The Rhine

North of Stuttgart and east of Frankfurt are the Cities of the Rhine. The Rhine is a very long river and many cities line its banks, but this particular segment is very popular for German tourists. It's easy to see why. The Rhine is a slow river about 200 meters wide, gently winding through a narrow valley it has worn away from the surrounding hills. The hills that flank it are steep and high, striped everywhere with vineyards and dotted with a castle atop a high perch every few kilometers. With few exceptions, below each castle lies a sleepy town that wakes up for a scant few hours each day to welcome visitors, then returns to its quiet inert state.

The particular town I stayed in is Bacharach, named after Bacchus, and thus appropriately produces some good wine, but not much else. The sights are few, a temple ruin, a church; but the defining point of interest is its hostel. How cool is this hostel? Well, it's a frikkin' castle! Situated high above the town, the hostel requires a steep 15-minute climb to reach it, but its unique characteristics certainly make it worth the effort.

Bacharach is connected to other cities of the Rhine by a dock, from which ferries collect passengers a few times a day and carry them up or down the river. The absence of English on any information signs pushed me to just pick a city to visit by sight alone. The cruise downriver was relaxing, though, with interesting things pointed out by automated recordings.

I jumped off at St. Goar with its massive castle being a visible standout. Castle Rheinfels gives its visitors unprecedented freedom to explore all its nooks and crannies. Besides the outer walls and inner courtyards and towers, the pitch black interior corridors and mining tunnels were open. Spelunking through them with flashlight in hand is a spooky experience as the throughways are very cramped and the undressed stones sharp. Imagine climbing a tight spiral staircase with a claustrophobic four foot ceiling, forcing your to crouch, in total darkness and muffled silence, having no idea where it will lead, and not being able to see around the corner. I was glad I was carrying four lights on me.

Castle Katz was nearby and I tried to get to that, but to no avail; it was private property so I guess you can own one of these. Note to self: when I get rich, buy a German castle. The cruise back to Bacharach was immensely pleasant with the temperature just right and the low-lying sun putting the Rhine into a new light. Evening at the hostel was pleasant as well with a choir group practicing in the courtyard and everyone enjoying Bacharach wine.

Tomorrow I cruise south to Mainz for half a day, the last city I visit in Germany before leaving for southern France.

Stuttgart

Today on my way to Stuttgart, I went to the reservation office at the train station to reserve my next few trips. There, I made an interesting discovery. If you reserve multiple train trips at once, the reservation fee becomes about 10 times cheaper than doing it separately. I will have to plan out the remainder of my trips then and reserve them now, way ahead of time.

Stuttgart is a busy city. The main walkway through the downtown is stuffed full of people throughout the day and everyone walks at a slower pace than you would like. The central parks are littered with people just sitting around, despite this being the middle of the work day.

Stuttgart is home to the Staadts gallery, a collection of modern art. I went mainly to see the Salvador Dali collection they advertise as having, but to my disappointment they only had one painting by him on display. A large portion of the museum was given over to Picasso and Matisse, and I did like Picasso's non-surreal work where he doesn't depict people like flatfish. However, this gallery was quite small and didn't take long to get through. Another lesson of the day: if a museum asks you what kind of student you are, the correct answer is "art".

On to the highlight of Stuttgart, for me anyway, the Mercedes-Benz museum. The museum is a piece of art in itself, a large cylinder without separate floors but instead a long spiral winding its way down the interior. Upon entering, you receive an ipod-like audioguide with a large LCD that displays audio track options. At any exhibit, you can choose between hearing about fundamental, technical, or social aspects of it. The museum was totally redone in 2006 and it sure is sharp and nicely presented. I spent a very long time here and by the end was ready to call it a day.

Tomorrow I leave the Stuttgart area to travel north to the Rhine cities.

Ludwigsburg

Right now I'm staying in a small city outside of Stuttgart called Ludwigsburg. It's named after King Ludwig, who was kinda nuts and built a huge palace here modeled after Versailles and used to have salt put on the ground so that he could drive his sled when there wasn't any snow.

But the palace is pretty darn cool. During the tour we walked 1.5 km through the halls from room to room. That's nearly a mile without backtracking and we only saw half of the place. Of course, every room was decorated, although not too ostentatiously. It is the main and probably only tourist attraction in Ludwigsburg. The rest of the town is quaint, with a main street lined with little shops and a central plaza with a prostestant church opposite a catholic. This was the Monday after Easter Sunday and there were decorations EVERYWHERE. Easter is a pretty big affair here with colored eggs decorating miniature trees like christmas ornaments or lights. They get a 4-day holiday for it too.

