Things change

We're back in Freiburg for a few days, and things aren't entirely as we were expecting. First, it was almost 100^oF today--hot for Freiburg, and hotter than it's been all year in Durham. Hot.

Second, Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz is no longer the longest word in the German language. According to the UK's Telegraph, "the word--which refers to the 'law for the delegation of monitoring beef labelling,' has been repealed by a regional parliament after the EU lifted a recommendation to carry out BSE tests on healthy cattle." I'm not sure how Germans will refer to this law as history without the word, but I'm sure the Volk will work it out in due time.

Third, despite reserving a rental car two months in advance and talking with a rental company rep about how we needed a car large enough to hold Stefan's bike suitcase and four people, we were surprised today to receive a car large enough to hold Stefan's bike suitcase or four people. After much wrangling, Stefan negotiated upgrading to a larger car on Friday, the day before we need to drive the bike and four people to Austria for his 110-mile, 9000-ft elevation gain bike race. I'm not sure whether the chance to upgrade represents an improvement in German service over the past several years or not. Incidentally, the weather on race day is currently anticipated to be 50^oF in Nauders, with rain. Even compared to today's heat, I don't think that represents an improvement in the weather.

Some pics from the day:

A steam-punk bespectacled dog Wasserspeise

A dog or goat body therapist cheerfully massaging a human head Wasserspeise

Lunch at Chang Thai

Where muppet fairies sleep

Mock orange

Walking home from dinner

Sweat makes great hair-styling gel

Rose

Grape vines at 8pm

More on the Muenster

My parents left this morning following a good visit and quality bonding time with Elias. As she departed, my mother passed her Maternal Nurturing Baton to Stefan's mother. The baton went from the kitchen to the bathroom, from making soup and doing all the dishes to dusting every horizontal surface and scrubbing sinks we didn't even know were dirty. I fear Elias will never have it as good when he's grown up and I'm on baton duty.

My parents, both avid photographers, also passed one of their older digital SLR cameras on to Stefan, and he has been taking some wonderful pictures with it. He managed to combine the right f-stops and shutter speeds with a steady enough hand to capture some of the figures over the Muenster door without also capturing the distracting pigeon-restraining wires.

Over 500 figures surround the cathedral entrance, which was built between 1280 and 1300. In an age of high illiteracy, the statues conveyed stories and lessons to the masses. They also served as a useful method for identifying Freiburgers. Who other than a Freiburger would know that a devil wrings his hands over the Muenster doors because--as the angel's scales illustrate--good souls always outweigh bad souls, even when bad souls cheat to tip the balance. To the left of the angel, good souls help lift one another out of their graves (notice the skulls); to the devil's right, bad souls are weighed down with heavy stones.

While Mary and Jesus sit front and center above the entrance, the allegorical Ecclesia and Synagoge stand on the left and right sides of the portal. Ecclesia, wearing a crown, holds a cross and chalice. Synagoge, blind to the coming of the Messiah, holds the broken law of the Jews.

Reunification day, Ravenna Schlucht, and music

Saturday, Oct. 3, was the 19th anniversary of German reunification; November 9 will mark 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Southern Germany celebrated by closing up shop and going hiking.

We took my parents for a hike up the Ravenna Schlucht, a pretty, narrow gorge near Freiburg. The trail followed a series of small waterfalls up to a functioning mill house, where a water wheel was powering two rapidly rotating stones to grind whole grain into coarse meal.

Afterward, we headed to St. Peter for an organ concert: a recreation of Mendelssohn's 1840 "Bach Denkmal" (Bach memorial) organ concert at the Thomaskirche (Bach's church) in Leipzig. In 1840, Mendelssohn performed several compositions by Bach, then closed with an improvisation on "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" and the motive B-A-C-H (German for B flat-A-C-B natural). Yesterday's concert, featuring organist Johannes Goetz, repeated all of the same works by Bach and closed with a fleshing out (by Rudolf Lutz) of Mendelssohn's unpublished fragments on the aforementioned themes. After the concert, Elias and my dad played a game of chess in front of the church.

