May 31-June 2: Malerweg
June 3: Dresden Semperoper with the Duke/UNC/NCSU research abroad cohort. We saw a staged performance of Handel's oratorio Saul. It was full of intrigue and politics and worked impressively well staged. We had seats near the ceiling, thus the stairwell photo.
June 4-6: Malerweg
June 7: Berlin with the research abroad cohort. On Saturday, we met up (because they used mass transit and I walked) at the East End Gallery (Berlin Wall).
June 8 morning: free time in Berlin with family--H, S, V, and R. We walked up Teufelsberg, a non-natural hill in the Grunewald district of Berlin built after WW2 from 98 million cubic yards of rubble and debris. It's located in the former West Berlin, and during the Cold War, the US built a large intelligence-gathering "listening station" on top. The station is no longer used and has become a street-art gallery, with almost every available surface covered in murals.
June 8 afternoon: Tour of the Reichstag with the cohort.
June 9 morning: Our last day in Berlin. The cohort took a boat tour rather than join S and me for the long walk we invited everyone on. Ostensibly we were looking for the graves of the brothers Grimm, but we only got as far as the graves of the Familie Mensdelssohn in the Dreifaltigkeit cemetery in Kreuzberg. (We also visited the gravestone of grandpapa Moses Mendelssohn, the 18th-c. philosopher and theologian whose writings became central to the "Jewish Enlightenment" of the 18th and 19th centuries; he's buried in Berlin's oldest Jewish cemetery, which was desecrated during the Nazi era--to the point that his is the only gravestone still erect, but not in its original location).
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| R to L, Wilhelm Hensel, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn... |
June 9 afternoon: We had a little time to kill before our train, so zipped through the Alte Nationalgallerie with a few of the students. We happily revisited many of the Friedrich paintings that we had seen in New York, but the photo of the day goes to "Liszt am Flügel" (1840) by Joseph Danhauser, one of two music-historical paintings I recognized from across a room and of which could immediately say, "hey, that's George Sand swooning while Liszt plays the piano!" The other painting was "hey, that's Frederick the Great playing the flute!," a.k.a. Flötenkonzert Friedrichs des Großen in Sanssouci [1852] by Adolph von Menzel. I coulda sworn both paintings graced covers of Dover scores that I owned, but I can't identify which scores.
June 10: Back in Dresden. I needed a walk, so built a loop route to the Loschwitz neighborhood via the Blaue Wunder, and for the sake of thoroughness, included the recently enhanced gravesite of Caspar David Friedrich at the Trinitatisfriedhof.
June 12: Early morning train home to Steinebach. On the way, we planned a layover of a few hours to visit Bamberg, nicknamed "Franconian Rome" because like Rome, it has seven hills.
June 19-20: No photos. It was a cold, not allergies.
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| Liszt and his adoring fans... |
June 10: Back in Dresden. I needed a walk, so built a loop route to the Loschwitz neighborhood via the Blaue Wunder, and for the sake of thoroughness, included the recently enhanced gravesite of Caspar David Friedrich at the Trinitatisfriedhof.
June 11: Before meeting up for a farewell gelato with the students (they were staying on, but faculty advisors, including S, were leaving the next morning), we had some open time, so made a too-short visit to the Albertinum. The photo below is of the work Palianytsia (2022) by Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova. The work is made from sliced river stones. The accompanying label says the stones "become a symbol of welcoming culture and community in leaden times." It also notes that Russians' inability to pronounce the word Palianytsia correctly "became a phonetic identifier to distinguish 'friend' from 'foe.'" (And if you Google the word Palianytsia, you'll learn it's both a hearth-baked bread and the name of a Ukrainian turbojet drone missile system developed by Ukraine during the Russian invasion.)
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| Palianytsia (2022) by Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova |
June 12: Early morning train home to Steinebach. On the way, we planned a layover of a few hours to visit Bamberg, nicknamed "Franconian Rome" because like Rome, it has seven hills.
June 13: first day back in Steinebach, and we were homebodies, walking no farther than to the grocery store and back. The new Edeka opened a year or two ago, so now instead of walking 3-4 mile RT to the old Edeka near Etterschlag, we only need to walk 1.6 miles RT.
