Die größte Kirche

Cologne (Koln) has a very ancient history in Europe, having been established by the Romans only a few decades AD. Its name is from the word "colony". The thing that practically hits you in the face the moment you get off the train is the Kolner Dom, the largest church in Europe. The present church took more than 600 years to complete, starting in the 1200s. It took that long through a combination of the huge scale, the restrictions of the techniques of the age, wars, and lack of money. It's a pretty magnificent building, and we have been in it a few times, once for a tour, once for me to climb the spire (all 509 steps of it, and it was like a human autobahn all the way up and down the winding spiral staircase), and once for a wonderful concert last night. The concert featured a repertoire of Bach, and had a 30ish piece orchestra, a 50ish person choir and 4 soloists. The sound, though beautiful, was a little bit lost in the heavens, as the church just goes on up and up and up. Still, it was well worth the sitting in the freezing cold to listen to it!

View from the top of the main spire, up 509 steps

The other famous thing about the Kolner Dom is that it has relics (in this case skulls) of the Three Wise Men, so it is a place of Christian pilgrimage. The skulls are in a very beautiful and expensive gold and jewel encrusted reliquery in the church. We just have to assume it's true, and anyway, why spoil a good story?

Yesterday we saw Judith, our #8 German student. She and her mum came across to Cologne from Kassell to see us, which was great. We had not expected that to happen and Kassell was not on our route, but it is great to have now met with every one of "our" Germans!

One of these is a geocache!

I have enjoyed doing some geocaches in the last week, some around Lohne where we spent Christmas, and some here in Cologne. The cleverest so far has been hidden in a lock on the rail bridge over the Rhein. As also happens on the River Tiber in Rome on the Milvish Bridge, and also the Great Wall of China, couples pledge their love by locking a padlock to the bridge with their name on it, then they throw the key away. The cache was in one of the locks, and considering the locks go for hundreds of metres, it was a bit of a hunt, even with the GPS. But as with all geocaches, if you know what you are looking for ...

This is our last port of call in Germany, and I have to say that we are now officially over the snow and cold, and looking forward to the warmth of Egypt.

Dashing through the snow ...

I have to admit that it has been a bit surreal in the last couple of days being part of a German Christmas. The snow has made it pretty special and everyone here goes all out with the decorations, candles, food and drink. It has been wonderful to be with Henny's family as they have their Christmas and we are a little part of it. Christmas here starts on December 24th with church, decorating the tree, presents and a traditional meal of frankfurter and potato salad. Christmas Day itself is like ours, only indoors, with family, food and more presents! Grant entertained the gathering with some magic tricks - fascinating in any language!

At "our tree" in the Burgerwald

Close by this little town of Loehne is the Burgerwald, a "community forest" where people can plant a tree that is dedicated to a person who has a special life event, like being born, graduating, getting married, etc. To our delight, we discovered that Henny's family had planted a tree, a Vogelkirche (which, translated, seems to mean "bird church", but it probably isn't that!) to mark our visit to Loehne for Christmas 2010. So we drove out to visit "our tree" and had a fun time in the snow. Conveniently, there was a geocache nearby, which Sonja found - she is getting hooked! Brahms the dog had to be carried as the snow was too deep for his short legs.

Picnicking in the snow

I went out to do a spot of geocaching yesterday to try to work off some calories, and also because the sun was shining. I managed to find two of the five I looked for, as the snow hid the others. One required a trudge across calf-deep fresh snow for half a km to a lone oak tree in the middle of a field - by that time I was pretty determined to find one!

Have sled, will travel ...

Today we took sleds and met with Sonja's family to walk in the woods. We "picnicked" with gluhwein, beer and chocolate in the snow, and sledded wherever it was downhill. Great fun!

Frohes weihnachtsfest aus Deutchland

It's Christmas time for sure in Germany. It couldn't really be more perfect for us, with snow everywhere. The last couple of days we spent in Bremen with Eva, which was lovely. She lives with her parents in a very little village near Bremen. The second day we spent in Bremerhaven, the fishing port where the River Weiser meets the sea. It has two very significant museums, both of which we visited.

