Day 31 Monday 1 May 2017

Happy May Day to you true believers out there (if there are any left, although I can think of a couple).

Welcome aboard Leanne, better late than never.

On my last train trip of the journey, a two hour train trip from Nuremberg to Frankfurt.  I was talking to a couple from Qld (not FNQ) on the platform before the train arrived and we were discussing why Australia can't have a train system like Germany or most of Western Europe for that matter, eh.  Think of all the money wasted on Rudd's pink batts debacle or the Julia Gillard memorial school halls debacle or the flat screen in every household bonus debacle.  Not to mention the $1.4 billion we Victorians spent on a road that doesn't exist.  If this money had been invested in something nation building we might have had the start of a east coast high speed rail link.  

I have become a bit of an expert on snooker on this trip.  You may not be aware of it but the world snooker championships have been playing for the last two weeks somewhere in England.  Now this has been televised on German television with German commentary, but as snooker is a very visual sport the commentary is completely unecessary for the enjoyment of the game.  It has been about the only thing on television that I have been able to watch (apart from some appalling Italian cabaret shows like something from Australian 1960's television).  The snooker is up to the grand final, Higgins (underdog) is leading Shelby (current world champ) 10 frames to 6 in a best of 35 competition, I'm rooting for Higgsie!

Will post this from the train, more to come, if I see or do anything interesting in Frankfurt.

Days 29 & 30 Saturday & Sunday 29 & 30 April 2017

Ladies if you are deciding what the fashion is going to be for the upcoming season I suggest that you do not throw out your jeans with the holes in them.  Everybody is wearing jeans with holes in them, even some chaps.

As last night was my last Saturday night in Europe I decided I would go the whole hog, so to speak, for dinner.  Having experienced some difficulty getting into a restaurant on Friday I decided I would try a new strategy.  I will digress slightly here, on Friday and Saturday nights when the restaurants are really busy they are loath to take up a table with a single diner when they could put a couple in, I have been turned away, or ignored while they find a table for the couple behind me.  Anyway I was determined not to experience this on Saturday night, so late in the afternoon when I was walking back to my hotel I went past a restaurant where I had lunch the day before, so I went in there and made a reservation for one, gotcha!

Just changing locations down to the bar, to be continued.

Now in the bar waiting on my vodka & tonic.  So dinner on saturday night was pork shoulder and potato dumpling accompanied by kellarbier.  When you walk into the restaurant you walk past a window looking into the kitchen and in there you can see a large glass fronted oven with I reckon 50 or 60 roasted pork shoulders sitting in there.  The pork shoulder is a large lump of roast pork topped by a large lump of pork crackling, the potato dumpling is a dense ball of mashed potato all sitting in a pool of beer gravy, where can you go wrong with that.  Kellarbier is a speciality of the region and is a local brew drawn straight from the barrel located in the kellar, which is German for cellar.  This beer is served in a half litre porcelain mug probably so that you can't see how cloudy it is, but it is delicious and refreshing.  In a very large restaurant I reckon about 90% of the patrons were having the pork shoulder,

On Saturday I did a combined morning and afternoon walking tour led by our tour guide, Chris a 20 something surfer dude from the northern beaches of Sydney.  He has been living in Germany for 7 years or so.  The morning part of the tour was around the old town and was the usual array of market places, churches and castles.

Church in Nuremberg - blue skies

The afternoon involved catching a bus to the former nazi party rally grounds.  As I have mentioned before this was where Hitler and his cronies held their big propagander driven rallies and parades.  There is a documentation centre (modern museum) there as well as the unfinished nazi Congress Hall (when the congress hall was finished it was to be twice the size of the colloseum in Rome) and the Zeppelin Field where the rallies were held.  The modern day Germans are in a real quandry as to what to do with these buildings and facilities.  The original buildings on the site, congress hall and the zeppelin field grandstands are all crumbling and falling into disrepair.  The Germans want to leave these facilities as they are to show what has happened in 70 years to buildings that were supposed to last for a 1,000 years as the showpieces of the 3rd reich.  However they can't allow the buildings to deteriorate much more as they would then be unsafe.  This now becomes a political and moral minefield as they do not want to be seen to be spending money on restoring or maintaining nazi facilities.

