Hanseatic Tour continued: Lübeck

The continuing account of our weekend trip to the northern German cities of Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck…

We arrived in Lübeck early Friday evening.  We stayed at the very nice and reasonably priced Hotel Lindenhof, which is conveniently located halfway between the train station and the Halstentor, and which we highly recommend.  The old part of Lübeck is located entirely on an island in the Trave River, and the Halstentor is one of the four original gates in the city wall.  It’s one of the iconic images of the city, the other being the seven huge church steeples rising from five medieval churches.  This is not a very big place… you can walk around in the island in an hour.  Why would any place need that many huge churches?

Friday evening and most of Saturday we just wandered around the city, where one street is cuter than the next.  We went into several of the churches as well as one of the oldest hospitals in Europe.  Like Bremen and Hamburg, Lübeck has a beautiful and elaborate city hall with a pub in the basement which has a funny story.  There is a little statue of a devil seated next to the nearby Mariankirche with this story:  When the people of Lübeck started to build the church (which is now one of the largest in the country), the devil thought it was going to be a drinking hall and pitched in on the construction effort.  The construction went quickly, until the devil realized the actual purpose of the building and tried to tear it down.  The people convinced him not to by promising to put the drinking establishment under the town hall next door.

We also stopped at Niederegger, world-renowned maker of marzipan for over 200 years, and stocked up on presents and a few things for ourselves.  Marzipan, if you aren’t familiar, is crushed almonds mixed with sugar into a kind  of soft paste that can be shaped and colored to look like little fruits and vegetables or animals or whatnot.  Joe got himself a little devil like the one outside the church and did eat it, but plain marzipan is a bit much and I find it infinitely better covered in chocolate.  A picture of me with the big devil is below.  Tune in tomorrow (or whenever our internet at home is fast enough) to watch Joe cavorting with his marzipan devil.

I was hoping to be able to take a boat trip down the river to Travemunde, a resort town belonging to Lübeck on the Baltic Sea.  Unfortunately, that will have to wait for the next trip, but we did take a boat tour through the harbor and around the island, which was a relaxing way to end the afternoon before heading back to Hamburg and the train home.

Halstentor

Amber under Halstentor

Salzspeicher

Bremen town hall

Amber and the devil

It just gets cuter and cuter

Houses built into old town wall

Pretty buildings

Germany’s first hospital

The local Presbyterian church

Enjoying some marpizan on a boat ride

Boat ride around the island

 

Pictures from Miniatur Wunderland

These are just a handful of the pictures we took at Miniatur Wunderland, the world’s biggest model train exhibit in Hamburg.  The lights cycle from day to dusk to night to dawn every 15 minutes.  There were so many charming details that you almost have to take eight million pictures.  A few of my favorites that aren’t here: the flying fairies, the dinosaurs in the zoo, the Sumo wrestling match in Scandinavia, the herd of cows including one purple spotted one a la Milka chocolate, the Sasquach, the snowman in the outhouse…

Gold mining camp

One of my favorites

See me on the other side of the tunnel?

Scandinavia

Several of the buildings burn down occasionally

Nope, this isn’t real either

Hard to believe this isn’t real, isn’t it?

Me in front of the control center, where they monitor all the trains

A labor strike

A dinosaur excavation

Outdoor concert

Las Vegas at night

The outside of the building

 

A Hanseatic Tour: Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck

Eons ago, way back in early June, I had a four day weekend because of Fronleichnam on June 11 (the Catholic holiday of Corpus Christi… or as one German tried to translate for me… “something to do with a dead body”).  Joe and I had to be home Sunday morning for the last week of Sunday school, but we took Thursday, Friday and Saturday to make a tour of the northern German Hanseatic cities of Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck.  The Hansa, or Hanseatic League, was a trading alliance of more-or-less independent cities from the 13th through the 17th centuries that stretched across northern Europe from London to St. Petersburg.  [Aside regarding Lufthansa Airlines:  When we first came to Germany, I was excited to recognize the first part of our airline's name as the German word for air.  On this trip, the rest of it made sense!  Maybe I am learning something about the language after all.]

