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Kassel, Goslar, Hannover, more Göttingen
Thursday, 25 February 2010 10:41 am[sorry about the extra return characters in these posts; they don't appear on the ipod, even editing the entry, so I can't fix it until i'm at a computer. Anyway! Moving onward!]
Tuesday 17:47- I'm on the ICE train back to Göttingen from Kassel, which won't give me enough time to finish this entry. It took me an hour to make the trip in the other direction, with 4 stops in 50 km. This way will be 17 minutes. Zoom! [goobermunch, does that answer your question about 1.5 lightspeed? ;]
[back at the hotel] I'm fairly damp; it rained all day. I saw a wonderful science tool museum with clockworks from the 17th century, astrolabes, telephones from the turn of the last century, and suchlike, started as a collection by a local baron/scientist. My favorite exhibit was an ornate "astronomical clock" with faces for all seven planets, each with hands for where on the compass the planet would rise and set.
Kassel is regionally known as the site of a 5-yearly modern arts festival, which sounded like its permanent exhibits would have been neat to see, alas they were too far, or closed, or I failed to find them. I did a lot of wandering streets and photographing old buildings though.
I think I spent too much time wandering before I finally got on the tram for Wilhelmshöhe, a large park featuring two castles and a giant statue of Hercules. The closer larger castle, an ornate half-circle shape on top of a hill, containing a decent art museum, closed just as I got there.
It was icy and foggy; I barely could make out the other two sights through the fog.
The park felt like a fairy tale- train tracks through snow in a forest, castles through the mist on a hill... Inviting lights turning into will-of-the-whisps and turning off as soon as I approached... I did have fun overall, despite bad timing.
In the evening we went to a party thrown by a student in dan's host's group who just got a job in eastern Germany. So his advisor brought him lots of east-german techno.
I wish I had any conversational German; it felt weird being monolingual around so many multilingual people. German cultural note #n of many: my slice of chicken and broccoli pizza had a heavy cream sauce instead of cheese. It was tasty, but it reminded me of last night's dinner.
Lufthansa pilots are/were on strike. Hopefully the flight backlogs will be cleared up by my first return leg Sunday (Berlin to Frankfurt).
Wednesday 15:45- I'm in a coffee shop in Goslar, home of Rammelsburg mines, a museum and UNESCO heritage site. And a very spooky museum it was- underground, dripping water, nobody else around, spotlighted rusty equipment amidst the shadows. Perhaps creepiest- water dripping in a few exhibit cases. I took a huge number of photos. There were headphones with an English audio guide, which sounded like it had been written by fine arts students imitating German grammar. And yet, I have no reason to think it was poor translation. I couldn't figure out how to make a recording of any of it, but I was laughing out loud a few times. One notable clip was from the perspective of a piece of basalt. "I have been crushed and folded by the inexorable forces of millennia..."
But! There was an exhibit on a Christo project, called "Package on a Hunt", which involved an ore hopper wrapped in fabric and pushed around by Christo and Jean-Claude outside the mine in 1988.
There was another piece of art, near the entry, with ghostly miner outfits suspended from the (far above) ceiling by chains. I was not so fond.
The interpretive history exhibit feels like it can be summed up: "1000 years ago, they found copper here. Ore trading made this a powerful city for many hundred years, but it was to valuable to barons and princes so it was also invaded frequently, destroying each settlement in turn. Now we have a creepy museum instead."
English guided tours were only by advance arrangement, so I didn't do the "ride in an ore hopper" tour or the "wear a helmet and walk around the mine for an hour." Just as well, as I did find lots to see in Goslar (including tons of very old German houses, as Goslar wasn't bombed during the war at all.) I caught a bus that got me back to the train station, and a bit of food, then on the regional train to Hannover in ok time.
I'm feeling fairly worn out, and considered just going back to the hotel, but I think I can have ~45 minutes in what my guide book says is an excellent modern art museum.
18:23- well that was exciting. I just had the equivalent of a visitor to... Well, somewhere 100km from some big city...