The first is the Climate Museum, which cleverly follows the line of longtitude 8 degrees East all the way around the globe, featuring the different climate zones and the issues each is facing with climate change. It was very interesting and extremely well done. We've visited enough museums now to know that some are good and some are ... boring!

Yachts snow and ice bound in Bremerhaven

The second museum was the Museum of Emigration, a clever recreation of the experience of the hundreds of thousands of Europeans who left from the German ports of Bremerhaven and Hamburg during the late 1700s through to the mid 1900s. You got a really good idea of the feeling of everything as they had recreated the port scenes and also the insides of the ships. There is a database of all the emigrants, so we tried to find more information on Grant's forebears, who left in 1871 from Hamburg, but no luck - Johann and Anna Hoffman is like looking for John Smith in England!

Lohne on Christmas Eve day

We are now in Lohne, a town southeast of Hanover, where we will have Christmas with the Hohmeyer family. They had a Kiwi Christmas with us 3 years ago when they visited their daughter Henrike who stayed with us for six months. The snow is all around and even the Germans are amazed - it's apparently the most snow in 100 years. The autobahns are backed up all over the place and the trains are jammed. Honover train station yesterday was like bedlam, but we managed to get on the right train to deliver us to Lohne. Today (Christmas Eve) we will go to a church service this afternoon, then there will be the decoration of the tree, the presents, then another church service at night. Chrismas Day itself is a continuation of food, family and various traditional things. We have completely given up trying to watch our diet - it's just too hard!

Working off the German calories

The musicians

Bremen is a photographer's feast. With the snow and a sunny day, it is even more of a visual banquet, so it was hard deciding what NOT to take pictures of today. We are hosted here by Eva and her parents Hans and Angelika, in a beautiful home in a village 20km or so out of Bremen. Everyone is amazed at the snow and temperatures here in the north - it is usually only the south that has this experience, and admittedly it was pretty darned cold today, with the thermometer hovering around -8 to -10 degrees most of the day.We are really appreciating all our Icebreaker clothing and assorted merino and goose-down!	Needs no introduction!
We were treated to a delightful tour of Bremen and its port by Eva and Hans, with a visit to the Rathaus (town hall - one of the most famous in Europe) and the Schnoor, a famous old area of the town with very narrow streets and very narrow buildings. Many houses had dates in the 1600s etched above their doorways. There is also a "Wedding House" that is the smallest hotel in Europe - it's a very old building containing just one honeymooner's suite upstairs, and the whole thing is only about 3 metres wide. Of course a lot of it is centred around the theme of the Musicians of Bremen, which has probably made the city a great deal of money over the years. However, it's a picture postcard city so the attention is well-deserved. Bremen is one of the major ports of Europe, so it has that added flavour to its history that comes from being a maritime town.	In the Schnoor
Bremerhaven is 50km or so north on the actual coast, and is the fishing port, but here, on the River Weser, most of the shipping is cargo. A newer port is being developed slightly west at Wilhelmshaven, which allows ships of deeper draft. Yesterday we had our first real hassle due to the weather; all the trains were delayed, and the one we travelled on from Berlin to Hamburg was so crowded that we had to sit on the floor the whole way. However, it was no real drama, and we made the acquaintance of a Berlin theatre director and her dog Missy. In Hamburg we had a couple of hours with Benedicta, our very first student, and a brief tour of the city, then continued to Bremen.	Wherever there is a sword ...
Breathtaking in view and temperature

Berlin!

Brandenburg Tor

The good news is that today's low daytime temperature was only -7 degrees. The bad news is that today's high was -6 degrees! Kind of hard to enjoy being outside too long, and not conducive to a walking tour, which was one idea for today. Yesterday we spent the morning at the National Jewish Museum, an amazing chronicle of the journey of the Jewish people in Europe through the centuries. There is almost nothing they were not blamed for. The exhibition didn't only concentrate on the holocaust, but all the same it was very moving. We were impressed at the complete honesty that seemed to be present - there was no fudging of the facts from what we could see. The word "murder" was used in all descriptions of those who were killed in the death camps.