Although the Hansa once encompassed more than a hundred cities, the three we visited were among the most powerful and longest standing members, and the only ones to retain the distinction as part of their official title.  Bremen and Hamburg style themselves as “Free and Hanseatic Cities” which I think is why they are independent states.  The only other city-state in Germany is Berlin.  Hamburg has made a modern name for itself as the second largest city in Germany and the second largest port in Europe, but the other two peaked, so to speak, in the Middle Ages, and are now beautifully preserved old cities.

Thursday morning we took the train north to Bremen, about 3.5 hours away.  The weather in Cologne wasn’t especially nice, and it got colder and wetter as we went north toward the sea.  We found Bremen to be a charming little city, despite being cold, wet and very windy.  In honor of Joe’s dad, we had lunch at the energie cafe, a restaurant run by the local power company from the ground floor of their headquarters.  Bremen has a fantastic old town hall, decorated in the black and red bricks common to northern Germany, and several big, old churches.  One of them has a charming garden with plants mentioned in the bible and a display of mummies, naturally preserved in the crypt’s dry air and on display for tourists for the last 300 years.  There is also a very big statue of Roland the friendly knight, the fantastical Art Nouveau alley known as Böttcherstraße where we heard the ceramic bells of the Glockenspiel, and the little Schnoor district of twisted lanes and tiny fisherman’s cottages currently inhabited by art galleries and other twee establishments.

Outside Germany, Bremen is probably best known from the Grimm Brother’s fairy tale of the Bremen Town Musicians, the story of the four farm animals who run away together to become musicians in the freedom-loving city of Bremen.  Along the way, they end up scaring off some robbers and settling down in the robbers’ former house, never actually arriving in Bremen, but that doesn’t stop the good folks of Bremen’s souvenir industry from putting the animals on every conceivable trinket.  We, of course, had to get a picture in front of the statue of them.  My favorite postcard from the trip, considering the weather we had, shows the same statue of the four standing on each other’s backs and outfitted in one cleverly-contrived raincoat.  For what it’s worth, Bremen is also the hometown of Robinson Crusoe’s father.

Another hour on the train took us to Hamburg, where we had the tourist office in the train station find us a hotel room (we felt very Bill Bryson).  Thursday evening we went out for a walk near the harbor, past what has to be the world’s largest statue of Otto von Bismark, and along the Reeperbahn, the street at the center of Europe’s largest red light district and the place where the Beatles got their career started.  We weren’t very impressed with that last bit, although Joe did get himself propositioned in the minute it took me to take a photo of the fancy police station.  I hadn’t even noticed the prostitutes until then, as it was really cold and they were all wearing winter jackets.  And I don’t have a lot of prostitute-spotting experience.

On Friday, our main goal was Miniatur Wunderland, the world’s largest model train display.  And it is so much more than just trains.  Set in the Speicherstadt, the old warehouse district where the big brick buildings have been re-purposed, the exhibit is a tiny, incredible reproduction of seven different areas, including Hamburg itself (which has a miniature Miniatur Wunderland with, as in reality, a line out the door), America (highlighted, literally, by Las Vegas at night),  Scandinavia (complete with real water and fake snow), and Switzerland, among others.  There are trains, yes, but also cars and trucks moving along roads, boats, planes, and thousands of tiny people engaged in funny and interesting things.  I knew we should have gotten there early, but Joe had a bad cold and I wanted to let him sleep in a little.  We got there the middle of the morning and had to wait in line for over an hour.  The exhibit itself was insanely crowded.  Even so, it was worth seeing.

After the trains, we walked around downtown Hamburg.  We saw the old town hall there, and some more churches.  We went by St. Michael’s, the biggest and most famous church, but it was completely closed for renovation, and we opted not to pay the 2 Euro entrance fee to see the room describing the work being done.  Our favorite sight was the Nikolai church, bombed in WWII and left as a peace memorial.  I am infinitely glad that my country has never been subject to such devastation, but at the same time, I think we miss something important, not having spaces like that in the United States.  One of the churches in Lübeck was destroyed and rebuilt, but they left two huge, shattered bells in back, gouged into the floor where they fell when the steeple was hit by Allied bombs.