Also in a Ludwigsburg city park, they have some old Roman ruins, mainly the foundation stones of a Roman estate, some stone stellae, a long Roman road, and a little bit of the north Roman wall. The wall used to stretch a very long distance across the northern border of Rome, kind of like the Great Wall of China, but instead of functioning to keep the Mongolian-like Gauls out, it was more to mark their territory.

Later in the day, I went to a historical town called Marbach. It's kept largely in the same appearance it had a few centuries ago with windy uneven stone-paved roads, old village-style half-timber house architecture, and a city wall surrounding it. While walking through, a group of kids playing soccer in the street offered to give us a tour of a section of the wall. The owner of this section of the wall (houses are built into the wall) gives the kids a key so that in good weather they can show tourists in exchange for tips. The wall contained a guard tower with a toilet being just a hole in the outside wall and a deep pit at the base where they keep witches, as translated by holding a crooked finger up to the nose.

In another part of Marlbach there was a retired Mercedes-Benz mechnaic who spoke extremely good English and was restoring what looked like a circa-1900 Chevrolet. He also had a stable converted into a small brewery with a large copper drum for heating and a separate room for fermentation.

Tomorrow I go to Stuttgart.

Picture post

A view of downtown Munich from outside

During the day, accordianists come out to play, giving the place a baroque feel.

Müncheners just chilling

Just something to put in the middle of a roundabout

The national theater

An urban side street

The prison block of a concentration camp, so a jail within a jail. You can bet anyone in here was doing hard time.

A gas chamber

They were pretty serious about keeping people in

Patroness Bavaria, made from the cannons of sunken ships

A typical biergarten beer garden. Note the playground in back. Fun for the whole family!

The city hall rathaus and its glockenspiel

The gothic Frauenkriche is huge and made out of bricks.

Museums

One of the things I like most about Munich is the consideration the city gives to bicyclists. In Munich, the roads are narrow and the sidewalks are wide. There are many areas in which cars are prohibited. However, bicyclists get their own lane everywhere. On the sidewalk, there is a separate lane for bicyclists, sometimes painted red, sometimes marked by a different asphalt pattern, but that lane is THEIRS. Don't even try walking in that lane. Any bicycler in sight will ring their bells at you telling you to get out. And there are a lot of bicyclers. Every railing in the city has bikes locked to it or even just placed next to it. There are people riding around at all times of day. In the U.S., you usually only see bikers wearing those racing outfits, biking around for the exercise. But here they actually use bicycles for transportation. From old people transporting groceries to young people commuting to work.

Anyways, after a short night's sleep (this guy from brazil was a snorer), I got up early and went to check out the Oktoberfest grounds. Not much to see at this time of year, just a really large empty lot. But Patroness Bavaria was there as well, sculpted from the metal of cannons retrieved from sunken ships. Today I was leaving Munich to travel to Stuttgart, so next I stopped by the train station to pick up a train ticket. One of the unfortunate things about the train system here is nothing is in english, even crucial instructions that you need to follow such as stamping your ticket are only in german. But, one type of automated ticket dispenser does have a language select, and after choosing the parameters of your trip it tells you the cheapest ticket you can buy to get there.

As soon as the museums opened, I was there. I saw two of the three Pinakothek museums (1 Euro Sunday does exist!), the old museum (middle ages to 18th century) and the new museum (18th and 19th century). I didn't have time for the audio guide, and little did I know the names and descriptions were all in german, but it wasn't too hard to figure out what I was looking at. In the old museum especially, about 90% of the paintings were about one of five things: the birth of Christ, his crucifiction, dogs or lions hunting a boar, still life involving flowers or food, and portraits of rich people. I think I need more education to appreciate it, which I will hopefully gain later in the trip.

Next I went to the Residenz, the former residence and center of power of the Bavarian kings. Bavaria is southern Germany. It was a huge palace with every room decorated by frescoes on every available wall and gold wooden scrollwork covering anything that wasn't painted. Quite fancy. The tour culminates in the great hall, supposedly the largest and most grandiose renaissance hall north of the Alps. Even the decorations had decorations.

With that, I concluded my stay in Munich, leaving on a four hour train trip to Stuttgart. Munich was really a great city with a lot of character. Walking around at night felt perfectly safe and the metro system can take you anywhere once you figure it out.