The next place for us was the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, at the "House at Checkpoint Charlie". Established in 1962, only a year after the wall went up, right from the start it was a place to exhibit and draw attention to the plight of east Berliners who tried to escape to the west. (Before the wall was built, more that 2 million East Germans escaped - they needed a more permanent solution). We both found it quite an emotional experience, reading story after story of people who wanted a choice. The inventiveness of those who escaped is incredible. The first personal underwater propulsion system (there must be one word for all that but I can't think of it) was first used to escape via the Baltic Sea, and it was developed extensively after that for other uses. There is an amazing photo of a border guard letting a child through the wire (before the wall days) - apparently a great number of the border guards sympathised with the east Berliners, aiming to miss when they shot and deliberately looking the other way.

Near the Reichstag

Today it was snowing and very cold so we visited the Medical History museum - Dad, you'd have loved it. It had thousands of specimens preserved from decades of research, some rather freakish but really interesting. I even got to see what my L4-5 spinal fusion looks like! 

Who needs a pram in this weather?

We tried to find a few geocaches, but it was near impossible in the snow. There is supposed to be one hidden in the giant Lego giraffe outside LegoLand, but there were too many people around for a good look and also there are hundreds of police everywhere (LegoLand is not far from the Bundestag), so it probably wasn't smart to be seen closely investigating anything with a gadget in our hands!

Ghosts ...

With the temperature at -13 degrees, we joined a "Ghost Trail" tour on Wednesday night. Promising "true" ghost stories and legends (I feel a Tui ad coming on here) - and a surprise or two - it was actually pretty lame, and we nearly froze despite all the layers. When the "Mad Butcher" leapt out of the shadows with a rubber knife behind the Tyn Church, he wasn't prepared for the fact that Grant and another guy on the tour would react like anyone would who had a mad-looking assailant leaping at them - Grant socked him in the jaw and the other guy kneed him in the stomach! It all ended with profuse apologies, but I sure wouldn't want that job night after night!

Prague in the sun is an even more beautiful looking city than Prague snowing. We had the day to ourselves on Thursday wandering around the bits that warranted a second look. I went to a chamber orchestra concert at the St Salvator church (complete with heated seat pads, but I still needed to keep all my layers on), and listened to a program of wonderful well-known classical music. Later we got a different sort of culture by seeing the movie "The Social Network" - good timing since Facebook's founder has just been announced as Time Magazine's Man of the Year, and a really good movie. 


Any thoughts that Berlin would be warmer have been scotched. It snowed during our entire journey by train next to the Elbe and back into Germany, and Berlin is totally covered in snow...

Dem bones ...

Ossuary church, Kutna Hora

When you next go to church, imagine what it would be like to look up and see a chandelier made out of human bones! That's exactly what can be found at the Sedlec Ossuary at the Church of all Saints in Kutna Hora, east of Prague. Today we took a tour to Kutna Hora in a thick snowstorm - seemed like a good idea on a day like today.

The history of the place isn't so macabre as you might think. The Cistercian abbot of the church went to Palestine in the 1200s and brought back some soil which he sprinkled in the church cemetery.

That made it a desirable place to be buried, and so many people were interred there, along with the many thousands of people killed by the plagues in the 14th century, that they had to dig up the central part and build an ossuary to put all the bones in. It is estimated that the bones of more than 40,000 were in the ossuary, many unidentied even at the time of burial due to the plague.

The head bone's connected to the neck bone ...

All the bones that were exhumed were stored there until the 1870s, when a woodcarver was given the job of organising the bones into some kind of respectful system. What he came up with was unusual - there are four bell-shaped towers of bones, mostly hip bones, at each corner, a coat of arms and an enormous chandelier of bones in the middle made up of at least one of each bone from the body. It all looks pretty freaky, but it seems it wasn't disrespectful - in fact the message the woodcarver apparently tried to convey was the transience of life and the inevitability of death!

We had lunch (the ubiquitous beef goulash with dumplings) then visited St Barbara's Cathedral, after the saint whose father threw her into prison because she wanted to be christened, despite the family's atheism. Apparently she miraculously escaped prison by causing walls to crumble before her. Anyway, she is the patron saint of miners, since Kutna Hora was THE silver mining centre of Bohemia, and there are numerous references to miners in the frescoes in the church. 

St Barbara's Cathedral, Kutna Hora

It's an amazing gothic cathedral built with flying buttresses - the solution to church collapse that came from the English and French stonemasons around 1000.