A couple of Hitler's follies

The Germans still have real issues as to how they deal with the physical, moral and political fallout from the nazi era.  Maybe somebody should write a book about it one day.

On Sunday, continuing the nazi German theme I visited the site of the Nuremberg trials.  This involved my first foray with the Nuremberg undergound, the railway system, not a political movement.   Court room 600 at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice is where the trials of the leading Nazis took place after the end of the war.  Court room 600 is still a working court room and although the court room is laid out differently it is very easy to see how the court appeared for the trials of the leading nazis, a number of whom were executed as a result of the verdicts reached in this room.

Court rooom 600 - IMT (International Military Tribunal)

Upstairs in the roof space above the court room is a very (very) detailed display about the court, the processes and outcomes of the trials.  It is extremely well done but for the casual visitor far to detailed.  To see, watch and listen to everything would have taken many hours, so I skipped some parts that were probably important to the people who put the display together but not to me.  What is important from the Nuremberg trials is that they set the groundwork for the Nuremberg Principles that now form the basis for the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

So back out into the sunlight, beautiful day here today, sunny and about 16 degrees.  Train back into Nuremberg and Italian for lunch sitting in the sunshine on the edged of the old market square, listening to some bloke playing a piano accordian.  Now this is what European holidays are supposed to be about, not trudging through snow in dark leaden skies.

Ex Con Tiki bus I reckon

Catching the train to Frankfurt tomorrow (Monday) and then flying out of Frankfurt on Tuesday.

(wi fi is really slow for posting pics, more pics to come)

Day 28 Friday 28 April 2017

Quick blog entry, this is the view from my hotel room this morning!

It is 9.00am and still snowing

How cold is it going to be on the station platform this morning????

A photo from the train just out of Munich, obviously a lot more snow on the ground here than in the city.

Well I finally found my castle today, I know that it is a castle cause it is at the top of a bloody big hill.  Much more of this and I will have legs like a mountaing goat, I don't mean hairy and smelly, I mean taut and muscley.  Luckily I have been keeping fit on a diet of sausages, sauerkraut, potatoes and beer.  Nuremberg castle isnt a big castle as far as castles go, but it is old and at one time was one of the main castles in the Holy Roman Empire which was a pretty big deal back in the day.

Nuremberg is another of the German cities that was almost totally destroyed in WW2, or as I call it NTGW (Not the Great War), and was rebuilt after the war.  What I find amazing is that they rebuilt in the style of the original city, with the old medieval style buildings, including the churches and public buildings replicated so that as you wander around now you think that these buildings are hundreds of years old when in fact they are less than 70 - 80 years old.  The castle was heavily damaged and has been substantially rebuilt.

How old do you reckon this building is? Prize for neatest correct entry

Nuremberg was heavily bombed as it was an industrial centre and transport hub but was also seen as a city that had been integral to the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930's.  The nazi rallies that we have seen in the old black & white movies were held here and the infamous Nuremberg laws that codified the nazi views on racism were passed here.  

Of course the Nuremberg trials were held here after the war, but that is a different matter and will be dealt with at another time.

I am doing a walking tour tomorrow that includes a lot of the old town but also visits the site of the nazi rallies.  It is going to be a balmy 12 degrees tomorrow, might have to break out the sunscreen.

Day 26 & 27 Wednesday & Thursday 26 & 27 April 2017

There is no danger of me ever getting scurvy, the amount of sauerkraut I have eaten should protect me for life.

I went to the concentration camp site at Dachau today (Wednesday).  I reckon the temperature did not exceed 4 degrees all day and when it stopped raining it snowed.  The novelty is starting to wear off for the snow.

The forecast for tomorrow is similar.

