Wednesday & Thursday, September 28th and 29th

HAMBURG

Wednesday was a long day. First I took a train from Görlitz north to Cottbus, on the single-track railroad north through the woods of east Saxony - mostly beech, oak, and pine. At a tiny burg, the train stopped at the double-track station to let the southbound train go past. 

The train passed a station way out in the boonies of Brandenburg with the sign "Brand - Tropical Islands." Just like that, in English. WTF? So I looked it up later. 

It turns out it's a resort inside a huge HUGE balloon-like structure built for an airship "cargo-lifter" scheme that went bankrupt. It is the 2nd largest building on earth, and the largest without internal supports, located out in the Brandenburg wilderness. It was bought by a Malaysian concern and is now a resort, with the biggest indoor rain forest in the world, a beach, many tropical plants and a number of swimming pools, bars and restaurants inside of it (website here). This is what it will be like for us when we live in a bubble on Mars. 

Why fly to the tropics when you can take the wife and kids on the train from Berlin for a tropical weekend? Pretty amazing.

At Cottbus I "climbed around" (as the Germans say) to the train to Berlin, and there I had to go down to the "tief" tracks way down below the station to find the fast ICE train. It zooms to Hamburg in just two hours. In one stretch is was doing 150 mph. In Hamburg I found the S-Bahn to the Reeperbahn station and schlepped to Axel's airbnb hostel very near the amazing high life of the Reeperbahn. He was at the door to meet me.

He's a big pudgy nice Hamburg guy, showed me everything, and helped me get on his funny wifi. He was effusively helpful, with good English. When I was testing whether I had managed to get on his wifi or not, I went to google maps and randomly put in "Detroit." Axel saw it and said he's been there -- his band played there! At the downtown Ramada on Bagley! They told him if he went outside, not to walk east.

Axel's hostel is a warren of little rooms each with a bed, a TV, and a sink. There are common showers and toilets. It's $35 a night. He said when he bought it 15 years ago it was already a hostel, but he thinks originally it was a whore house, since there are 10  little rooms, each with just a bed and a sink. Makes sense. Plus, it's near the notorious Reeperbahn.

I asked him if there's any area that I should avoid walking in and he said no, everyplace is pretty safe. "Safer than Detroit," he said.

Axel said the harbor was just a few blocks away so I headed in that direction. And WHOA! I found out that I'm right next to Hans Albers Platz! With his statue in the middle! 

I'm pretty sure people who look at this blog don't know who Hans Albers was, but I do because of my interest in old German movies and Schlagermusik. He was a hugely famous singer and actor, a true and beloved son of Hamburg - Hamburg personified. He made over 160 films and was the most famous German film actor of the 1930s and 40s. 

He also had many hits as a singer. Here he is singing "On the Reeperbahn at Half Past Midnight," from the movie of the same name. The clip also shows scenes of the wild nightlife right where I'm staying -- I recognize all the street names. Albers starts singing at about 1:30 on the clip, but at least watch the first part to see what it was like here in 1954 (not 1943 like it says). His singing really sucks, as I'm sure you will agree if you listen to it. (Note the horse having a beer.)

In his Platz there is still a "Kult-Kneipe" (cult pub) with pictures of Albers all over it. He's been dead for over 50 years, and I thought maybe they've milked this way beyond its expiration date, and that nobody younger than me knows who he is, even in Hamburg. But I was WRONG, as I'll explain later.

Here is Albers in his heyday, with co-star Lilian Harvey ("The Sweetest Girl in the World") from the 1932 classic UFA film "Quick". Lilian falls in love with a clown (Albers), but spurns him when he is out of makeup, failing to see it is the same person. Ha ha! What a merry mixup! The whole stinky movie is on Youtube here, for your enjoyment (in German with French subtitles). 

Slade's son has been here in the Reeperbahn area with his band, and he had told me about it. The neighborhood is over-the-top seedy, with dozens of flashy sexy nightclubs, sex shows, sex shops, betting shops, gun shops, and very very many liquor stores and bars. It's also where Beatles-Platz is, since they played here at a few clubs when getting their start in 1960. Everybody here seems so happy! (Not counting the dudes sleeping on the sidewalk with shit stains on the seats of their pants). 

Here are three old dudes almost as old as me (but with more teeth), laughing and yacking and drinking beer off the top of a city trash can.

I bet you always wondered where the Wodka Bomb was invented. Well, here ya go. Reeperbahn, Hamburg.

