Zürich - Part I

Sometimes I am a very bad tourist. The kind most people disparagingly mock. The kind who shows up in a country just assuming that the power outlets are the same shape as the country next door. FYI, they aren't. Now I have my computer plugged into a daisy chain of adapters - North America - Germany - Switzerland, no direct conversion was possible. Zürich is a lovely city (pics next post). Not just for banks and expensive chocolate - the Swiss people are very unique.

It turns out I showed up on some kind of civic holiday, when the medieval guilds kick off the summer season. I didn't think anyone belonged to a guild anymore, but I could not have been more mistaken. Yesterday was the children's parade - essentially a multicultural festival where kids dress up in traditional costumes, but randomness abounded.

This small contingent of Roman legionaries was not actually part of the parade, and actually cut off the Armenian children by storming the parade route

As I later leaned, the children's parade was only the opener to the adult parade the next day. In the grown-up version, the male guild members walk along the route in guild costumes. There are also a lot of brass bands - Switzerland is next-door to Germany, after all. The finale of the grownup parade is - wait for it - the lighting on fire of a giant snowman effigy stuffed with explosives. Bet you didn't see that one coming. If he explodes fast, summer will be warm and dry. If it takes a while, it'll be a rainy year.

The man of the hour being towed along the parade route

You would think nothing would have distracted me from burning shrapnel flying from the giant exploding snowman on the other side of the street. That's when the men of the fisher's guild started pelting the crowd with whole raw fish (you know, like in normal parades when the marchers toss candy into the crowd?), and the burning debris became an afterthought. Nothing about this seemed like a good idea, until I learned that when the inferno had burned down a bit, people barbecued over Frosty's remains. Maybe then a raw fish becomes something more desirable to have on hand? After the main route, all the guilds split up and marched separately to the guild houses where riotous partying ensued. This is clearly one of those festivals which I can say with a high degree of confidence would never work in North America.

Eichstätt

Eichstätt - a small town in Bavaria, famous in palaeontology circles for the lithographic limestone that is quarried in the region and has produced spectacular fossils, including Archaeopteryx.

Lithographic plates (of city maps)  made of polished limestone. The idea is that the mirror image of the item to be printed is etched in the polished rock, then inked, and transferred to paper.

Archaeopteryx and other beautiful finds are displayed in das Jura-Museum, overlooking the town.

View of the town from the Bishop's Palace, now das Jura-Museum

Eichstätt is far from normal. This is turning out to be a bit of a theme with the more remote locations in Germany. Our accommodations were in a Catholic seminary, where the conference attendees enjoyed a delightful breakfast every morning with the candidates for priesthood. The city jail is located directly across from the train station, less than 200 m from the city centre, presumably so the escapees will leave quickly. Eichstätt is also famous for the witch trials in the Middle Ages, that resulted in a spectacularly high loss of life - in this small city, close to 300 people were burned at the stake.

Market square: where the witches were executed. The pink building is the Rathaus (city hall)

See how sunny it was? Sadly, the seminary was cold and dark like a gigantic limestone cave, and this is where all the presentations took place.

France

The last topic of my intense week of end-February tourism will be . . . . France. I've been fantasizing about it ever since I found out it was a mere 150 km due west from Stuttgart. The land of tasty coffee and a language I can understand. The coffee was just as tasty as I remembered, but my ability to speak French has been somewhat compromised by learning German. I still understood, but whenever I tried to answer the words were a bit of a German-French hash.

The closest French city to Stuttgart is Strasbourg. It is extremely quaint, with a very large old city centre. It is also flat as a pancake (hence the bicycles).

Strasbourg

In terms of tourism, Strasbourg is most well-known for its cathedral. This is pretty standard, except for the truly enormous astrological clock which has only a weak link to any kind of Christian imagery. Not sure how it ended up in the cathedral.

Cathedral entrance, with crazy-intricate carvings

We also went to eat flamm, a specialty of the Alsace region that I got hooked on while living in Montreal. So tasty . . . 
Unfortunately the escape from Baden-Württemberg was just a bit too short. The novelty of eating Maultaschen has sadly not yet returned. I need to make more of an effort with the cooking.

Der Schwarzwald

So the impromptu visit of family provided some motivation to leave Stuttgart city limits, and what better way to spend a sick day than writing a blog post?

One of the more famous tourist attractions in Baden-Württemberg is the Black Forest (Schwarzwald). This region also has a delicious cake named after it, which obviously just makes it better. When I was initially planning the trip, I was immediately confronted with the problem that there was not too much to do in the Black Forest - it just seemed like something to drive through. I selected the "northern black forest" route, as per the guidebook, for logistical reasons as much as anything else. This route is a big circle from Stuttgart down to Freudenstadt, and up through the forest to Baden Baden. I don't know what I expected from the Black Forest, but it is really extremely hilly. Also there was far more snow than in Stuttgart, and the weather was also worse.

See the hills? I swear they're there, hiding in the clouds.

