Ulm

Ulm
07.March 2009

On a whim, I hopped a bus, train, train, and train and reached Ulm, the city with the shortest name in Germany. Known for the Münster, the tallest cathedral in Europe, this city also holds a stretch of the Danube and a museum about bread. What’s not to like, eh?


This street name makes up for the short city name. It is also has the biggest street name length to street length ratio I've ever seen.


The cathedral is so tall (700 something spiral steps) that the upper levels were still ‘frozen’ and closed for visitors, probably because the upper levels are poking through the upper levels of the atmosphere. The inside remained spectacular though.


This one makes me think of finite element analysis.



I walked through a cemetery to remind myself how happy I am to be the one facing the grave stones from this side and straight to the Bread Culture museum. Out of all of the food museums I’ve visited (chocolate museum in Cologne, Potato Museum in München), this was the best. It explained the history of bread making processes and development as well as the cultural impact of the loaf.

The Ulmer Museum stretched the definitions of ‘art’ a bit and had some nice classical stuff as well. Mostly, I enjoyed walking around the city. It could be considered the stereotypical German city: Relatively small with a HUGE church, a famous river flowing through, and lots of ancient architecture. There was a city wall built in the 13th and 14th centuries and many segments still stand today. Aside from a few wall sections now covered with quaint houses and schools, the majority of the preserved sections are the bits with gates and towers so there are loads of cool passageways throughout the city. There are a couple of small streams that join the Danube in the city and these flow through canals that meander tightly under houses and diagonal walkways, creating a little maze for confused tourists.



This is a model of a gate. What remains is a little more run down (700 years will do that) but much much bigger.


This is one such tower on the wall, and now part of a small school.


This sign is by the river (seen on the right). "Bei Hochwasser" means "in case of flooding" and the arrow points away from the water. So, if there's a flood, simply read the sign and proceed away from the water.

The sun came out and I listened to the J. Strauss’s Blue Danube on the banks of the Blue Danube (but it was kind of a greenish-brown river color).

Nuremberg

This is a picture of a tower on the castle in Nuremberg.

On a whim, I caught a train to Nürnberg (Nuremberg), the closest bigger city in the area. At roughly 500,000 inhabitants Nürnberg is a nice sized city with an “Altstadt” sequestered by the remnants of a city wall. The city has a nice Burg/palace/castle sort of cluster of buildings on a hill. It was the emperor’s crib when he would visit the region and that happened about 300 times in 600 years so it wasn’t really used much. Because it was only used once every two years or so, all of the decorations and furniture actually belonged to the wealthy families; they’d just furnish the palace when it needed to be furnished. So, the rooms in the castle were all empty but there was at least a nice view.



While I was there, there was a demonstration monitored by lots of police in a square by one of the churches. As far as I could tell, it was a convention of the folks that wear lots of black, boots, metal pointy things, and outrageous hair styles. These are the types that hang out by train stations across Europe and they had gathered to do what they do best, stand and sit around. A flag indicated that it was an anarchist rally of sorts so they were trying to further their cause by drinking, smoking, and playing death metal music. Way to go guys.

Time for pictures.

This is the view from the castle over the old town area.


They don't make em' like they used to.


I kind of wonder why they decided to put a building on top of the river. Surely there was some good reason.