My hostel room has its window right on the sidewalk, and Axel had left a mint and a pair of earplugs on my pillow. But it's the middle of the week so it's not so bad, and besides, I like the noise. Here are some more pictures of the area

Around the corner on the Platz I saw a bedraggled old lady making mini-pizzas in a wood-fired oven inside a little storefront that said "Pizza 2€" so I ordered two of the veggie ones. They were yummy.

Wednesday I took a tour of the huge complicated harbor on a little boat, watching big cranes load and unload containers from gynormous ships.

As we passed one unbelievably huge self-loading ro-ro container ship, the tour guy said that that ship usually came into port here to load up with "used cars for the Africa market."

The tour boat dropped me off at the Harbor Museum,  a big complex of old-fashioned ships, boats, huge floating cranes, and a big warehouse full of machines and winches and tools and tally-man office equipment and big scales and barrels and boxes and kegs, and sacks of exotic spices and raw rubber, stacked up to the rafters on many shelves. It's all remnants of the way they used to load and unload cargo in the pre-container days. The whole "museum" is being managed and organized and massaged by a bunch of retired port duffers who love this stuff, and it's a huge interesting mess.

I was hungry and there was a sign there for some kind of little gedunk, so I yelled in "Hallo" at the counter and a nice fifty-ish lady came out. I asked if there was anything to eat, and she seemed slightly flustered and asked me if I was a worker on the museum ship. Turns out they really don't serve any food, really, despite what the sign said. 

She asked if she could fix me a nice schmaltz sandwich, and she showed me the schmaltz. It wasn't orange like Spanish manteca - it was just gray fat with onions in it. She said it was delicious and good for you. I said nah. So she said how about a nice frikadelle and some of her home-made potato salad? I said das wäre geil (that'd be cool) so that's what she fixed me, plus a cup of coffee, €5.50. The frikadelle was a hamburger-shaped hunk of tough grisly ground meat, but not un-tasty with mustard. It was fun talking with that jolly lady.

On Thursday after spending three hours in the historical museum, which is very big and thorough, I stopped in at the Hans Albers Cult Pub on his platz near his statue, and had a conversation with the bartender, an older lady (but a lot younger than me). She said Albers used to hang out right there, and she pointed to a wall covered with Hans Albers memorabilia. 

Hans Albers Memorial wall, in his Kneipe

She also put one of his stinky songs on the jukebox, just for me (it was "On the Reeperbahn at Half Past Midnight," so I could act real smart and tell her the year and the movie's name). She claimed young Germans ARE aware of Albers, and come to that place to worship his memory. (Hmm. I think maybe not). As I left, she was serving a large group of young French tourists who, I assure you, had never heard of Hans Albers.

I went over to the nearby Greek restaurant and ordered take-away moussaka for my dinner here at the squat. While I waited, I had a long conversation in Greek with the proprietor, a friendly older guy (but younger than me) who was doing sudoku out of the newspaper. He said Greeks have ALWAYS been in Germany -- for work, for political reasons, and because of shipping. He asked all about where and why I was in Greece. I told him we had a son who was born there and he asked if he was still there - a Greek. Ha ha. The guy is from the Thessaloniki area and has been in Germany for 34 years. Before I left, he insisted that I have an ouzo with him.

Random observations:

Hamburg is FULL of black people and brown people, more than any German city I've seen. But I see very few Chinese/Korean/Japanese-looking people.

If you walk into a drug store and ask for a small package of kleenex, they give you one for free.

All the streets of downtown Hamburg are covered with litter. Little street sweepers patrol the sidewalks at night, but the next day they're all messed up again.

 In the open pedestrian areas near the train station, people (men and women mixed) sit in circles on the pavement and drink beer and wine and talk.

People drink beer and eat on the subway trains. People are walking around on the sidewalks with bottles of beer in their hands all the time. Lots of them. Bars and restaurants have signs that say "All of our cocktails can be ordered to go."

Sunday, September 25

GÖRLITZ

Görlitz is the eastern-most town in Germany. I wanted to see it for two reasons. First, my high school German teacher Herr Heuser was from Breslau, in Silesia (now in Poland), and he told stories. As the Red Army advanced through Germany, Breslau was declared a "Festung" (fortress) - the Führer said the people should stay and fight and he wouldn't let them evacuate, so when the Red Army came through they destroyed the city. 18,000 people froze to death and 40,000 civilians lay dead in the ruins of homes and factories. So I was interested in Silesia, and Görlitz has a Silesian Museum.

