetic. I figure to lose a pound or two by switching to a no-bakery diet for the following week and restricting my intake of baked goods thereafter; and, while I do not know what kind of shopping options await me in the Czech Republic, I am sure that I will find a way to eat reasonably there.

Goodbye for now!

That is Bamberg's castle in the distance!