I did a guided tour of Dachau from Munich, the tour guide was an American who had lived in Munich for the last 40 something years.  The concentration camp site is located just outside the village of Dachau which is now pretty much a suburb of Munich.  Our little tour group caught the S-Bahn train from Munich to Dachau and then a local bus service to the concentration camp site.  For those of you who are interested Dachau was the 1st concentration camp built by the Germans and it operated from 1933 to 1945.  It was originally built as a camp for political prisoners and was never intended to be used as an extermination camp such as Auschwitz.  But having said that it is estimated that of the 230,000 or so prisoners that went through Dachau more than 30,000 died.  The majority of these prisoners died of hunger, maltreatment and disease rather than deliberate killing, although many prisoners died as a result of punishment handed out by the Germans.

I didnt take many photos as, one it was either raining or snowing and I didn't want to get my camera wet and secondly I didn't feel comfortable with some of the photo opportunities on offer.  Anyway a couple of general photos of the camp follow.

This morning (Thursday) was cold and wet, what a surprise!  Nothing formal planned for today so after breakfast in the hotel, which was included as part of the deal, I donned coat, hat, gloves, thick socks and boots and ventured forth.

I wanted to have a look around some parts of Munich that I hadn't already visited and go back to a couple of places for a better look.  For a couple of reasons today's itinerary included a couple of churches.  The first reason is that if you are visiting a church you are indoors and not getting wet, although I dont think that they waste a lot of money on heating.  The second reason is their role in the history of these places.  Munich and Bavaria generally is still strongly Roman Catholic, the rest of Germany, particularly in the North is Protestant.  For whatever reason the reformation didn't reach this far south.

I also visited the only TGW memorial that I have seen in Germany.  I have attached a couple of photos instead of trying to describe it.

My walk today included a stroll through part of the English Garden, the term garden is a misnomer as it is bigger than either Hyde or Central park.  There is a large open area and apparently in nicer weather people sunbathe there nude, although there wasn't any nude sunbathing there today although I had my zoom lense ready just in case.

The other thing is that I haven't seen any squirrels! I thought that they would be all over the place, maybe they are still in their little squirrel holes eating their nuts.

Now here is a funny sight that you don't see every day;

and another pic just for the sake of it;

For lunch today I had beer goulash with a massive dumpling in the middle accompanied by a beer and a pretzel, no sauerkraut though.  Through the day today I discovered an Irish Bar that also has the Ned Kelly Australian Bar, so that is an option for dinner tonight.

Leaving Munich tomorrow and on the train to Nuremberg.

Day 25 Tuesday 25 April 2017 (Anzac Day)

Dreary rainy day in Munich, but in the interests of providing my readers with more interesting and entertaining stories I donned my coat and ventured forth.

Immediately I was struck by an opportunity to include a food picture, see below;

The Bavarians and the Germans as a whole are mad about fresh asparagus and it is currently the middle of the asparagus season.  Their asparagus is very white and often quite large almost the size of a banana.  Asparagus and strawberries are sold all over the place from these streetside stalls, as above.

I did a walking tour this morning, again a good way of getting a bit of a feel for the place.  During our walking tour we visited the largest of the beer halls, the Hofbrau Haus.  Whilst we were there the tour guide explained how there is a system of regular customers marking their tables and heaven help any innocent traveller/drinker who may inadvertanatly sit at one of those tables, she also advised that sometimes the indicators may be subtle and vary from bar to bar.

We were also taken to Munich's favourite (only?) surfing place.  Wow, I hear you say, Munich is 100s of kilometres away from the sea, how do they go surfing?  Patience little ones, all will be explained.  There is a swift flowing stream that runs through the English Garden, (Munich's equivalent of Hyde park or Central park) anyway at a certain point the water in this stream crosses a weir wall producing a major wave and this is what the surfies surf on.

So this is how you go surfing in Munich.