The second reason is that Görlitz is the only German town of its size (about 55K people) that didn't get bombed during the war at all. And after that, the East German government didn't invest much in its infrastructure. So almost everything you see is unchanged, and the way it used to be.

The downtown is very pretty, with big old kept-up medieval buildings and churches, but outside of that there are streets and streets of empty clapped-out buildings, some even with plywood on the windows. Many of them are decorated with pretty 19-century architectural ornaments, nymphs and pilasters, etc. Lost glory.

Maybe where the kid puked in "The Reader"

So, they make movies here, because it's like back-in-time -- a ready-made movie set. I read that they call it "Görlywood" (ha ha). When I was walking from the train station I think I saw the passageway where Kate Winslett helped the kid puke in "The Reader." According to the IMDB, they've made 44 movies here in recent years, including "Inglorious Basterds." The interior of The Grand Budapest Hotel is an old shopping pavilion here.

Anyway, Tuesday morning I took the train from Erfurt eastward out of Thuringia and into Saxony, through Leipzig (been there) and Dresden (Missus Slade and I have been there). I stayed there two nights.

Near Görlitz, station signs started to be in both German and Polish (the train I was on went on to Warsaw).

I dragged the suitcase a mile over bumpy cobbles to the only non-airbnb place that I had booked on this trip (there weren't any airbnbs here much) -- the Picobello Pension, which is in a beautiful location, right on the bank of the River Neisse, which since The Big One is the border with Poland. There is a footbridge that connects the two countries. There is no sign or marker that tells you when you left one country and went into the other - people are just walking and biking back and forth. In fact, I was just in Poland a few minutes ago, and bought a Polish beer in one of the "Zigaretten" shops that cluster around the Polish side of the bridge like hemorrhoids. I didn't have any zlotys on me, but the Polish lady GLADLY accepted euros. Everybody there does.

By the way, I think they should build a wall, and make Poland pay for it.

This pension is about $35 a night, which is pretty cheap but other than the location, it's no bargain. It's pretty spartan, and I'm on the 3rd floor, which over here means the 4th floor. With my heavy suitcase and no elevator! (I know. It's good for me.)

The worst thing is, there's no free wifi. You have to pay 4 euros for a scratch-off card that gives you 180 minutes of bad wifi. I plan to write a bad review of this place on Booking.com

Silesia is a fat tongue of land that sticks down southeastward from Berlin with its capital at Breslau, now Wrocław. Like most of eastern and northern Germany it was originally Slavic, until the Teutons moved in and took over way, way back in the day. A lot of eastern German town names sound Slavic - they end in -ow and - itz. Actually, the -in part of the name Berlin is the same Slavic ending as on Stalin and Lenin. (I hope nobody ever told that to the Führer - it would have pissed him off for sure).

The Allies chopped off the eastern part of the Reich and gave it back to the Slavs, with the new border running south up the Oder and Neisse rivers.

The Görlitz area is on the west side of the river Neisse, so it was the only part of German Silesia that stayed in Germany. All the rest of it went to Poland. So there is a really good Silesian museum here where I spent a lot of time. Descendants of Silesian Germans come here to see how it was for their grandparents, and sigh over their wonderful lost homeland.

The Soviets expelled the German Silesians, who had lived there for centuries, pushing many of them through Görlitz. And they moved Polish, Ukrainian, and White Russian populations westward into Silesia, to take the ousted Germans' jobs, shops, and farms. They called it "population transfers." The museum has lots of pictures and artifacts and text about it, in German and Polish.

There are tourists here, but as far as I can see they're all Germans. You can hear Polish spoken in the streets, and also Greek. After the Greek civil war of 1949-50, 14,000 Greek Communists (the losers) were brought up to here and settled on both sides of the river by the Polish and German Communist governments.

Also, I saw a family of orthodox American Jews (I heard them talking) - with kippas and tsitsis and everything - walking in the main Platz. I wanted to ask them if they had some Jewish connection with Görlitz - maybe related to murdered pre-war Görlitz Jews - but I didn't want to embarrass them or me. I chickened out.

Monday morning I rented a bike and rode all over town, enjoying the many pretty old run-down buildings. Then I spent the afternoon riding around on the Polish side, which is not very different except it doesn't have a historic core, since the core was on what's now the German side.
The picture is my bike on the "Peace Bridge" across the Neiße to Poland.






This is a doggy toilet facility in Zgorzelec, Poland, which is the name of the Polish half of Görlitz. I like the way it actually show's the dog's anus. In case you still didn't exactly get what it was for.

