Guten Tag from the land of schnitzel, spatzle, and highly questionable political philosophies. I may look a little different than you last saw me. I have not posted in a while and in the meantime have decided to grow a giant metal monkey out of the back of my head.
Oh clever reader, you have seen through me already. I see that I will have to come clean. That is actually the Heidelberg Monkey, which sits just to the right of the old bridge crossing northwards from Heidelberg and across the picturesque Neckar river. It is traditional to take this demeaning photo upon arrival. I was going to abstain, but then I thought of my valued readers (for the first time in six months) and went through with it. Fortunately there is always a Japanese tourist around to help out.
Heidelberg is a major tourist destination, even this late into the season. Actually, as you can probably see in the accompanying photos, early autumn might be the perfect time to visit as the leaves are changing, making the surroundings picture postcard pretty. I've marked the location of my hotel, the Goldener Hecht, or "Golden Pike"(the fish not the spear) on this overhead shot. Right next to the old bridge with the aforementioned monkey.
There are several reasons why tourists flock to Heidelberg. The main one, apparently, is that Heidelberg is one of the few German cities that the Allies didn't bomb into oblivion and then fly over and bomb it further into oblivion -- outer oblivion where the rents are cheaper but the commute is long -- and then, after a cup of tea and crumpets, return once again to blow up any pieces that looked like they could still sustain terrestrial life. So, because Heidelberg was so dull that the Allies ignored it, it is now one of the few cities in Germany where the majority of oldest buildings were built pre-1945.
The Heidelberg castle looms over the old part of the city (also looms above my head in this photo) and while it looks a bit like it was bombed, it in fact has not faced hostile fire since the Palantine war of succession (yeah, I had to look it up too). It mostly just suffered from neglect and bad luck, having been struck by lightning and later used as a stone quarry for the local rich. The view from the castle is killer, but the sight not to be missed is "the Barrel."
OK, you could miss it and make through the rest of your life without any significant regrets, but it IS a very big barrel. It is capable of holding some 220,000 liters (that's 58,000 gallons to those us metric-ally impaired), and is in fact the largest wooden barrel ever actually used to hold wine. I figure that in 1751 it was what the typical over-compensating Count purchased instead of a Ferrari.
This claim to fame oddly implies someone built an even bigger wine barrel somewhere, but never had the stones to actually pour wine into it. A simple google search finds that it is twice the size of the current wine barrel record, and in further even more unhelpful news: the largest wooden barrel factory in the world is right here in the good ole USA! But I can't find any mention of a bigger barrel, so perhaps the Germans are being unnecessarily coy.
Seriously. It is a big barrel. No one would dispute it.
Producing considerably less excitement is the Apothecary museum, also located at the castle. Apothecaries were medieval Pharmacists, always good for a poulstice or a purgative to help you with your palsy, catarrh, or excessive choler. What apothecaries had were lots and lots of jars. So if you want to see lots and lots of jars an apothecary museum is the place for you. And yes, bring the kiddies, as they also have a wonderful Kinderapotheke, where they will have non-stop fun opening and closing empty jars.
While at the castle I was not on any sort of official tour. In fact, the conference I was at had basically just dumped us out with a "Have Fun" for 2 hours. There are not two hours of things to do at the Castle (see Apothecary museum, above). There were some official tours wandering around. Not all were in English, but enough were that I caught some bits and pieces. The best bit and/or piece was about this "footprint" in the stone of the castle balcony. Now the flagstones are solid stone, so it is highly unlikely the shape could be anything more than some flaw in the stone that had weathered strangely (footshape-ishly?) with time.
Still, more than one tour was told a tale of an unfaithful Countess and her paramour. The Count returned early, so the lover grabbed his trousers and sprang from the window to the balcony far below, leaving the print. Fantastic tale until you realized that the leaper had to clear 50-60 horizontal feet to even make it to the stone in question. Meaning he would have to leap from such a height that there really should have been a large, puddle-shaped depression in the ground.
After a full five days of talks covering the minutia of the properties of galaxies that can be discovered by studying one transition line of hydrogen (in its defense, it really is a very powerful transition line... the biggest, really) I was ready to stretch my legs a bit. On the north side of the Neckar river the land rises up rapidly. About a third of the way up runs the Philosophenweg, or Philosopher's Way, a strolling path that was once used by the likes of Goethe and Heidegger to clear their heads for really big thoughts. Or possibly to romance young German maidens.