One advantage of the freezing cold is that there are hardly any other tourists around (our guide Martin probably wished we had stayed in bed today, too!)

No charge for chilling the chardonnay!

Prague!

Wenceslas Square

Prague was always going to be a highlight for us on this trip. We have week on our own now, split between Prague and Berlin. Getting to Prague was interesting - the journey was completed via 4 trains and a bus. The quality of the trains deteriorated markedly across the Czech border, along with the availability of English, but we made it ok.

Old Town Square

It is colder here and there is more snow. Today we went on a walking tour of the city with Radek, our guide. It was a great way to see things and hear some of the more interesting history and stories, to take our minds off the snow that fell most of the day and the subzero temperatures. It's clear that Czechoslovakia has had a history peppered with takeovers, communism that didn't work, and latterly a rejuvenation of the economy and the infrastructure with the move to capitalism. The historical buildings have all been restored and are wonderful.

Jewish cemetery

The city is very beautiful, even in the snow. At least in the city area, all the buildings are ornate, with lots dating back to early centuries. Our walk began in Wenceslas Square - yes the one we sing the Christmas Carol about, but apparently he was a duke (not a king), he wasn't particularly "good", and the Czechs don't have a carol about him! There is a Jewish Quarter which has a tiny cemetery with gravestones all jumbled together, higgledy-piggledy - apparently they ran out of room and just kept putting down more layers of clay, then burying the next lot on top. Altogether there are 12 layers of bodies!

We got a taste of things to look at in more detail in our tour today and as we have three days here before we leave we have plenty of time.

Nativity play in the snow

At the local Nativity Play

Lindau is a blink-and-you-miss-it village of 218 people in Frankonia, not too far from the border of the Czech Republic. Our hosts, Ricci and her mum Doris, are like many Germans who live in a small village or town but do all their activities in a larger town nearby. Lindau is well-known locally for its Christmas Play, held on the 3rd Sunday of Advent each year. The locals put together a nativity play, laced with regional or even political themes of the day, and it's held in the middle of the village, surrounded by the ubiquitous stalls selling gluwein, bratwurst and various regional sweets. Of course we didn't understand much (the odd "Gott", "Maria" and "Josef" are pretty easy to understand in any language.)

The 3 kings look the same anywhere

The weather has been lousy, so we've been a bit limited for activities. However, Doris and Ricci have taken us around a bit, to Kulmbach, the local town which is most famous for its beer, and to Beyreuth, which is home to Richard Wagner. We went to a very old wooden opera house, the oldest in the northern hemisphere (circa. 1780) where Wagner staged many of his operas. Napoleon apparently visited and was so taken with the beautiful stage curtain that he nicked it and sent it to his father-in-law as a gift! Richard Wagner became frustrated with the limited size of this one and built his own further up the hill, and both opera houses are still used today.

Sampling the local Kulmbach brew

It has been a mix of snow and rain in the last couple of days, but I did manage to get out and do a geocache that was not buried in snow! It is beautiful outside in the snow, as long as you are well rugged up.

Snow returns

Grant gets his fibre - chocolate coated fruit!

People asked us why we would go to Germany in the winter. Madness, really. But days like today make it seem just right. We woke to 5cm of fresh snow and a clear sky. It would be pretty miserable being here with it just being cold, but cold and snow seems just right.

In the Englischer Garden

We walked to the Deutches Museum, a huge place with a nod to virtually every kind of technology you can imagine. We wandered for ages, as you do in museums, but only about half of the exhibits had an English description, so it wasn't so easy to understand. It hasn't quite got the Te Papa touch yet, where you can try lots of things out. Wanting to escape the hubbub of hundreds of school children, we went north to the Englischer Gardens, a huge 5 x 1 km expanse of woods and gardens just to the north of the old town. It was laid out by an Englishman  and then planted in 1788 by Karl Theodor. It was very beautiful in the snow, and hardly a soul there (just as I like it). Grant's sensitivity to cold required a visit to a cafe and a hot chocolate, so we ended up in the Museum of Modern Art. Bought a print just to say we'd been there. We dared to go into an art gallery in one of the swish streets near the centre to look at some art by an American called Rizzi (we had seen some at one of our host's place), and had to act totally nonchalant when the proprietor told us the price for the piece we were looking at - 4500 Euros!