Friday & Saturday, September 23d & 24th

ERFURT, THURINGIA

It's Oktoberfest in Erfurt, and apparently in the whole country. (I guess it's like when our stores put out the Christmas stuff in August). 

Every town's main platz is laid out with carnival rides, games of chance, and food stands.

A wooden rollercoaster. Umm, I think not.

And what would Oktoberfest be without churros??

It's nice to be in a town with just Germans in it. Germans everywhere. Nobody offers to speak English. I heard almost no foreign languages at all. I've seen only a few tour groups, and they were all Germans. The one I saw at the old synagogue was probably Jewish Germans (yeah, there is such a thing).

The old synagogue escaped destruction because the Nazis didn't know it existed - it had been sold centuries before and turned into a Gasthaus and dance hall. Now it's been discovered and turned into a museum, and it houses the Erfurt Treasure, a hoard of coins, goldsmiths' work and jewelry hidden by Jews in the 1300s during the Black Death pogroms (they had been poisoning the wells, so it was said). It's pretty amazing.

I have been in five cities, and have only seen TWO street cats. Lots of people are walking tiny dogs on leashes, but cats are scarce. This is a funeral home in Erfurt for dogs. Presumably also for cats, if anybody ever had one. Your pet will rest in a rose garden, it says.

On Saturday, I took a 20-minute train ride (€4) to Weimar and rented a bike. It was hard to find a bike rental because it's Saturday and they close early. By the way, you don't "rent/mieten" a bike here. You "borrow/leihen" one. They look at you funny if you say you want to rent one. (?!)

I was finally directed to where I might find one, in a sort of cave around a corner managed by an old man. He was closing for the day, but he sighed and told me to come on in. He gave me a bike to test, and then he took my passport info (but he didn't keep the passport), and said when I was finished I should just lock the bike onto his gate and put the lock key in his mailbox. Merchants here all seem kind of lax and trusting that way. It cost €9 for the day.

Supposedly, Thuringian bratwurst is the quintissential brat - all others are fakes. There were several different food stands claiming to be vending the best and the one and only genuine Thuringian bratwurst, without preservatives or flavor enhancers. The fact that they are just chopped up carcasses squeezed into pig gut casings is not mentioned. I had to eat one, though. May God forgive me. With mustard.

It was FUN riding all over the pretty, compact medieval town on a bike. It was sunny and cool and it's such a pretty little place, colorful and full of people and bikes and horse-drawn tourist wagons. And all Germans. It's the town of Goethe and Schiller and Bach and Liszt. It was a hotbed of the German Romanticism movement, with the focus at Jena, just down the road.

Here is Slade with Goethe and Schiller.

I like Goethe pretty much. He's hard for me to read, but I can tell that the German is pretty. Schiller, not so much. In college we had to read his play Wilhelm Tell, which stinks. The only good part I remember is when we were reading parts aloud and when one guy came to the part where Tell shoots the apple off his son's head, and the son says, "Vater schiess zu, ich fürcht mich nicht!" ("Father, shoot! I am not afraid!"). Except instead of reading "Schiess," the guy read "Scheiss," Thus: "Shit, father, I am not afraid." That's all of the play that I can remember.

Shakespeare, Schlegel, and Mendelssohn

In 1826, when the composer Felix Mendelssohn was 17 years old, he began writing music for Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," because he liked the play so much. You've heard the music before; part of it is a wedding march - not "Here Comes the Bride," but the music they commonly play afterwards, when the couple are leaving the church. Click here. 

Probably the reason teenage Felix liked the Shakespeare play so much is that it had recently been translated into German by his Aunt Dorothea's brother-in-law, August Wilhelm Schlegel, a prodigious translator, writer, and foremost leader of the "Romanticism Movement" in Jena. Schlegel's translations of Shakespeare's plays are amazing. If you know German, look at this (from Hamlet's hand-wringing suicide speech):

Wilhelm Jeffersohn Schlehdt (mit
neufundländischer Baseballmünze)
beim Shakespeare-Denkmal,
Park an der Ilm, Weimar, Thüringen.

It's really pretty incredible. Schlegel's beautiful translations are much of the reason that Germans today love Shakespeare so much, and even consider him one of their own. They call him “our Shakespeare.” There are numerous Shakespeare clubs and societies and institutes. Here's a picture of me with Shakespeare, in Germany.

Earlier this year, when we were visiting Seattle, a lady at a used book store tried to sell me an old multi-volume set of Shakespeare in German, in beautiful fraktur typeface and luxury bindings. But they were very heavy, and it's all on line now.