So now for a funny story.  After the tour finished I was lookng for a suitable establishment for some lunch and rehydration.  I found a nice little bar/restaurant and found a handy bench to sit at near the bar.  The bar wasnt very busy and was only about half full.  Anyway I ordered my lunch, meat loaf with warm potato salad, served with two different types a mustard and a beer poured from a wooden barrel. Anyway I was halfway through all this and a respectable older German gentleman entered the bar, greeted everybody by name and sat down at the same bench as me but opposite.  I thought, 'this is strange, there are lots of other places for him to sit' but we nodded greetings and he went about his beer.  I finished my lunch ordered another beer and drank that feeling a little uncomfortable.  Then the man's wife came in, ordered a beer and sat at the same bench, it was getting a little crowded by now.  Looking casually around the bar I observed that some tables and benches had a wooly halo thing over them.  I looked up and there was a little wooly halo over my bench.  Then I recalled the tour guide's advice from this morning, I was sitting at this man's private bench without realising it.  I must admit he took it very well, didn't glare at me or anything.  I finished my beer and with gracious auf wiedersehens all round made my exit.

I have just found out it is going to be 4 degrees tomorrow!  I am going to do a guided tour to Dachau tomorrow so will need to get rugged up for that.

I have just got back from dinner, schnitzel, a mountain of fried potato, a small salad and apfelstrudel mit cream and ice cream and a couple of beers.  Lucky I am walking a lot.

I will finish up with this little story.  The tour guide today mentioned the mistress of one of the King Ludwigs of Bavaria and the mistresse's name was Lola Montez.  This name rang a bell with me, it turns out that after Lola ( who was English born) had to flee Bavaria and seek refuge in Switzerland she somehow turned up in the goldfields in Victoria as a dancer.  She danced a dance called the 'spider dance' in which she showed her knickers, or would have done if she was wearing any.  Imagine the furore that would have caused in Melbourne in the 1850's.  There is also a story of her horsewhipping the editor of a Ballarat newspaper for giving her act a bad review.  Great story from royal mistress in Bavaria to exotic dancer in 1850's Victoria and various other adventures before, during and after.

On that note good night from me.

Day 24 Monday 24 April 2017

On the train from Prague to Munich with extremely dodgy wifi, so will see how it goes.

A big thank you to Flashy for his detailed explanation of the term 'defenestration',  as an ex altar boy he would certainly be familiar with the latin roots (so to speak) of the word.

As the train left Prague the sun was shining, it was about 2 or 3 degrees but promising to be a fine day.  The wi fi on the train isn't up to giving me a weather forecast for Munich so I will just have to wait and see.

The train is just crossing the border, leaving the Czech Republic and heading back into Germany, still about 3 hours to Munich.  Everything just got neater and tidier so I think we have crossed the border into Germany.

I need to gather my thoughts a bit about Prague.  They certainly don't go out of their way to make visitors and tourists feel welcome.  There is no signage in English or German, even at the tourist spots.  At the station this morning trying to find the international train departure area was difficult as the station signage was all in Czech.  Once you got to the international area the departure information board had a smattering of information in German and English.  Even the French do better than this.

The other thing is that you always have the feeling that the Czechs are trying to separate you from your funds.  As an example, if you go into a bar they may have some pretzels hanging from a wooden frame on your table or on the bar.   Hmmmm you say, I might have one of those, at your peril, you will be charged through the nose for it.  The other trick is to give you a basket of bread with your meal, hmmm you think I will have a piece of bread. Again you will be charged extra as the bread is not included in the price of the meal.  If you don't touch it you won't be charged.

But I did like the old town and the medieval feel of the place,  it was an interesting town to walk around as you were never quite sure what you would find at the end of the street, or even where you were actually going to be.  The buildings and the history were all interesting and like a lot of these European cities they have been at the centre of dramatic historical events both recent and in the distant past.

The Jewish quarter was interesting, pre 2nd world war Prague had a Jewish population of I think 70 to 80,000; after the war the Jewish population was something like 2,000.  There are something like 6 or 7 synagogues in the Jewish quarter and a Jewish museum.  Hitler had the bizarre idea of putting all the material looted from the synagogues all around Europe in a Museum in Prague, although this never quite got of the ground for some reason or another.