My guidebook described Hamburg as being as watery as Venice or Amsterdam, which I thought was an exaggeration, but actually isn’t.  With its three rivers, two lakes, and extensive system of canals, Hamburg actually has more bridges than the other two cities combined.  It’s not tiny and charming the way Bremen and Lübeck are… after all, the Hamburg metro area is home to more than 4 million people, but there is definitely enough there to draw me back (particularly the Dialogue in the Dark and Spicy’s Gewürtz (aka spice) Museum).

Late Friday afternoon we took the train up to Lübeck, which is only about ten miles from the Baltic Sea.  That, however, is going to have to wait for another blog post, or this is never going to get up.  Below are pictures from Bremen and Hamburg.  I’ll post the Miniature Wunderland pictures separately.

Joe and the Town Musicians

Town Hall of Bremen

Bible Garden

Lavender in the Bible Garden

Joe with a Mummy

Oh so Art Neuveau

Glockenspiel

The Schnoor

Amber in the Schnoor

Windmill of Bremen

The Beatles

Hamburg Harbour

Giant Otto, with me down on the left

Police station in St. Pauli

Hamburg Town Hall

Memorial Statue

One of the many bridges of Hamburg

St Michaels church

 

Ich schmeltze, ich schmeltze!

That’s what the wicked witch said when Dorothy dumped the bucket of water over her head, and that’s what Joe and I are saying now.  We arrived back in Germany yesterday in the middle of a heat wave, complete with sufficating humidity.  After being shut up for two weeks, our top floor apartment, especially the bedroom, was sultery, and it’s a testament to our exhaustion after 17 hours of traveling that we were able to fall asleep in it.

Today I’m back at work, and through a lucky coincidence, I happen to have the only air conditioned office in the institute.  Germans are not the devotees of air conditioning that Americans generally are.  At DLR only the labs are usually cooled.  Even the cafeteria doesn’t have AC; on hot days they turn off the lights, close the blinds, and sweat through lunch.  My office used to be a lab, so I have an air conditioning unit on my ceiling that doubles as a heater in winter.  I’ve heard a nasty rumor that the AC in the other building isn’t working even in the labs, but I haven’t been over to investigate personally.

The up side of this is that we can all go home early on particularly hot days.  An email went out this morning reminding employees that the work day officially ends at 2:30 when the temperature at the near-by airport reaches 29 C (84 F).  That’s where it currently stands, although I’m pretty sure Lorenz doesn’t care and we will leave at the normal time.  Not that I’m complaining.  I’d rather spend the afternoon in my nice cool office than at home.  Sorry Joe.

 

Super Silly

For anyone who did not see this on Facebook, we present a video from our visit with Kathleen, Bill, and amazing-brilliant-goddaughter Lizzie:

 

Home, on the longest day of the year

We’re in the USA!  On June 17 Joe and I flew to Chicago for the start of our whirlwind tour.  In four days, we managed to see almost everyone we love in Chicago.  My graduation ceremony at Northwestern was Friday morning, and despite 4 inches of rain in the city that day, we had a good celebration.  Sunday afternoon we drove up to Madison, Wisconsin for dinner with Bill and Kathleen and our remarkable and brilliant god-daughter Lizzie.  We stayed with the Owens family for the night and sent my parents to The Speckled Hen Inn as a celebration of their 40th wedding anniversary which was earlier this month.  They thoroughly enjoyed their stay and highly recommend it.  Monday we headed the rest of the way up to Grand Rapids, with a stop in Osseo for Norske Nook pie.  We’ve been enjoying the time up north to relax, and even got into the lake yesterday afternoon.  Tonight is my ten year high school reunion.  Tomorrow we head down to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area for a couple more days with friends before flying back on Tuesday.