Some random observations

<> Announcement in the Frankfurt Hbf (in German, French, and English): "Attention. Tricksters [that's what it said] are doing their rounds in the station. We advise you to be particularly alert."

<> Most places are smoke-free but there are still lots and lots of smokers.

<> The squirrels are both black and brown, but very tiny.

<> Nobody EVER says hello as you pass them on the sidewalk, or even smiles at you. But a young man on the train got up and helped me put my suitcase on the rack. I guess I look old. 

<> An old couple (60s) was sitting across from me on the train. The old dude had his head on the woman's breast and was feeling her up.

<> In all the formerly East Germany towns, you can see the bathtub ring of Communism.

The grammatical genious of the German mind

After I checked out at the supermarket in Erfurt today, the check-out lady said to me, very quickly, "Brauchen Sie die Quittung?" Meaning to say, Do you need the receipt?

Here's what must have gone through her head, in just a few nano-seconds. This must have been her exact thought process:

"Quittung" ends in -ung, which means it is a feminine gender noun. So the feminine definite article would be "die." But here the noun "Quittung" is the direct object of the verb "brauchen," which would put it into the accusative case. However, the fact is that the definite article for singular feminine nouns in the accusative case is ALSO "die." So that's what I must apply.

And then she instantly put it all together and articulated the utterance. 

This is astoundingly quick logical thinking. This woman, in my opinion, should be teaching linguistic theory in some university. But here she is working as a check-out clerk in a supermarket. I just don't get it.

Wednesday and Thursday, September 21st & 22d

Since I saw Mark Twain's autographed photo in the touristy inn advertised as a "Historisches Studentlokal," (ha ha) where I ate yesterday among Hoosiers and Iowans, I downloaded the part of "A Tramp Abroad" where he talks about student life in Heidelberg (Click here). It's not like that nowadays. 

I passed a sign that said "In this house lived the scientist Robert Bunsen." But in my opinion, just because you invented some new kind of burner doesn't mean you're a scientist.

I stumbled on the birthplace and museum of Friedrich Ebert, the lefty Labor organizer who became the first president of the Weimar Republic in the early 20's. Sort of an FDR of post-war Germany. The say if he hadn't died of appendicitis, maybe there wouldn't have been any Nazi party. The place was all photos, letters, and wall explanations of German politics after WWI, very comprehensive and well-done, and in German only. I spent over two hours in there, and made 25 more German vocabulary cards on my phone (e.g., Umstürzler = subversive.  Rufmord = character assassination)

Then I came across the footpath up to the castle, so I walked up. It's was a very good evening view of the old tile-roofed town with its churches, and the River Neckar winding away toward the Rhine.

Sign in the window of a Heidelberg bar: 

"We have no wifi. Talk to each other. Pretend it's 1995."

Thursday I took the train back up to Frankfurt, passing through Darmstadt where the murdered last tsarina Alexandra of Russia (Queen Victoria's granddaughter) was born. Incidentally, Darmstadt means "Gut City." What were they thinking?!

In Frankfurt I changed for Erfurt, out of Hesse and eastward into Thuringia. Horses, sheep, brown and white cows. Free wifi on the train, so I whatsapped a lot with Missus Slade.

Erfurt is pretty big but it wasn't bombed much so it has very many really old apartment and office buildings with attractive 19-century architectural touches. And maybe it wasn't fiddled with much because it was in the Communist DDR so it was sort of in economic suspended animation. 

I had some trouble getting into the apartment. Tobias's flatmate Christian had emailed me that they were at work, but I was to ring Frau Schroder's flat, and she would give me the key. I rang her when I got there. She is an odd little woman with a peculiar manner, and I really couldn't understand anything she said.

She went out to her mailbox but there was no key in it. So I called Christian on my Mobal euro-phone, and he said the previous airbnb tenants must have put the key in HIS mailbox instead of Frau Schroder's. And he couldn't leave work until 4:30 (it was only 2:00 at the time). So I was ready to get kind of pissed, but then Frau Schroder came out of her flat with a long pair of tongs, which I managed to insert into Tobias's mailbox slot and, after quite a lot of fiddling, snag the keys. Ta-daah!

"Theatrum Mundi," a mechanical puppet and doll manufactory on a narrow old street in Erfurt. A little gnome-like man was inside there fiddling with many tools and doll parts. The sign says "Insert a coin."

