The Long Drive

If a goal of mine was to drive really fast on the Autobahn in a BMW, then I have crossed it off the bucket list. Sadly, after about 15 minutes of being excited about the realization that unlike my last car, this one could accelerate within the allotted space, I realized that Stuttgart - Berlin is a really boring drive. Also, traffic in Berlin is terrible. Also, moving in during a thunder storm adds a little adrenalin rush that gets the job done. In spite of all this drama, however, I did not crash the car, and finally got the apartment clean and everything unpacked. Now I live in Berlin near Potsdamer Platz, the most touristy spot ever. As far as I can tell, the only legitimate attraction is several chunks of Berlin wall, but maybe the semi-permanent flea market selling DDR kitsch draws people too. The tourists got annoying faster than I anticipated. The good news? My sub-par linguistic abilities are not as big a deal here, and I live across the street from the most excellent and cheap Thai/Chinese/Sushi take-away restaurant.

Potsdamer Platz - English billboards? The world's largest Canadian flag? Architecturally bland condos? Am I lying and actually living in Toronto?

Stuttgart - the last days

Before heading north I did one last installment of paleo-tourism in Baden-Württemburg. The first site was fairly typical of the region - the cement quarry in Dotternhausen (nothing says tourism like a cement quarry). The company that owns the quarry sponsors a small museum. My favourite part was the mural modified from Henry de la Beche's Duria Antiquior - but I don't remember the plesiosaur in the original looking quite so much like a duck.

Dotternhausen mural - awesome in so many ways

The second trip was to the Bärenhöhle, a large cave system in the Schwäbische Alb. It is famous for the large number of cave bear skeletons (Pleistocene) that have been excavated from it. Sorry closet Clan of the Cave Bear fans, no human remains found at this site.

Mounted cave bear skeleton - Bärenhöhle

It's now a protected site, because the popular thing to do back in the day was grind the bones up for fertilizer. I'm a bit mystified as to why the bears liked to live there, since it's a pretty deep cave and therefore quite chilly (and the bear bones are a long way from the entrance), but not being an ice age mammal I guess I can't really relate. Onwards, to Berlin!

Cenotaph of ammonites, Schloss Lichtenstein

Milan

From Zürich, I just kept heading south. This is partly because I felt the need to escape from the German language for a short time, but mostly because both Milan and Zürich have copious collections of Triassic marine fossils from quarries along the Italian-Swiss border (now a UNESCO world heritage site: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1090). I had never been to Italy before, so I had no intention of spending all my time hanging out in the museum basement.

Milan is an enormous city. Unlike Zürich, it is also extremely flat, which makes walking easy, but like Zürich it isn't a budget-friendly destination. Best known for fashion and design, the shopping is amazingly abundant, everything from modern designers to flea markets.

Old and new

 There is also a cathedral, which has a fairly stunning interior (a white and blood-red marble inlaid floor really sets it apart from the grey-on-grey German churches). I'm not an art historian, otherwise I might have more interesting things to say.

The Duomo (cathedral) in the centre of the city

There is also an enormous castle (Sforza), former home of the Duke of Milan but it looks a lot more like a maximum security prison. It has a garden supplied with many cats, which puzzled me until I noticed the many rats. I left quickly after that.

Sforza castle's good side

Zürich Part II

I didn't expect Zürich to be such a gorgeous city. Because the name really isn't melodic-sounding and because all I knew about Zürich were economic factoids, I thought it would be more utilitarian, like Stuttgart. In reality Zürich has a lot going for it, but being on a budget makes eating and sleeping  a challenge. Swiss-accented German? Also a challenge.

My first view of the Alps

There was even a double rainbow

Old city, with cathedral

Unusual statue on the cathedral: He sees you when you're sleeping . . .

The museum basement was obviously not the best venue for sightseeing, so I guess I'll just have to come back another time and see the rest of the city. Yay!

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.