Gottingen :: Germany
Where I try to remember the entries I deleted. This is a break from the normal continuity, and may differ from what was originally here. I´m an idiot.
Places: Brugge, Luxemourg, Koblenz, Mainz, Baden-Baden & Freiberg
Coolest thing I did: Worked my way down the 'on tap' menu of a Belgian bar.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: The very idea of pension funds was invented by Otto Von Bismark during the First Reich. Before that old people had to be looked after by their kids.
Brugges, it turns out, is quite a cool place to visit. Despite the fact that all the cobbled streets and old buildings are obviously there for the tourists, the place has a relaxed feel, and people don´t mind wasting time having a chat with you. Some places I´ve been, you get death stares the second you finish your coffee and don´t leave the cafe. In Brugges, they don´t seem to even care whether you buy anything or not. The place itself is quite ye olde, as one would expect. The parallels to Venice are all there (they even have picturesque canals and everything), but it does feel a bit less of a Belgian theme park than Venice did an Italian one. For one thing, I could afford to do all the touristy stuff and actually stay in town.
To properly do the tourist thing in Belgium, you realy need to do 3 things: beer, mussels and waffles. At one point, I even had all three in the same meal.
The place I stayed in was a bunch of dorm rooms over a resteraunt (very much like the place we stayed in at my first Oktoberfest for all those who participated in that week of debauchery) and the bar below serverd as a good point for meeting up with people. This was helped by the free beer with your meal if you ate there. Man, here is a landlord that knows his target market.
My best night out involved myself, four Americans and a Candian. We went to a bar the yanks had frequented the night before that boasted a menu of 350 beers. The best thing about Belgian beer is every beer they have, regardless of whether it´s on tap or in a bottle, comes with it´s own glass. One of the best ones was a free standing conical flask in a wooden stand. I didnt try that actual one, but I was assured it was good (hey, they were all good). Myself and one of the other blokes decided to work our way through the on-tap menu, not taking into account such things as volume of liquid or percentage alcohol. This, in Belgium, can be dangerous. I was overjoyed with the world a mere fifteen euros later, but some of my new friends were a bit more than that. The conversation turned to those old goodies: politics, religeon, the environment and NASCAR racing. My knowledge of engines in cubic inches isn´t that crash hot, so I had to leave it there. Still, much fun had by all.
Do have the waffles with icecream. They are really, really good.
Whist taking a walk through town, you see a whole lot of buildings and gates with dates in the late 40s on them. You forget that just half a century ago, there was German artilery bombarding the place and tanks parked on all those cobbled streets. If you can fix things in half a century this well, perhaps places we´re currently bombing into the stone age have a chance.
So, it was then over the border to the first of those little historical curios no one can figure out why they still exist: Luxembourg.
Luxembourg City is quite an impressive thing to behold. It stands on top of three sheer bluffs looking over two river valleys. It has, surprisingly, also been occupied by almost every foreign power it borders on at one time or another. I can´t imagine taking the place was something you´d want even on your best day if you were a seige engineer or something like that. At the turn of the century, the Luxembourgers went all neuteral and decided to dismantle all their fortifications.
The modern place is something else. I´ve since discovered that they managed to make themselves rich through mineral deposits after WWII and then through banking since that became less lucrative. The streets are filled with designer boutiques, rich, goodlooking people and very expensive German cars. As a result, it´s got a very different feel to the other Benelux countries. For one thing, Luxembourg has an amazingly sophisticated nightlife compared to other cities of that size. I thought it might be a mistake to be stuck there in mid-week, but I managed to find a couple of nice grungy student cafes and a cool DJ bar. The DJ had impecable taste in beats and hip hop, something else I didn´t expect.
The view from the ramparts of the old city whilst the sun goes down over the valleys below is something worth going for alone. Whilst I´d never recommend someone spend more than a couple of days here, it did make a good buffer between Belgium and Germany.
So I crossed the border to a place called Koblenz. I knew practicaly nothing about the place, except it´s the point where the Rhine and Moselle rivers meet. I learned soon that the hostel (Yugendherberge in German!) was based in the old fortress looking over the city. Whilst this is a very cool location, it´s also quite inconvinent. By the time I´d carted all my gear up the 15 minuite climb in the pre-storm conditions I probably looked alot like I´d just stepped out of a shower. However, watching an electrical storm move over the city below was well worth it. It´s been a long time since I´ve sat and watched a whole sunset, but with the sun mixing red hues into the black clouds covering it, it was something to behold. It´s a pity none of the pictures will probably come out.
