I went to the public market in the morning. It was full of beautiful fruit, vegetables, and flowers. There was quite a bit of the white asparagus that the Germans like. I walked to the medieval and highly decorated Ste. Anna church, with its attached “Luther Steps” museum which was well worth seeing. Luther stayed here when it was a monastery. The pope sent a legate down to terrorize him. The legate yelled at him but he yelled right back. The church went Protestant a few years later, ha ha.
They were having a small prayer service while I was there, and their chanting sounded just exactly like the Catholic chanting of my youth, except it was in German. There are dozens of dead people buried in the walls and floor, and I was wondering if, after the Reformation, the corpses who chose to remain Catholic were dug up and moved up to the Catholic cathedral a mile north.
I walked up to the Dom, the ancient cathedral which is still Catholic. It is also full of dozens of dead people in the walls and floor, with stone and marble tributes, some elaborate. Next to it is a little plaza with Roman-era ruins.
I also visited the beautiful synagogue, built in about 1913. The Nazis set it on fire on Kristallnacht in '38, but because there were adjacent goyish establishments, including a gas station, the fire brigade extinguished the fire instead of watching it burn, as was they usually did when Jewish-owned buildings were burning. After that it was used as a place to gather Jews enroute to their death, and as administrative offices. It has now been restored and there is a very nice museum cataloging Jewish life in Augsburg through the centuries.
Then I walked to the train station and bought my ticket to the town of Nördlingen, which I plan to visit tomorrow.
There are plenty of platzes with fountains and benches, and people enjoying the spring sunshine. When tottering around looking at stuff, you have to dodge bikes and streetcars.
Vignettes:
When you pass a person on an empty street, the other person doesn’t say hi.
People don’t say Guten Tag here. They say “Grüß Gott,” usually heard as “Sget!”
Hardly anybody wears a hat or sunglasses, even when it’s sunny.
In the Karlstadt department store, I saw a dapper older gentleman with his little dog on a leash, perusing the displays of the weird men’s euro-underwear.
Here are some Hungarian potato chips. You can't GET them in America!
Tuesday afternoon I drove from Delaware to Dulles Airport. I had to backtrack on the Virginia beltway TWICE, because in Virginia they don't call the Dulles Toll Road "The Dulles Toll Road." They call it some number instead. I took the toll road instead of the free road because I had arranged to park at a nearby hotel.
Security was intense. They x-rayed my whole body with the machine, and then a big beefy TSA guy asked what the "massive object" in my back pocket was. I had forgotten to take out my wallet and passport. So he looked them over and inside of them, and then he rubbed chemical-infused papers on the palms of my hands. Then he told me he had to pat me down on the ass and inner thighs, which he did. I was a little bit insulted that he thought rubber gloves were necessary, but I didn't say anything. He said I had a nice ass, but I bet he says that to everybody.
As advertised, the Icelandair flight offered no food and no freebees except a small soft drink. The seats were bad but by no means the worst. Iceland looked like a lake of frozen mud. The airport buildings and the dwellings I could see sort of reminded me of Alice Springs, except there were no trees at all, let alone gum trees.
I thought it was kind of charming that the Icelanders wanted to stamp my passport. What a perky li’l country! But when I got off the plane in Munich and walked from the plane right out onto the street, I realized that in Iceland I had somehow entered the Eurozone (although Iceland doesn’t use euros).
I got euros from the wall, got the bus to the Munich Hauptbahnhof (a LONG bus ride -- the city is big, like Chicago) and bought a ticket to Augsburg from the machine, and hopped right on the train. In an hour I was here, and clumpedy-clumped my carry-on across town on the cobblestones. The Airbnb place I’m staying is in the back of Madame Tamtam’s seamstress shop. She (real name Rebecca) gives lessons in sewing and garment design in the shop out front. The building is about 500 years old, and I think it has the original front door and massive iron latch.
The east side of town is a series of little parallel streams. You can see them down below and alongside the streets, and there are railings so you don’t fall in. At the end of the street there is an overfall with a spiffy little electric generator tucked between the buildings, humming away. The little streams flow into the river Lech, which runs northward to the Danube.
Rebecca doesn’t have wifi so I compute and get coffee at Henry’s Coffee on the Rathausplatz, using their wifi.
Augsburg is a very pretty, booming, middle-size town, which is just what I was looking for. It’s bustling with shoppers and eaters, and some beggars and buskers. I hear Turkish on the street, but I’m not noticing tourists at all, and that’s pretty nice. Maybe it’s snobby of me, but I like it. The multi-level center has a maze of cobbled street, passageways, fountains, and stone steps.
For over a year, I’ve been studying German on my phone at the fitness center instead of working out, and it made a difference. The signs are almost all transparent now, and I can order my train ticket from the machine and my food at eateries.
