EUROPE 2015 ISSUE IV

Door Handle

The last issue of the Avatar was difficult to write, while this one seems to have written itself.  It may have something to do with the fact we are now in Groby, and there are not nearly so many things to keep you entertained.  So apologies in advance if it seems that these are coming a little more quickly than seems reasonable.  

Street signs

As a point of interest, one of the surprises, on our shipboard adventure, was the loss of the walking track on the top deck.  It was an absolutely delightful spot for photography while floating past all the Rhine castles.  If photography is not your thing, the majority of the deck space was available for sitting in deck chairs as the sights rolled by.  It was really quite decadent to be able to sit and be served “cocktails” (non alcoholic) and hot towels . . . visions of the QE II.  What wasn't set up for comfort had a "walking track" of about a 1/10th of a mile.  Not a bad place to walk off the extra wine and desserts.  

Towel Elephant

Once we hit the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal (Main is pronounced “mine”) say it again to yourself Rhine-“Mine”-Danube, quite mellifluous,wouldn't you agree.  So, as I was saying once we hit the Rhine-Main-Danube that as the end of the walking track.  As its name would indicate it is a canal, which means locks, and locks and more locks (Wikipedia says 16 of them.)  And locks mean sitting in black hole, looking directly at the cement sides of the lock no more than a foot from the edge of the boat, while the water level is raised until you can sail out the other side.  Naturally enough once the water level is raised you can actually see countryside.  It also means that all the infrastructure on the top deck is flattened. . . no more chairs, no more sun awnings, no more railings, no more walking track and most importantly no more bridge.  

Remote command Docking

The bridge, you know that place where the captain sits and steers the boat, is on a scissor jack and collapses down in to the body of the ship when passing through locks and under bridges.  There are actually remote command centers on either side of the ship on a level with the bridge that come up out of the deck to allow control of the ship when the bridge is collapsed or while moving in to a dock space.  Made me think of Captain Kirk and Star Trek or possibly a remote for Nintendo or x-box. 

There is another, more significant, downside to these tightly engineered locks besides the inconvenience of not having a top deck/walking track or being able to see anything out your window.  When water levels are low some of the ships cannot pass down the canal at all; they will scrape the bottom.  This is what happened with the Viking Ingvi, the Captain determined that he would not be able to pass through the canal between Nuremberg and Passau and as a consequence we would need to change (actually swap) ships.   

Stylish Common Toilet

Kudos to Viking, they made this very simple.  Pack your bags and put them out in the hall by 9:00 a.m. with the already prepared tags.  When ready to go out for the daily tour take whatever you would normally take with you, nothing more, nothing less.  When your tour is finished hop on a pre-arranged bus, sit back and enjoy the scenery.  When we reached the other end, the Viking Alsvin was waiting for us and our belongings had been delivered to the same stateroom as the previous ship.  Unpack and it is back to our original routine, everything looked the same with the exception of the crew.  They did send along our original Program Director and Concierge but the rest of the staff remained with the ship.

Passau Church

This resulted in two nights in Passau and an unscheduled bus ride to Regensburg, but it was handled flawlessly.  More than that, it meant another welcome cocktail party with our new Captain and free concert in Vienna as compensation for the inconvenience.  The concert, of Mozart and Strauss pieces, had been an optional excursion with a 60 euro charge. 

Regensburg Borrowed Image

Regensburg, I think this was the place where we discovered just how Catholic Germany is.  Sunday morning, a guided tour around the city center and no one was there.  Picturesque little place but nearly everything is closed.  A few shops selling tourist trinkets, a few restaurants selling the ubiquitous sausages, potatoes and kraut or for a change, schnitzel, cabbage and potatoes and the churches.  No museums, no shops and no people to create a sense of place, quiet.  In Germany touring churches is always free and nearly all of them are Catholic, as is most of the population (61%).  We spent our free afternoon wandering the streets and climbing the hill (it’s a bUrg not a bErg) and stumbled on his delightful church and hardly anyone was there.  

Passau

Monday, it must be Passau, this does feel a bit like “Tuesday it Must be Belgium” which I admit to having never seen.  But, it is Monday, and it is Passau, which should have been called something berg.  There are some really steep alleyways leading from the city center to the waterfront which actually have stairs.  The streets are narrow, mind you I did not say one way, but they ought to be.  Passau’s biggest claim to fame is St. Stephan’s Cathedral and its pipe organ.  

St Stephens Organ

Germany it would seem did not have many artisans specialising in designing and building these mammoth and extremely ornate Baroque structures.  My sense is that everywhere we go Italians are credited with being the architects and artisans who built these churches and castles and St Stephan’s is no exception.  Its major claim to fame, its organ, is the largest outside the United States and the largest cathedral organ in the world.  So for those of you who might understand something of what this means, there are 17,774 pipes and 233 registers (whatever that may mean) and five carillons (bells?).  Carillons may also speak to the fact that the organ is divided up into five separate pieces spread throughout the building, and all of this is played from a single console composed of multiple keyboards.  More than you ever wanted to know I suspect.  Is it a great organ? I am not the person to be the judge of

that.  I will tell you that the sound was pretty amazing.  It filled the space and you could almost feel the music in your bones.   It didn't hurt that the pieces by Johann Studen, J. S. Bach, Percy Fletcher, Jacques Lemmens, and Sigfrid Karg-Elert covered the gamut of styles from classical to contemporary, all played by a 21 year old Bastian Fuchs. 

On to Austria next.  Some of my pictures got deleted, so some of the images need restoring.  As a consequence be prepared for pictures that don't quite belong with the text.  Until next time.  

