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