So from Koblenz, I took a river boat to Mainz, much further down the Rhine. There is nothing like sitting on a sunny deck and drinking wine whilst you watch the vineyards that grew it pass you by. Along the 7 hour slow journey there are numerous villages, nearly all having a castle perched on the hillside above it. They are in various states of repair and ownership, but it does make for some excellent scenery. You do, however, get a bit blase about the whole thing once you´ve seen your 9th castle of the day, but I´d much rather that than go along thinking "was that it?". The boat also passes the Lorelei Cliffs, which are famous for having mermaids on them that caused the sailors to crash their boats into the cliffs. Any industry that encourages lots of drinking and then accepts mermaids as the cause of an accident needs to have a long hard look at itself. Perhaps I should start making legends about the network elves whenever the servers crash. Mermaids. Pffft!
So I continued onto Mainz, not because I knew what was there but because that´s where the boat went. Most people got off much earlier, which I should have taken as a sign. By the time we reached our final destination, it was just me, the barman and the crew. Mainz, isn´t exactly the tourist capital of Germany. I was nearly going to give it a miss and try and make it to Heidelberg that night, but the woman at the train station asked if I´d seen the Guttenberg Bible yet. This made me go miles out of town to stay at the always incovenient youth hostel and spend a night watching school kids run up and down hostel stairs. For some reason, school groups have been at every hostel I´ve stayed at in Germany.
The Guttenberg Bible is just an old book, but it´s quite important in what it represents. Before big J Guttenberg (as he was known to his mates) invented the printing press to churn out bibles, only the preisthood really could read and own then. After this, richer common people (the plebs still couldn´t read) could have them too. Then people got thinking more about this whole Catholisism caper. Then a bloke called Sisigmund (who was a holy roman emperor by trade) had another bloke called Huss killed because of this. Then a bloke called Luther nailed a few complaints about the Pope and some of his mates to a church door. Then some other stuff happended and at the end, Europe had defined borders for countries and a whole lot more people could read and choose what religion they liked. Besides that, it´s just an old book.
Once I´d done the one touristy thing in Mainz, I took off for Baden-Baden.
In Roman times, Baden-Baden was a kind of ritzy spa resort for rich people. Now...well now it´s a kind of rityz spa for rich people. As it´s got money involved, the town is in excellent condition and has been restored quite alot. The revival in it´s fortunes had already started when Mark Twain (Twaino to his mates) arrived here about a hundred years ago as a part of his book A Tramp Abroad (which comes up a bit, and which I haven´t read). I decided to take a Roman Irish spa, which takes place in the restored ruins on the original Roman site. I could have just had a dip in the new complex next door, but if it´s good enough for Twaino, it´s good enough for me.
I quickly learned, that the whole thing is done in the nude. While this shouldn´t bother me (I´m not that much of a prude) for some reason the fact that the first three people who I saw inside were fully clothed and female did get me a bit on edge. They explained to me what order I was supposed to go do things and then I was off. The first bit is all blokes, so you get kind of used to greeting and chatting to people without looking at their bratwurst as you go through the various rooms. The saunas are something else, as you can see the steam rising off the exposed rockface that covers two walls of each room. They tell me there are pipes underneath, but I´d like to think it was all natural. After this section, you get to the pools, which are shared with the ladies. Again, I did get a bit uptight at first and didn´t quite know where to look, but after a little while you figure out everyone else is naked and they don´t seem to care. Once you get this through your head, you can properly relax and enjoy the whole thing. By the end of the three allotted hours, I was so relaxed I could hardly walk.
So my final lost destination was Freiberg. I liked this town. It was an immaculately sunny day and all the students (about 45% of the town´s population) were sitting in the parks, cafes and beer gardens instead of going to class. I miss those days.
Instead of trying to tackle the Black Forest on my first day, I decided instead to indulge in such laziness myself. I found (or rather, Europe on a Shoestring found) a beer garden on the top of a hill overlooking the town. I spent a few hours here not doing much but watching the little people walk about below. I met quite a few students skiving off classes who were full of insights on life (and more willing to share them as the beer count mounted) and I felt the most properly relaxed I have on the whole trip.
And that´s been alot harder than I expected. Though I was enjoying my job towards the end of my time in London, after it became apparent I wasn´t going to stay, the whole thing felt a bit mercenary. I thought it would be easy to just wander the world as a man of leisure, doing what I pleased, but I´m finding it hard to just sit still these days. I feel like I should be doing something all the time, and it´s only quite recently that I´ve managed to let myself do very little. I´m trying to do this more, as 8 months is a long time to be always on the go. Hopefully when I stay with a few friends later on, I´ll be able to let myself relax a bit more.