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| Fence shadows in Kukuksheim, en route to EDK |
June 14: Bastille Day = "No Kings Day" for over 5 million mostly USAmerican protestors mostly in the U.S. but also internationally. On our way to join a couple hundred protesters in Munich, we walked past the Weiße Rose Memorial at Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, and thought about the difference between showing up for protests every once in a while vs. risking everything to fight Fascism.
June 15: annual hike to Andechs. S biked, and we met up for Brez'n, Obazda, and Sprudel.
June 16: Strava says I went to the grocery store again. I was trying to figure out if I had allergies or a cold, and didn't take a single photo.
June 17: Hallbergmoos to Nordfriedhof.
June 18: Hallbergmoos to Freising. Afterward, I took trains to Seeshaupt, then walked to Bernried to meet up with S and friends from his college days in Hamburg. Afterward, S and I walked to Tutzing.
June 19-20: No photos. It was a cold, not allergies.
June 21: Dinner at Sepperlwirt, followed by a walk "the long way home" to visit Favorite Lone Tree on a Hill, which is nowhere near Sepperlwirt.
June 22: Landshut to Moosburg
June 23: A doozy of a cold. I think I spent most of the day in bed.
June 24: Moosburg to Freising
June 25-27: What? No photos? I walked around the Wörthsee, and to Herrsching in the rain, and S and I walked to Eching before catching a bus to Puppi's for Kaffee und Kuchen and homegrown Johannesbeeren and Stachelbeeren.
June 28-July 12: Rorschach to Guendlischwand
July 13: We had just walked 170 miles across Switzerland, so we took it easy. We bought groceries, and walked to Gasthaus Dietrich for dinner. We used to eat there regularly with Helen, but management changed after her death, and no one's really felt like it could compete with their memories of it. But it was pretty much how I remembered it, and we were rewarded with a rainbow over the house next door.
July 14: We walked 5 miles to Stegen to meet family for dinner. Before the deluge, and before discovering the restaurant was closed, there were wild raspberries on the trail through the woods to Inning.
July 15: H, S, and V visited us from Berlin. More rain, but also a walk to the lake and sailing the model boat until the wind became too strong.
July 16: Dachau
July 17: Our German Romanticism summer ended with a two-day connect-the-dots walk from Lindau-Insel to Rorschach. The Rules of Walking permit virtual and real ferry connections, but we figured we'd make a land connection too. Our destination for the first night was Bregenz, where we enjoyed a modernized rendition of Der Freischütz: Carl Maria von Weber meets Gilbert and Sullivan meets Monty Python meets the Beaver Queen Pageant. I might have been the only audience member laughing out loud at the giant sprinklers during the lesbian dream sequence with diving mermaids. Check out the preview to appreciate how crazy the interpretation was (see also this behind-the-scenes video on stunts and staging).
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| Clap clap bravo clap brava clap clap clap bravo clap clap |
July 18: From Bregenz, we continued on to Rorschach--a much more varied walk than the previous day's.
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| Uh, sure, that's a potato... |
July 19: We walked to Puppi's for Kaffee und Kuchen with G, M, and M'. M' is heading to the U.S. this fall for a year abroad.
July 20: S biked and I walked to Herrsching, and we met up for gelato.
July 21: I made latkes for R and R'. On their way out, R' found a feather and told me I should save feathers for her (for what purpose, I don't know). It occurred to me that in ~550 miles of walking and hiking this summer, I hadn't noticed any feathers. S and I went for a walk afterward, and voilà...
July 22: We had some gummint business to take care of in Starnberg. Afterward, I walked to Tutzing. I've now walked the entire length of the western shore of the Starnbergersee. Tutzing has a promenade named after Johannes Brahms, who lived there for four months in the summer of 1873 while he was avoiding visiting Clara Schumann, with whom he was having a spat.
July 23: One more visit with Puppi that involved some contortions with train and bus schedules, followed by a lovely evening walk as far as Inning and then a bus home.
And that was that...