EUROPE 2015 ISSUE III

Castles on the Rhine

A two week, organised river cruise is like nothing we have done before.  The best part, you can unpack and live in your own space for two full weeks.  The downside, you’re not in control of the where and when of your adventures.  It’s just the smallest bit unsatisfying.  Perhaps it is because our time is so short in each location, or that the history of this area is so convoluted and intertwined, never mind totally unfamiliar to me.  It may be the language barrier, although for the most part our tour guides have had excellent English.   Guess the biggest frustration has been our tours.  They need to appeal to everyone and as a consequence they have been more than a little superficial and lacking in detail about life in this part of the world.  

The focus has been on the age of the buildings, what style of church are we viewing or who lived here.  No real discussion of the politics and or economics of where we are.  Just what it is, is hard to say, but it may be just the sameness of all these tiny river communities (not in a bad way) or the fact that one super exuberant Baroque, Catholic Church begins to look much like another.  

But I get ahead of myself, there’s still the trip down the middle Rhine with it castles and the Lorelei rock where sailors were lured to their death by the siren song of a young girl.  We probably sailed past some of the more dramatic

structures while we slept but once we enter the gorge there are nonstop ruins of castles and fortresses for miles.    The mountains, they are too steep to be called hills, come down to the river’s edge with acres of vineyard terraced in to their sides.  It is green and lush, but not nearly as lush as the Austrian countryside to come.  The towns, or perhaps villages would be a better description, seem barely more than a street deep, and cling to the edge of the river.  Each has its requisite onion domed Catholic Church and fortress/castle looming on the heights. How they actually built anything on some of those peaks and slopes is a mystery to me, but they did.

Some of the towns on the north or is it east side of the river,  seem to have roads accessing more development back behind them. On the other hand, the opposite bank seems trapped between the river and the mountains.  A narrow band of development fronts the river, with terraces of grapes further up the slope.  In some areas a train line shares the limited flat space and there seems to be a roadway that runs along the bank. There are no bridges on this stretch of the Rhine, do you think they had tourists and cruise ships in mind?  So you want to cross the river to visit a friend or do a bit of shopping . . .  Never 

fear, you will find small car ferries that ply their way across the river carrying everything from small delivery trucks to mopeds and I assume pedestrians.  There is no opportunity to moor at any of these little settlements so we don't learn much more.

From here it is a progression of medieval cities, Miltenberg,

Wurzburg, Bamberg, Nuremberg, Regensburg, Passau . . . and a succession of baroque churches and quaint town squares, ornate city halls and decimated Jewish communities. The sausages change as we move down the rivers . . . . smoky, spicy, brown, white. Not to be forgotten, the mustards change as well. They do of course have to go with changing sausage which means they have gone from sweet and spicy to a hot Dijon style to plain old American style. 
Sausages change, mustards change and the beers change as well.  Guess that should be no great surprise, if I just think about all of our micro-breweries at home.  Here each city seems to have its own speciality and at least one major brewery that serves that particular city.  Our strangest experience was the smoky beer in Wurzburg, I think.  Having decided we needed to taste it we went looking for one of the two pubs purported to have it.  It was a cute little place all dark wood and Bavarian costumes on the staff (they really wear that stuff . . . dirndl skirts and

lederhosen, I mean) and plenty of folks with big pint mugs of beer sitting in the sunshine.  The smoke flavor comes from roasting the hops, which we were told was typical of all beers early on.  The atmosphere was delightful, what’s to complain about, vacation, sunshine and an ice cold beer. . . oh so very wrong.  Beer is supposed to taste like beer, not a barbecued sausage!!!  Wrong, wrong, wrong. 

Octoberfest

When it comes to beer the "Star of David" hanging outside the establishment is a good thing.  You see them suspended

from the sign and they purport to be the official symbol of the brewers guild which goes back to the early 1500s.  The symbol itself is older, dating in to the late 1300s.  There are six points to the star and six parts to brewing beer . . . water, hops (preferably not roasted) grain, malt, yeast and the brewer.  
As days pile up one city fades in to the next, and we have taken to referring to them as Berg-Burg.  “Remember that place where the city hall was on the island with all the bright colored buildings, or the place where we bought Lebkuchen and ate chopped pork sandwiches.”   You might have an opportunity to get it right, assuming of course you can remember a few specifics of each community.  Using the German language you can back in to it, if there is a mountainside it is probably something-bErg; while if there is a fortress/castle it is most likely something-else-bUrg.

Next stop Nuremberg (I see no mountains), a city on the Rhine-Maine-Danube Canal, in the German state of Bavaria and the administrative region of Franconia.  All these descriptors seem of utmost importance to the Germans, to me they are just more words to fill up the page of my blog.  We opted for the optional tour to the “documentation center” and some of the infrastructure left over from the Second World War.  The documentation center is really a museum showing the rise of Hitler and his impact on European history and of course the various Jewish populations that fell under his control.  Given that it is in Germany and designed as an educational facility they have done some outstanding work at making it accessible to English speakers. 

Nuremberg held great significance during the Hitler’s regime.  Because of the city's position in the center of Germany, the Nazi Party chose it as the site of huge Nazi Party conventions – the Nuremberg Rallies. The rallies were held from 1927 until 1938. After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 the Nuremberg rallies became huge Nazi propaganda events. Most of the films of goose stepping Nazis and the straight armed salutes were staged (quite literally) and filmed here as intimidation devices.  We saw a number of ruins that were constructed solely for these assemblies, many of which were never finished. The saving grace they are now used as venues for car racing and rock concerts.