After nine months in a foreign land, it’s a little strange to be back in the places I used to call home.  For one thing, the roads are all so wide!  Also, the difference in daylight hours is a reminder just how far north we really are in Germany.  Our house in Menden, Germany, is at 50.7 degrees north latitude.  Chicago sits at 41.9 degrees north, or more than 600 miles further south.  Even Grand Rapids, which is about as far noth as you can get in the continental US, is only 47.2 degrees north, or almost 250 miles further south (gee, I hope I did that math right).  And it makes a huge difference in the amount of daylight.  On the longest day of the year, the sun set in Chicago at 8:29 pm, in Grand Rapids at 9:14 pm and in Menden at 9:49 pm.  Twilight in Menden also lasts longer.  We don’t have curtains on the windows in our bedroom in Germany, and it’s been driving us a little bit crazy.  Every night, I have to point out to Joe that sunshine does not mean it’s too early to go to bed.

As I type this, I’m sitting in my parents’ living room looking at the lake and listening to the loons.  Germany seems like a half-forgotten dream.  Can I have another week of vacation?

 

She flies through the air with the greatest of ease…

Every time Joe leaves town, I seem to become remarkably busy.  Three weekends ago when Joe was in Geneva, I hardly had a moment to myself!  Not that I’m complaining.  I already talking about the Sunday visit to the Science Express train, but Saturday was busy too.  On Saturday morning, I finally met the other American resident of Menden, Kairy, and her little son.  What, you say, there is another American living in Menden?  I know, I was shocked too.  She’s married to a German man who works at the air force base right next to DLR.  Hopefully when we’re all back from our visits to the US, we can see her again.

At noon on Saturday, Markus and his girlfriend Karen picked me up for an afternoon at the Kletterward in Brühl.  This is a high-ropes course, which, if you aren’t familiar with the concept, is a climbing site set into the top of trees.  You climb up a wooden ladder, then make your way from the platform around one tree to the next via “elements” like a tightrope or a cargo net or some kind of swing.  You’re between about 10 and 35 feet off the ground, and wearing a harness that clips to safety lines on each platform and element.  The most fun party is probably the slides at the end, where you hook your harness to a cable and zip-line back to the ground.

I’d heard about these for years, but only been on one once before, at the camp in Michigan where some friends got married two summers ago.  One of my camps, Camp Vermilion, used to have a high ropes course too, but the insurance was too expensive so they just have the team-building low ropes elements now.  This place in Brühl does nothing else, so they have a much bigger set-up.  There are six different courses of varying difficulty for adults, one of which is nothing but zip-lines.  Markus and Karen had never done it before, but they had a good time too.   There are more pictures of the course on the website under Galerie.

After we were too tired and sore to climb anymore, we went back to Markus’s place for dinner (Swedish meatballs a la Ikea… yummy) before taking in a showing of the new Star Trek movie at the English theater in Cologne.   It was good and I enjoyed it a lot, although it was kind of violent.  I don’t think Kirk and Spock ever got into fist fights on the bridge in the original version.  And Leonard Nemoy was, of course, fantastic.

Now, I know this is not quite as exciting as pictures from Geneva, which Joe promises he’s working on (our internet at home is almost always really slow these days… grrr) or pictures from our most recent trip to northern Germany, but hopefully they will tide you over until we can get the travel pictures up.

Me, Karen and Markus in our climbing gear

Me and Markus really, really high up to start the slide course

I’m on the same platform, but Karen was using the zoom on the camera

There I go!

I was climbing the ladder to the B course when it twisted on me. Oops. But I got it back around without falling off or anything.

Me going across one of the elements in the B course

 

I Get my Strawberries from the Strawberry over on Hauptstraße and Hohlstein

Whenever I bike to DLR, I go past a giant metal strawberry.  It’s all closed up in the mornings, but in the afternoons the windows are open and field-fresh strawberries, asperagus, and rubarb are for sale.  I stopped last week and bought some strawberries, which were both the cheapest and the most delicious ones I’ve had so far this spring.  Maybe they have these to sell strawberries from in the US and I just wasn’t paying attention?  Regardless, I’ve seen several of them around here and I think they’re fantastic.  And despite the way it looks in the photo, they are not self-serve.  When I asked if I could take a picture, the girl who was working there hid behind the counter until  I was done.