Bleh, metaphor fail. Anyway, I had a rapid walking tour of Hannover. Museum didn't work out for me; it was too far and routing was confoosing. But I did find the essential sights to walk past, including Liebniz's house (ugh, too ornate) and nearby, a church that was turned into a WW2 monument in its bombed out condition, including a bell connected with Hiroshima. The opera house and old city hall are beautiful, as is... (I'm not yet sure which building it is, but it looked like a glass confection with cubes piled in odd not-quite-stable-looking arrangements. I'm sure I'll figure it out tomorrow.)
I hopped on a medium-fast train, which is to say 200kph, getting me back to the hotel before dan. Can I just say, if I could get to Toronto in 35 minutes by train, I would be such a happy boy? Of course, also, the fast trains are a huge money sink; I believe from The Economist they have been deemed "a mistake", but I'd like to see how it plays out over the next decades. I wonder if, like building more roads, they mostly invite more travel and more frequent trains?...
23:00- dinner with dan's host and colleagues; i'm quite socialed out. Good folks, just too much talking for me.
Thursday, 11:00- this evening we're off to Berlin. Today is a quiet day, I think. I considered another trip to Hannover, but I'd rather rest up. It's rainy again.
15:53- hah. Rest? I spent most of the day wandering Göttingen, once the rain stopped.
I found the farmer's market (on Tuesday I was looking in the wrong part of Marktstraße) and had cheese and pastry. There was a Catholic church with optical illusions on the columns, a not-so-exciting modern exhibit in Old Town Hall, and the outside of a number of places including the house where Gauß worked, Bismark's house and a tower somehow related to him (?) but it's for rent? *shrug* And a babbling brook. I probably should have rested more, but I guess there is the 2+ hr train to Berlin this evening.
Overall I'm having a good time; I have seen a lot that made me smile. It's too bad more tourist things are closed, but that's what I get for visiting in the off season. I wish my ipod came with wireless so I could sometimes figure out where the heck I am or what it is I'm looking at. Maybe I should have rented a gps or something. Or if the wikitravel app wasn't so bad- it caches pages, but only for a short while, so all my Germany info went "poof" before the trip started. And finally, there is the DeutcheBahn app- which is immensely useful if I have wifi, and utterly useless without. For such a well-designed app, it was a rude discovery I didn't have a copy of the tour items I had thought I stored.
Tuesday 17:47- I'm on the ICE train back to Göttingen from Kassel, which won't give me enough time to finish this entry. It took me an hour to make the trip in the other direction, with 4 stops in 50 km. This way will be 17 minutes. Zoom! [goobermunch, does that answer your question about 1.5 lightspeed? ;]
[back at the hotel] I'm fairly damp; it rained all day. I saw a wonderful science tool museum with clockworks from the 17th century, astrolabes, telephones from the turn of the last century, and suchlike, started as a collection by a local baron/scientist. My favorite exhibit was an ornate "astronomical clock" with faces for all seven planets, each with hands for where on the compass the planet would rise and set.
Kassel is regionally known as the site of a 5-yearly modern arts festival, which sounded like its permanent exhibits would have been neat to see, alas they were too far, or closed, or I failed to find them. I did a lot of wandering streets and photographing old buildings though.
I think I spent too much time wandering before I finally got on the tram for Wilhelmshöhe, a large park featuring two castles and a giant statue of Hercules. The closer larger castle, an ornate half-circle shape on top of a hill, containing a decent art museum, closed just as I got there.
It was icy and foggy; I barely could make out the other two sights through the fog.
The park felt like a fairy tale- train tracks through snow in a forest, castles through the mist on a hill... Inviting lights turning into will-of-the-whisps and turning off as soon as I approached... I did have fun overall, despite bad timing.
In the evening we went to a party thrown by a student in dan's host's group who just got a job in eastern Germany. So his advisor brought him lots of east-german techno.
I wish I had any conversational German; it felt weird being monolingual around so many multilingual people. German cultural note #n of many: my slice of chicken and broccoli pizza had a heavy cream sauce instead of cheese. It was tasty, but it reminded me of last night's dinner.
Lufthansa pilots are/were on strike. Hopefully the flight backlogs will be cleared up by my first return leg Sunday (Berlin to Frankfurt).