Yes please!

It is now snowing heavily outside so it will be thick on the ground tomorrow. We are going north to Kulmbach tomorrow to stay with Ricci and her mum.

Too many churches?

It's easy to become a bit flippant about the incredible cathedrals here. Within a square kilometre or two in Munich's "Old Town", there are several of breathtaking proportions, mostly originally built around 1200 or so. All were at least partially destroyed during World War 2, and some of them several times before that due to fire, but all have been paintstakingly restored for us to admire. As usual with old buildings, a lot of them here are undergoing various degrees of restoration, but in some clever situations, they have draped the building concerned with a massive painted shroud, outside the scaffolding, in exactly the same image as the building itself. From a distance you'd hardly know the work was going on.

Along with many hundreds of other tourists, we watched the glockenspiel do its thing at 11am at the Neu Rathaus (Town Hall). I remember it from our other visits here in 1975 and 1988 ...

Today we got a bit footsore tramping around the Old Town, admiring churches and old buildings. We also saw the Jewish Museum, but it was a bit disappointing as it was only concerned with the Jews of Munich. At least it was dual-interpreted in English, so we could understand it all. One thing that struck us was the fact that Jews have been persecuted pretty much for as long as there is written record of history (AD).

The Christmas markets are operating at full blast and chock full of tourists, so everything is very crowded. There are also heaps of police around as there is a very big football game in town tonight, Bavaria vs Basel (Switzerland), so the place is heaving with young men with their football colours on. I think we'll pass on the game ...

To Munich

The Rathaus

Just a brief entry today. We travelled across to Munich, our southern-most destination in Germany. We are fortunate to have the use of a flat here, belonging to the father of one of our students, Ricci. Munich is famous for many things, not least the beer, but also for its exorbidant prices, so having a place to stay for free is fantastic. It's also pretty central, only a few subway stops from the old town. Tomorrow and Wednesday we’re just going to be tourists here in Munich. Everything here is geared for Christmas, with Christmas markets selling all sorts of wonderful as well as tinny stuff. Earlier this evening we attended mass then listened to an organ recital at Munich’s main Episcopal Catholic church (Frauenkirche - the church of Our Lady). The organ was amazing – may as well have been an orchestra in its own right, it had so many different sounds. Grant zoned out and was making noises about leaving after a while, but I suggested that there was probably nothing much more useful to do at this exact point in time than listen to a magnificent organ being played by a talented musician in a very beautiful church in the middle of Munich! He had to agree ...

Schloss Mittelbiberach

Schloss Mittelbiberach

Did you even wonder who invented the blimp? Our hosts for the last couple of days have been Albrecht von Brandenstein-Zeppelin and his wife Nadine. Albrecht is the great great grandson of the zeppelin's inventor, Count von Zeppelin, a nobleman from pre-war Germany. Benedicta, their daughter, was our very first German home-stay students so we are visiting them in their home, Schloss Mittelbiberach. The family's closest forebears inherited the schloss 100 years ago or so, but it dates back to the 16th century. There are items of furniture with inscriptions dated in the 1600s, and it is chock full of very old things. It's a pig to heat, though, so some rooms are cooking while others are like a tomb. The estate accounts are all lined up in the library dating back from the 1700s, along with massive old books that I daren't open because they would probably fall apart. There are some chairs in the chapel that were made in the 16th century. Grant thought he'd have a sit down but I suggested that breaking a 16th century chair might not look good, and besides, our travel insurance might not cover it! Nadine, our hostess, is amazingly flippant about it all, thinking mostly about how impractical it is to run a house like this in the modern day. This is considered to be a very small schloss, but it must cost a fortune to keep it up. Albrecht has wide business interests and they are considered the local nobility, which must be both a blessing and a burden. Nadine and two of Bene's sisters visited Bene in NZ in 2006, and Nadine loved the informality and down-to-earthness of the kiwi way of life.