The old part of town is a pedestrianized labyrinth of very pretty, almost medieval-looking buildings and churches. This afternoon it was full of people walking and shopping and eating, and THEY WERE ALL GERMANS! I didn't hear any other language, except one Australian guy in a restaurant. There was also a busker in one of the platzes singing like Bob Dillon, who was probably an Anglophone, and a skinny guy in another platz playing the didgeridoo, but he was probably a German. So anyway, anybody who wants to discover a charming part of Germany that is very German but off the tourist paths, this is it.

"Thüringer Sauerbraten mit Apfelrotkohl & gebratenen Kloßscheiben" - Thuringian sauerbraten with apple-red-cabbage and roasted dumpling discs. It was pretty good - very much like a London Sunday pub roast, with dumplings instead of Yorkshire pudding. The street outside is the medieval "Via Regia" which ran east-west across the Holy Roman Empire. Erfurt was a main stop on the highway, since it was a center of woad production. Can't live without woad!

Incidentally, wine, beer, and spirits are astoundingly cheap here. A bottle of nice Barolo docg is only $10. It makes you realize how much tax we pay in the U.S. just to get tuned.

Monday & Tuesday, September 19th & 20th.

After The Big One, Heidelberg was firmly in the American occupation zone and for 60 years it was overrun with thousands of Our Troops and their families. Nevertheless, the city traffic lights are now fitted out with the old DDR Communist "Ampelmann" pedestrian signal. He's just so dang cute!

I had watched the movie "The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg," 1927, with Ramon Navarro and Norma Shearer (free to view on Youtube - Click here to enjoy it.

So I knew exactly what to expect: Heidelberg students with dueling scars, full of love and joy, sporting silly little student caps and constantly singing jolly German drinking songs.

Well, not so much.

I walked up into the old city of Heidelberg. I expected quaint little shops with quaint little troll-like men in them, making Christmas decorations and fashioning cuckoo clocks and mechanical dolls. I had read that since Heidelberg hadn't been bombed, it has preserved its picturesque old-world character - a journey back in time! 

Not on the Hauptstraße it's not. It's the touristiest place I've ever been in Germany. EVER! The main street of the "old town" is solid Gap, Gucci, NewYorker, Old Navy, Kaufhof, souvenirs and schlock jewelery, full of American tour groups with the guide holding up a stick. I love tourists, especially American ones. They're so endearingly clueless and confident. And they can't get enough of "Ausfahrt."

I was determined to have a dining experience at the inn where Mark Twain ate when he lived here for three months in 1878. His picture is on the wall there along with hundreds of others. I walked all the way to the end of the old-town Hauptstraße, past Michiganders and Hoosiers photographing the already-completely-photographed Heidelberg castle with their cell phones and tablets (wtf are they thinking? It's all on Google Images fer chrissake!), and at last I found it, "Zum roten Ochsen," The Red Ox (click it), unchanged since the 18th century. I was seeing what Mark Twain saw!

It' doesn't seem to be a student hangout anymore. Since (unlike the organized groups from Ohio) I didn't have a reservation, they seated me next to the lavatories, with a nice, shy Japanese youth who was admirably determined to experience the local culture despite a seemingly total, complete ignorance of the German or the English languages. He did it, and took cell phone pictures to prove it. He pointed to what I had, and said he wanted that. 

I ordered what seemed to me to be the most iconic German dish: Zwei Bauernbratwürste mit Weinsauerkraut und Kartoffelpüree - farm sausage & sauerkraut with mashed potatoes. It came with a mustard pot. Also, their famous goulash soup. Washed down with a Heidelberger pilsner. It was really delicious. Not vegetarian or vegan or gluten-free, but what the hell.

The price you have to pay for having this kind of genuine old-time German food isn't just for the food (which was reasonable). It's for having to eat somewhere where NO Germans would EVER eat (Germans eat international food - Italian and French cuisine and sushi and Turkish döner), and for having to listen to people across the room saying loudly how my daughter-in-law in Colorado was SO pleased with the Pack 'n Play I sent them. All I heard there was American English and a little bit of Japanese. Toward the end I thought I heard some snatches of actual German, but I think it was from an employee.

On Tuesday I went back to the old town and found the actual university, slightly removed from all the honky-tonkery. There were hundreds of bicycles and hundreds of youthful students milling around everywhere, but the funny little student caps seem to have gone out of style. Wie Schade!

I mingled with the students in the library - I let them think I must be a learned, doddering old professor, with the quirky habit of taking pictures in the library with a cell phone.

In the library. Presumably the computers and the gum ball machine have been added since the days of "The Student Prince."

Tomorrow, more Heidelberg.