Wednesday 15:45- I'm in a coffee shop in Goslar, home of Rammelsburg mines, a museum and UNESCO heritage site. And a very spooky museum it was- underground, dripping water, nobody else around, spotlighted rusty equipment amidst the shadows. Perhaps creepiest- water dripping in a few exhibit cases. I took a huge number of photos. There were headphones with an English audio guide, which sounded like it had been written by fine arts students imitating German grammar. And yet, I have no reason to think it was poor translation. I couldn't figure out how to make a recording of any of it, but I was laughing out loud a few times. One notable clip was from the perspective of a piece of basalt. "I have been crushed and folded by the inexorable forces of millennia..."
But! There was an exhibit on a Christo project, called "Package on a Hunt", which involved an ore hopper wrapped in fabric and pushed around by Christo and Jean-Claude outside the mine in 1988.
There was another piece of art, near the entry, with ghostly miner outfits suspended from the (far above) ceiling by chains. I was not so fond.
The interpretive history exhibit feels like it can be summed up: "1000 years ago, they found copper here. Ore trading made this a powerful city for many hundred years, but it was to valuable to barons and princes so it was also invaded frequently, destroying each settlement in turn. Now we have a creepy museum instead."
English guided tours were only by advance arrangement, so I didn't do the "ride in an ore hopper" tour or the "wear a helmet and walk around the mine for an hour." Just as well, as I did find lots to see in Goslar (including tons of very old German houses, as Goslar wasn't bombed during the war at all.) I caught a bus that got me back to the train station, and a bit of food, then on the regional train to Hannover in ok time.
I'm feeling fairly worn out, and considered just going back to the hotel, but I think I can have ~45 minutes in what my guide book says is an excellent modern art museum.
18:23- well that was exciting. I just had the equivalent of a visitor to... Well, somewhere 100km from some big city...
Bleh, metaphor fail. Anyway, I had a rapid walking tour of Hannover. Museum didn't work out for me; it was too far and routing was confoosing. But I did find the essential sights to walk past, including Liebniz's house (ugh, too ornate) and nearby, a church that was turned into a WW2 monument in its bombed out condition, including a bell connected with Hiroshima. The opera house and old city hall are beautiful, as is... (I'm not yet sure which building it is, but it looked like a glass confection with cubes piled in odd not-quite-stable-looking arrangements. I'm sure I'll figure it out tomorrow.)
I hopped on a medium-fast train, which is to say 200kph, getting me back to the hotel before dan. Can I just say, if I could get to Toronto in 35 minutes by train, I would be such a happy boy? Of course, also, the fast trains are a huge money sink; I believe from The Economist they have been deemed "a mistake", but I'd like to see how it plays out over the next decades. I wonder if, like building more roads, they mostly invite more travel and more frequent trains?...
23:00- dinner with dan's host and colleagues; i'm quite socialed out. Good folks, just too much talking for me.
Thursday, 11:00- this evening we're off to Berlin. Today is a quiet day, I think. I considered another trip to Hannover, but I'd rather rest up. It's rainy again.
15:53- hah. Rest? I spent most of the day wandering Göttingen, once the rain stopped.
I found the farmer's market (on Tuesday I was looking in the wrong part of Marktstraße) and had cheese and pastry. There was a Catholic church with optical illusions on the columns, a not-so-exciting modern exhibit in Old Town Hall, and the outside of a number of places including the house where Gauß worked, Bismark's house and a tower somehow related to him (?) but it's for rent? *shrug* And a babbling brook. I probably should have rested more, but I guess there is the 2+ hr train to Berlin this evening.
Overall I'm having a good time; I have seen a lot that made me smile. It's too bad more tourist things are closed, but that's what I get for visiting in the off season. I wish my ipod came with wireless so I could sometimes figure out where the heck I am or what it is I'm looking at. Maybe I should have rented a gps or something. Or if the wikitravel app wasn't so bad- it caches pages, but only for a short while, so all my Germany info went "poof" before the trip started. And finally, there is the DeutcheBahn app- which is immensely useful if I have wifi, and utterly useless without. For such a well-designed app, it was a rude discovery I didn't have a copy of the tour items I had thought I stored.