So either I strolled the same pathways used to unlock some of the mysteries of human existence, or I wandered the same roads used to get into the lederhosen of the some Bavarian Milk Frau Farbissina.To go all the "Way", one has to gain some serious altitude quickly. By the time I climbed up the narrow, tunnel-like stairway I was huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf, although fortunately no houses were damaged thanks to the general lack of Germanic straw housing. Once up there the views were fairly spectacular, although there was a lot of haze making it difficult to far into the distance.
Above the Philly-way is some lovely German forest that one can hike up through. To climb all the way to the top is about twice the vertical gain of the initial ascent to the Way, but it is much more gradual with lots of gorgeous spots to hang out and just be. Fall is just a great time to do the hike, as not only is the temperature pleasant, but everywhere is a thin layer of leaves that transform every journey into a shush-sush of floating through the trees.
At the top of the mountain (Pfft. they call anything over 1500 ft a mountain. If you ain't a mile up, it ain't a mountain.) Lies the Heiligenberg, which translates as "Holy Mountain".I did not follow the arrow to Hirschgasse, so I do not know what it is, nor do I want to. Knowing the Germans, it is probably a dark place, lost in the misty shadows of time, where the faerie folken once ruled and seek to again, if only a tiny tear in the fabric of reality can be made using the misguided actions of a bumbling but well-meaning professor or similarly bookish academic-type. No sir, I would have nothing to do with that probable Hellscape-to-be.
Hmmm. A Google search indicates Hirschgasse is probably just a Guest House with a couple of charming restaurants.
But most likely dark, malevolent restaurants where the supper... is you! Or a beef pie with a side of julianned carrots. So choose wisely!
Ahem. Where was I?... Oh yes. Heiligenberg.
Heiliginberg has been a site of worship for just about as long as anyone can remember, going back to the days of the Romans who built a temple during their stay here (and by stay, I mean the time they spent slaughtering barbarian germanic hordes.) That same sight become St. Michael's Monastery sometime about a thousand years ago. Here is a shot of the ruins taken from the highest remaining bell tower, the tippy-tippiest top of the mountain. (It still grates. You just don't grow up at the foot of the San Gabriel mountains and call 1500 feet a mountain. My front door step was 1500 feet.)
Now if you got a Holy mountain top, no reason to skimp on your monastaries. A second one, St. Stephan's is about 5-10 minutes walk from the first. It also has one remaining tower, from which I took this vertigo-inducing shot. Neither of these towers which I climbed actually withstood the centuries, of course, but were rebuilt/restored so German hikers would have something further to climb as they ran out of hill (There, I said it. It's a Hill. I feel better now.). The St. Stephan monastery was restored over a century ago, although obviously with regular maintenance since then.
All very charming, I hear someone saying, but when I go to Germany, I want creepy reminders of one of the grimmest periods in human history. Well, you are in luck, for the Nazis built a giant outdoor amphitheater on the Holy Mountain top, between the sites of the two ex-manastaries. The Nazis, of course, loved the idea of a place that might once used for the worship of Wotan being adapted for propaganda rallys run by Goebbels himself. The place practically hums with that Roman/pagan fascist architectural vibe the Nazis loved so much. You can almost hear the hollering crowds of intolerance. It is called the Thingstatte, apparently named after an ancient Nordic/Germanic gathering of people in an outdoor setting (a "Thing"). To me the name conjures images of some sort of prehistoric leviathan that has crawled its way from the lightless depths of the sea to feed upon unsuspecting mankind, as helpless and vulnerable as a newborn babe before its awesome hunger.
So that works too, I think.
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I am going to try and kick start this blog, which has been decidedly languishing for some time. I have about six months of architecture and babies to catch up on which is probably too much, but I will try and summarize some of the best bits in the next few posts. I know people come for the babies, not the travelogs. In parting, let me pass on the inscription emblazoned on the bridge, next to the Heidelberg Monkey, translated of course. To fully appreciate the quote and statue, it might help to know what that big disk the monkey holding is supposed to be:
A mirror.
"Why are you looking at me? Haven't you seen the monkey in Heidelberg? Look around and you will probably see, more monkeys like me."