The hills and rivers and coniferous trees were vaguely reminiscent of Northern Alberta, only on an endearingly smaller scale. The highlight was the ruined abbey of Allerheiligen, a very Gothic spot at the bottom of a deep valley in the middle of nowhere. The monks, trying to exert some control over the natural environment, went to the trouble of paving the river bed in the immediate vicinity of the abbey. Apparently paved rivers were trendy in the region in days of yore: Baden Baden has one too, including paved waterfalls.

Allerheiligen: a waterfall. Unpaved.

Crocus lawn in Baden Baden - a dramatic contrast to the Black Forest just to the south

All in all, the Black Forest was better than expected. The whole region is full of hiking trails, and in the summer I'm sure it's a delightful escape from the city. As for the forest itself, it wasn't that special, but next time I'll take the valley route instead of the ridge road, and maybe get a better feeling for how this region managed to generate so many terrifying fairy tales.

Berlin

I have been to Berlin before, but needed another visit - it is very different from Stuttgart, in a good way, in spite of being much colder. The theme of this visit was Archaeology. Berlin has several museums devoted to the topic, all localized in an overwhelming complex on an island (Museum Insel). The two I went to were the Pergamon Museum and the Neues Museum. Organization in German museums is not very logical - displays are not ordered following any kind of geographical or temporal context, leading to confusion as to what kind of system was used (Why is a stone-age sarcophagus from Northern Europe in the Egyptian section? Why was there nothing about Odin or looted artifacts in the so-named room? Why was the headless garden gnome from the 1920s in the gallery between the "Sudan and Egypt during the time of the Pharaohs" sections?). The Pergamon Museum seems to specialize in big things, and the Neues Museum in small-mid sized things, but there is a lot of overlap.

Ishtar Gate (Babylonian), Pergamon Museum

The Pergamon is unreasonably proud of the spectacularly ugly statues from the Neolithic culture of Tell Halaf (Syria). It's cracked because the warehouse it was being stored in caught fire during WWII, so the firemen sprayed it with ice cold water and the overheated stone cracked. Then the whole mess was left over a winters worth of freeze/thaw cycles. The museum has only now succeeded in gluing it back together.

The Neues Museum has a large number of papyri from the Egyptian book of the dead on display, which is pretty cool, and the Bust of Nefertiti, which is very beautiful. Even though you can buy a cheaper ticket to see both museums in one day (what I did), I don't recommend it: you have to have a superhuman attention span for that much museum viewing, or else just breeze through both looking only at the highlights.

View from the Neues Museum, Museum Insel, Berlin. The black specks are crows flocking around the tower.

Holzmaden

For those not in the know (this group, much to my dismay, includes pretty much everybody), Holzmaden is important. Rather than being an unheard of village over an hour and 6 transit zones southeast of Stuttgart Mitte using public transportation, it could in fact be regarded as the mother ship for geeks such as myself. Holzmaden plays a disproportionate role in what we know of marine paleobiology in the Lower Jurassic, and even the Mesozoic. For instance, evidence that ichthyosaurs had dorsal fins, like dolphins, is comes only from Jurassic rocks in southwest Germany, mostly from quarries in Holzmaden.

Ichthyosaur - Urweltmuseum Hauff Gallery, Holzmaden Germany

Historically, the major industry in Holzmaden was quarrying. The local shale was used for building, finishing (e.g. counter tops and flooring), and for the manufature of cement and gravel. The rock layer used is also highly fossiliferous. Over the past 200 years, thousands of fossils have been extracted and prepared, and sold, exchanged and gifted to museums and private individuals all over the world. Aside from my personal favourite of ichthyosaurs, other wonders include plesiosaurs, marine crocodiles, fishes, ammonites, belemnites with preserved soft tissue and, most famous of all, gallery-sized slabs of crinoids. The number of quarries has sadly dropped precipitously, which is unfortunate in some ways. Holzmaden boasts two paleontology museums, conveniently located right across the street from each other. Not bad for a village of 2000 people. Also included: scenic views of the Schwäbische Alb. Not included: much in the way of dining options. For a visit, take Stuttgart S1 Kirchheim to the terminus, then a bus. I know people other than me secretly get thrills out of riding S-Bahn trains to the termini. All the more reason to go to a town few have ever heard of. Your friends will be totally jealous.

Killesberg

Stuttgart has a fairly extensive park system. For some reason, I never ventured out of the central part, but today I explored what things are like to the west of the museum. Turns out it's really nice. The neighbourhood is nice too. Stuttgart names every little tiny segment of park something different, but generally we'll call the area in question Killesberg. While Schloßgarten/Rosensteinpark go for Greek and Roman statuary, Killesberg goes for weird modernist sculpture.

Pac-man emerges from his underground lair

I don't know why I found this landscaping attempt so inspiring. All the trees in one planter . . .

The Triassic: now with cross-bedding!

I probably just liked Killesberg so much because apparently it's a reclaimed quarry (no, I didn't know when I decided to walk there). The back half is a giant cliff made of Triassic-aged redbeds.