 

All Aboard for the Future

Two weeks ago while Joe was in Geneva, Markus and his girlfriend Karen picked me up after church and we went to Bad Godesburg to visit the Science Express train, aka Expedition Zukunft.  2009 has been declared the Year of Science, and to celebrate, Germany has outfitted a train filled with displays about cutting-edge science and how science is going to shape the future of the human species.  It’s traveling around Germany, stopping

It was Sunday afternoon, and the exhibit was free. The line was really long.

in a bunch of different cities.   Recently it spent a few days in Cologne and then Bonn (Bad Godesburg is a southern Stadtteil of Bonn and I’m guessing it was easier on the regular train schedule to have an extra train taking up one of the platforms for three days than it would have been in the main Bonn station).

There were a number of interactive displays. I think they may have been aimed at the kids, but why not play with stuff?

There are twelve cars, each one covering topics like the convergence of biology and nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, astronomy and particle physics (Jahred, they had pictures showing simulated Higgs boson collisions), materials science and manufacturing, and sustainable energy sources.  I was really impressed with the level of science, considering it was intended for the general public.

Robotic handed created by scientists at DLR. It has pressure sensors in the fingertips and can catch an egg without breaking it, among other things.

Markus and Karen in the sustainable agriculture car. They don't look like they are in a train, do they?

Heat sensor: look how cold my nose is!

In the medicine car: The pacemaker is also a DLR product.

 

Elections, German-Style

Germans will go to the polls tomorrow to elect their representatives to the European Union Parliament.  German elections are always held on Sundays when (gasp!) most people don’t have to work and are more likely to get to the polls.

There are more political parties in Germany than you can shake a stick at, and they all have maddeningly similar acronyms.  The biggest two are the SPD (Social Democratic Party) and the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) which of course has no current relation to Christianity.  One of these holds moderate-left positions and the other moderate-right, but the European uses of the words left/right and liberal/conservative are not exactly the same as they are in the US, so I really have no idea what the parties stand for.  Then, in no particular order, you have the FDP (Free Democratic Party), the CSU (Christian Social Union), Die Linke (the Left), and Die Grünen (the Greens), plus a smattering of neo-Nazis, a rising presence of neo-communists (people pining for the good old days when they had guaranteed jobs and an Iron Curtain), the Grays (seniors), the Violets (spiritualists), a few parties with actual religious affiliation (the Party of Bible-abiding Christians being my personal favorite) and the other fringe ducks (including the intriguingly-titled Anarchist Pogo Party and the jaunty Pirate Party which both, I promise, have Wikipedia pages worth reading).

At least four different parties had tables clustered around the entrance of the little grocery store near our house.  I think I saw the CDU, the SPD, the FDP, the PDF, the FDR, the FBI and the BBC.  Although I can’t vouch for all of those.  My first encounter with German politics was actually at a similar table in front on the grocery store on Easter, when the man handed me colored eggs with what I now recognize as CDU stickers on them.

It wasn’t long after the egg incident that the campaign signs started sprouting up.  Most of them are just head-shots of the candidates who seem to be universally young and good looking, although the SPD has drawn criticism for its series of attack ads aimed at the CDU. Historically, Germany has avoided negative campaigning, and word is that the SPD (which is behind in the polls) is trying out the tactic in advance of the national elections in September.  It may have been dirty, but the shark in the business suit was pretty funny.  I also liked the ones sporting gigantic pictures of Angela Merkel, who of course isn’t running for the European Parliament, but I guess she’s liked well enough to encourage people to vote for her party’s candidate.

I haven’t discussed the election with very many Germans, but the ones I have spoken to were unenthusiastic.  For them, it was going to be a vote against someone and a choice between the lesser of two evils.  That is a feeling I know all too well.

"We have a strong voice in Europe," says Angela Merkel, who isn't running for the office.

"Fairer Wages for Good Work -- So that she also can live from her work." Mostly I was just excited that I could read this whole thing in German.