Must be nearly time for a beer on the train, so I will see if I can post this and I may come back to it later, or then again I may not.  I might need a nap after my beer.

Days 22 & 23 Saturday & Sunday 22 & 23 April 2017

First up, Clair, thank you for your comments, but of course the difference was that I always knew when I'd had enough and knew when it was time to go home.

Flashy, you are right about the word hotel emblazoned on the front of the building, it is very handy.  The other thing is it is the only word in the Czech language that has any resemblance to the English equivalent.

To the guys at the Shrine, have a good Anzac Day, I trust it all goes well without too much drama.  I will be in Munich for Anzac Day, might have to find the nearest RSL for a game of two up.

 I have never used a map for finding my way around a city as much as I have done here.  And I am not alone, street corners are clogged with people looking at the maps and trying to compare them to the incomprehensible street names.

The city of Prague is an old European city and few of the streets go in straight lines and most are narrow.  So you start off walking along a narrow winding street going in a certain direction thinking that you know where you are going to end up, and then lo, you pop out onto a square somewhere nowhere near where you intended.  Not a problem, you just reorientate and head of again.  Most things are close and easily  walkable, eventually.

Prague has three really significant tourist attractions and a heap of lesser ones.  I will deal with the biggies.

Tourist attraction number one is the castle/cathedral complex.  The castle is high up on a hill, castles were usually built on hill so the occupants could drop boulders on any attackers.  On Saturday, which was wet and cold (8 degrees max less 4 degrees wind chill, felt like 4 degrees) I decided to visit the castle and cathedral and a number of other sites on the hill top.  I could have caught the train up or walked, I chose to walk.  This involved a rather long walk, mostly up hill and when I got to the square in front of the castle there was a queue of people about 300 metres long standing in the wind and the rain waiting to get in.  Not this little wood duck.  I visited a couple of the lesser sites on top of the hill and made my way back down again.

This brings us to major tourist site number two, the Charles Bridge.  This was named after some important bloke called, wait for it, Charles and was built in 1342 or thereabouts.  Tens of thousands of tourists visit this bridge every day.  Now, dont get me wrong, this is a very nice bridge and it crosses a very nice river, but at the end of the day it is a bridge across a river.

I bet you can hardly wait for biggie number three.  Number three is the astronomical clock in the old town square.  This clock is in a tower that was built in 1342 or thereabouts.  Every hour, on the hour the clock puts on a little show, this involves two trap doors above the clock opening and the disciples appearing in the little windows, 6 on one side and 6 on the other.

This display last 45 seconds!  Hundreds of people wait in the square in front from one hour to the next to see this, it is almost like it is a miracle of some sort.  The Czech tourist people claim this to be the most visited tourist attraction in Europe!

It may not sound like it but I have enjoyed my stay here.  Walking around the old town streets is an adventure with lots of little bars, bistros, ice cream shops and food stalls.  The market places, and there are lots of them are great, busy and colourful.  There is a huge amount of history here, and they even invented execution by defenestration (look it up).

After yesterday's sojourn up the hill and back down again, I visited the Fat Cat Pub and Brewery for lunch.  This is a bright modern bar, in contrast to the older style bars which are quite often dark and gloomy, although their food and beer are still good.  Anyway the Fat Cat served a taster flight of 6 of their own brews.

I had one of those followed by a number (I think three) of their light ales (light in colour, not strength) and to eat I had the roasted pork shoulder.  This is a Prague standard and every restaurant has it on it's menu.  Most places state the weight and mine was 1kg (including the bone of course), this was served with mustard and dried sauerkraut and strangely a toasted loaf of bread.  This was extremely filling and I staggered out of there about 3 in the afternoon with a tummy on me like a poisoned pup.  The pork shoulder, 3 half litre beers and the tasting flight cost me 1,000 krowns, including tip, or about $50 Australian.

I haven't even got to good King Wencleslas, save him for another day.

I am going by train to Munich tomorrow (Monday), so more good food and beer to come.