Yesterday we went for a drive down to the Bodensee (Lake Constance) where Switzerland, Austria and Germany meet. It was very unimpressive on a grey bleak day. However, we also went to the Zeppelin museum which was interesting - didn't realise how extensively used the zeppelins were from 1900 to the 2nd world war. Later we visited Fabian, our 5th student. He comes from more humble origins, his dad a school teacher, so he lives in an ordinary house in an ordinary street! It was great to see him and as usual we were plied with black forest cake, etc. Keeping the waistline to its normal girth is a challenge here!

Last night we had the official tour of the schloss by the Count, and boy was that interesting. I was particularly interested in the books, and I flipped through one printed on the Gutenburg press in the 1400s! Albrecht is very proud indeed of his family's heritage and he knows a lot about all the artefacts and art in the house, a real mixture of gothic, renaissance and romantic styles. They even have some family torture instruments, which were decidedly uncomfortable to try out!

Today we were picked up by Lennart's family and taken to Ulm, a very old city with the world's tallest cathedral spire. It is an absolutely fantastic church, and sports a gargoyle of Albert Einstein who was born in this town. We spent some time this afternoon at Bad Waldsee (Lake Forest Baths), a spa centre with a complex of pools heated by hot springs. All very German but it was great to do some lengths and feel that post-swim glow. Tomorrow we go to Munich and will have a few days on our own, which will be great. We have been treated like royalty by our host families but it's quite tiring being a guest and it will be good to be able to blob out a bit for a few days.

Biberach

Christmas Market at Biberach

Today I did my first geocache in Germany. Found one, but couldn't find another because presumably it was buried under the snow. This afternoon we took the train from Karlsruhe down to Biberach, and received a welcome worthy of royalty from Lennart's family. Biberach is a beautiful town full of very old houses, and a very historical old church which Catholics and Protestants share for worship. We are going to spend the next couple of nights in Schloss Brandenstein, the home of our very first student, Benedicta, then the final night back with Lennart's family. Apparently we have a tour arranged for us with Bene's mother tomorrow down to the Bodensee (Lake Constance), and we will have our own apartment at the schloss at our disposal! I don't mind this kind of thing, really! It's really great to see "our" students again, seeing them in their family situation. Might not be able to get on the net for the next few days as the schloss is possibly not internet connected.

Black Forest meanderings

Morning view outside the house

Woke up to a magic world with the sun shining and everything crisp and beautiful. Outside air temp about -8 degrees. Today we were taken on a tiki tour of part of the Black Forest, which is very near to the village we are staying in. Everything is snow-covered and idyllic. All the cars have snow tires on them so even though it looks pretty perilous driving on the snow and ice, actually it isn't a problem. Especially since Thomas, our host, drives a very nice car indeed. Speed limits don't seem to mean much here. The autobahn nearby has no speed limit and Thomas drove at 200km/hr at one point coming from Frankfurt.  I admit I found it just slightly unnerving ...

Old houses in Michelberg

We had a wander through the old town  of Michelberg, and took in the Christmas market at Ettlingen. It was freezing, so a mug of gluwein was just the ticket to warm the insides, but unfortunately it didn't get down as far as the toes! We are still waking up at 4am or so, so the days are very long! Hopefully that won't last too much longer.

Tomorrow we will go by train to Biberach in the south, to visit three families (Bene's, Fabian's and Lennart's). We have a Eurorail pass so we just reserve the seats and get on. Very convenient.

Christmas yummies in Ettlingen

SNOW!

Even our German hosts are a bit excited about the fact that winter has come early. Last night, our first in Germany, it snowed steadily and we woke to a very silent world outside. Our flight from Beijing was a novelty for us as we were in an almost new A380-800, one of the double-decker monsters that seems to defy all possibility of getting off the ground. It seemed very roomy, even in cattle class, and we were able to get some sleep. We managed to move to a spare seat on both flights - maybe it's our kiwi directness but we were surprised that nobody else seemed interested or brave enough to move - we leapt at the first opportunity!

We are in a "village" (about 6000 people) south of Frankfurt. Today it snowed all day, so it wasn't so bad that we had to stay around and do some client work. On the one hand it's not such a great way to spend time on holiday, but on the other hand it proves it can be done from anywhere. I went for a walk in the forest nearby with our host, Thomas, and it was wonderful to be out in the snow. We walked 4.5 km. Tomorrow we're going to be taken around by Thomas and Isabel to a Christmas market and various interesting towns.