P.S. I hope pictures will be forthcoming in a future post. The internet connection I had in Munich was barely sufficient to check email.

Dachau

It's taken me 24 hours, but I think I got the hang of Munich. Well, everything but the trains. Imagine a train station with 36 different tracks leading into it. And that's not counting the S-Bahn, the newer intercity train system, and the U-Bahn, the old underground system, all using that same train station for a hub. To call it confusing would be to understate it to such a degree that it actually becomes criminal. My shoulders hurt too from walking around with my big heavy pack trying to find the hostel yesterday.

One canadian guy I'm staying with just came back from two weeks in the middle east. He had a plane out of Israel today, but since it's the Sabbath, there was no public transportation and he had to walk ten miles to the airport. While this may or may not be an exaggeration, it is possible that he was able to do this because he fit everything that lasted him that long into a regular school backpack. Meanwhile my filled travel pack with all my junk weighs 40 pounds. I think I brought too much stuff. I brought 5 changes of clothes. Ridiculous! Turns out each change is good for at least a couple days.

Anyways, today I managed to score both a cell phone number and some cash by redeeming a traveller's cheque, so I'm ready to roll for the rest of my trip. The way phones work here is it's free to receive calls from same-country phones, but not free to receive or send a call while outside the country. And since calling cards and Skype both use local lines, my Germany number is available for communication from the U.S.

On the sightseeing front, today I took a daytrip by train outside of Munich to Dachau, the site of the infamous first concentration camp upon which all concentration camps were based. I went there only expecting to stay a few hours, but ended up spending the whole day there until they closed. The place is huge, and well upkept with lots of interesting exhibits and original buildings. During its operation, the site had over 30 long dormitories, a prison building as long as two dormitories (about a fifth of a mile!), and two crematoriums. The prison was very cold and dark inside and is basically a narrow hall with cells as large as a standard bedroom on either side for the entire length of the building. In constrast, the dormitories were very hot and stuffy, even without them being actually occupied. They were divided into four segments with each segment containing a bunk room, crammed full with triple bunks, and a locker room. Ironically, the crematoriums sat in a very idyllic setting with well-manicured lawns and flora surrounding it. There was also a gas chamber at the site for "liquefying" lots of people at once, as they put it, but it was never used because they already had more bodies than they could deal with. Anyways, a very interesting site that not only showed the conditions of detainees, but also elaborated on the reasons why the Nazis came to power as well. They didn't pull any punches in describing what had happened, they even showed graphic images and film that probably wouldn't have been shown in the states. Anyways, truly an educational and historic site.

Going back to Munich, I explored the rest of the city (since all the museums close at 5, but daylight lasts until about 8:30). There's a large river flowing through the city called the Isar, flanked by strips of rocks without any grass or sand. But still, a large number of people congregate around the river, either picnicking on a blanket or just sitting around in groups. I suppose that if there were a river like that where we live maybe people would just go there and sit as well, but I highly doubt they would in such numbers.

Tomorrow will be a museum day.

Arrival

Well, I made it to Munich safe and sound, no thanks to the two stops I had to make in London and Zurich. After the initial confusion of figuring out Munich's train system (not much english instruction), I made it to the hostel and got a bed. After a little what-the-heck-am-I-doing-here panic, I set about trying to get both a SIM card for my cell phone and a train ticket to Madrid, my next destination. Those plans failed catastrophically.

It turns out today happens to be a holiday in Munich, so most all stores were closed. The ticket reservation counters were open, however. I planned out how I was going to get to Spain weeks in advance. I knew what trains I was going to use, I knew what exact time I wanted to go, and I had hostels booked to stay in for when I got there. But fate had other ideas. Every single train going into Spain was completely full. The poor ticketing assistant was searching through the database for over half an hour looking for SOME WAY to get to Spain in the next few days. Unfortunately there were none. So...uh oh. All the hostels I had booked for later this week are in Spain, and I can't get to any of them. I have to cut Spain completely out of my schedule for now, and add it back again later.

Perhaps it was the folly of overplanning that made my needs so rigid, or perhaps it was the benefit that enabled me to quickly organize a new plan on the spot, and book a train ticket to southern France instead. I'll go to Spain towards the end of the trip, I hope.

I walked through most of the city tonight, but I'll talk about it later. Right now I'm so tired my eyes feel hot. Like starting to sting/burn from staying awake too much. An-zzzzzz..