It has been a musical weekend. Friday night, we attended a concert in the Muenster featuring various choral psalm settings, including works by Mendelssohn, Dvorak, and Kiel, and Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.

We have not been to a single concert this year in Germany that has not included a composition by Mendelssohn, born 200 years ago in 1809.

Muenster and Museum

Elias and I climbed the Muenster tower this morning: 207 enclosed steps up to the ticket desk, and then, via staircases on opposite sides of the tower, 56 nerve-wracking, fenced-in, open-air steps up to the viewing platform, and 33 comfortably enclosed steps up to the bell tower. I stifled my fear of heights with the knowledge that tourists don't drop from the tower every day, although surely a few workers must have plunged to their deaths over the several decades it took to complete the tower.

We followed up with a visit to the small Wenzingerhaus Museum near the Muenster, which offers an unusual collection of local artifacts, including a detailed diorama depicting a mid-stage Muenster; early city seals and stained glass windows; a tapestry of the Zaehringer family tree; medieval iron instruments of torture along with illustrated instructions on how use them; a melted typewriter from the 1944 Allied bombing of Freiburg; a Steinway piano; and an unnerving advertisement for Der Allemanne, Freiburg's very own Nazi newspaper that provided daily news to 300,000 National Socialists in Oberbaden (the first Swastika I've seen since we've been here, displayed in a hard-to-photograph spot behind a door).

At the Wenzingerhaus, we were reminded that although Germans like the idea of museums, museum guards don't like the idea of museum visitors. Elias and I were the only two people for the guard on the second floor to glare at, and we received her undivided attention. Thanks to an earlier visit to Freiburg's Museum fuer Neue Kunst, where the second floor guard followed us from room to room to make sure we weren't enjoying the artwork too much, we knew not to take it personally.

Graffiti

I've never carved my name into a tree, a picnic table, or the paint on a bathroom stall door, let alone spray painted Hello-Kitty ninjas in an underpass. After visiting the Freiburg Muenster today, if I ever want to deface something, I'll aim for a more permanent surface.

Chickens on tour

As I don't yet have access to an organ to practice on, and as the local pottery co-op is closed due to summer vacation, and as my excuse to strike up casual conversations with complete strangers in the park is busy attending summer camp, I'm on the lookout for ways to keep myself busy. Today I went on a short walking tour of the Altstadt, revisiting some of the sights Frau H. showed us last week.

The "Haus zum Walfisch" (Whale House, left) was built 1514-1516 and acquired its name because at the time it was, figuratively, the biggest fish in the pond. When nearby Basel went Protestant during the Reformation, several of Basel's university professors fled to Catholic Freiburg, including the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus von Rotterdam. Erasmus lived in the Haus zum Walfisch from 1529 to 1531.




Two American chickens (right) imagine the view Erasmus might have enjoyed from his front door.





Guarding the door of the house are two waterspout gargoyles. Evil spirits trying to enter the house would have seen these kindred figures, realized the house was already claimed, and moved on to another place to haunt. One of the gargoyles has goiter (left), an illness endemic to the Schwarzwald.



Freiburg has official "sister cities" around the world, including lovely Madison, Wisconsin. Each of the sister cities is represented with a mosaic shield on the cobblestone street in front of one of the two Rathaeuser (right).


The chickens appreciate the hard work and artistic challenges that must go into laying down all those stones, so they don't mind that the mosaic of the Wisconsin State Capitol building doesn't clearly depict the golden badger atop Lady Forward's helmet (left).

No tour of the Altstadt would be complete without a visit to the Muenster. The entrance to the Gothic cathedral is decorated with hundreds of small statues, variously depicting scenes from Christ's life, the triumph of good over evil, important medieval residents, and a range of fantastical creatures. The chickens were unable to get a closer look at the nose trumpeter (right) due to the protective wire installed to keep pigeons away from the statuary.

After wrapping up their brief visit to the Altstadt, the chickens pause at the "Verschmutzung verboten" fountain in Herdern and contemplate the unthinkable (left).