Getting around, part II

This morning after Elias left for camp, I walked out the front door and headed south through...

Herdern, past...

the Schwabentor bordering the Altstadt, through...

the Wiehre neighborhood, with all its big snazzy Jugendstil houses, and all the way to...

the old monastery gate at the edge of the village Guenterstal, where I cut east into the...

wooded hills. I had five kilometers behind me, and my goal ahead was the top of Freiburg's nearest sizeable mountain, Schauinsland, a mere 8.5 or 9 kilometers further away, depending on whether I believed or followed...

any of the signs. The signs are quite detailed, as you can see, but they aren't terribly accurate when it comes to distances, and while one trail intersection might have signs pointing you toward 20 different places, another intersection might not have any signs at all. Remember this, remember this, remember this, and do not be lured into false hope by the signs. Instead, carry a good topo map. But don't entirely rely on the map either, since there are always dozens more trails to choose from in real life than will ever fit onto any map, such as the trail less traveled that led me to this...

mossy bench next to a rivulet. (I'd amuse myself and call it a mossy Bank, since Bank is German for bench, but I'm told puns aren't funny in German, and even a bilingual one is probably a stretch). The trail spit me back out on a gravel road with a bucolic view of...

sheep. My route threatened to descend back down into Guenterstal, so when I came to a junction, I headed upwards into more...

woods. There were lots of...


wildflowers; and of course no hike here would be complete without abundant...

stinging nettles. The scenery stayed rather...

consistent for several kilometers, until I gained enough elevation to enjoy a...

rewarding vista of the valley below. The subsequent views included...

more woods. Eventually, I passed under...

the Seilbahn line that runs from the town Horben, in the valley below, up to the top of Schauinsland. The Seilbahn crossing was a welcome sight, because from there on, the trail straightened out somewhat, although it became steeper. I turned onto a mountain-bike path, where I saw a sign warning travelers about...

horse flies (Bremsen). Oh wait, silly me, the B is lower case: bremsen is a verb: so not "Attention, horse flies," rather "Attention, brake." Further ahead, I crossed the only...

bridge of the entire hike, and then number 483,000 out of about a bazillion...

piles of tidily stacked wood. Only...

2.5 kilometers to go (no, no, don't believe the signs!): past copious, sun-kissed expanses of...

wildflowers, past...

the two giant windmills, to a rocky trail that climbed upward, crossed the paved main road, and then terminated at an unmarked T-intersection. No trail sign? Surely that meant either option--left or right--would end up at the top of the mountain. Did I check my map? No, no. I took a left onto a nice wide graded gravel road, because my ultimate goal was the end of the Seilbahn line, and the Seilbahn was now quite a ways to my left. The gravel road continued on and on, passed under the Seilbahn line, and continued on and on some more until it reached...

a dead end. Realizing I had inadvertently added a few extra kilometers to my hike, I cursed loudly (in English, because I haven't lived in Germany long enough to instinctively curse in German) before cutting down to the...

paved road. After walking a short while, I saw a...

Naturschutzgebiet (nature preserve) trail that wasn't on the map. It offered a significant shortcut, as well as some...

fine views, before meeting up again with the paved road, which I followed the rest of the way to my...

final destination, where...

this handsome guy was waiting for me. The grand total: five hours, 23.3 kilometers (significantly more than 5 + 9, you might observe), and one kilometer elevation gain. (Stefan, for his part, biked 69 kilometers round trip in a little over three hours, climbing a combined total of about 1440 meters: Freiburg-Zaehringen-Heuweiler-St. Peter [break for a hazelnut pastry]-Unterriebental-Kirchzarten-Oberried-Hofsgrund-Schauinsland-Freiburg.)

After half a liter of Sprudel (seltzer), a Heidelbeershake (you'd think that would translate as blueberry milkshake, but it's actually a foamy lukewarm puree of blueberries and milk), and a plate of Pommes (fries)--a nutritious vegetarian lunch if there ever was one--I took the fast way home:

Titisee

Stefan couldn't find a store in Freiburg that rents racing bikes, so today we drove to Neustadt to rent one there. Afterward, we thought we'd check out scenic Titisee, reputed to be an idyllic lake-town gateway to the Black Forest.

Surely it was, once. Now it's an international summer vacation destination for people who want to kick back and relax in the company of a few thousand like-minded tourists. The camping is European Lake Style, meaning rows and rows of RVs and tents are squashed together like sardines. The lake offers some good photo ops if you can coordinate views unobstructed by people.

After an initial look at Titisee, we headed away from town, eventually hitting a trail that took us past old farm houses and into green mossy woods. Ahh, much better.

Schumann Wahlfahrt

You'd think that because 2010 is the 200th anniversary of Robert Schumann's birth, every organ concert this year from here to Berlin would feature at least one of the composer's intriguingly unidiomatic organ works, in the same way organists celebrated Felix Mendelssohn's 200th Jubelaeumsjahr last year. Of course, Mendelssohn wrote a lot more music for the organ than Schumann did, and his holds together better, and it isn't so stormily melodramatic or--how should I say it--puppy-doggishly confident. But with such a small opus, it would seem easy enough to play all of Schumann's organ works, from the brilliant cream-of-the-crop to the so-so ones--and be done with them, just for the record.

Alas, this is not to be. The baroque church in St. Peter is offering a series of six summer organ concerts, and would you believe this past Sunday's was the only one to program anything by Schumann? Knowing this in advance, of course we had to go.

We didn't have access to a car, so first we walked 1.5 miles to the Hauptbahnhof, took a train to Kirchzarten, caught a bus to Stegen, misunderstood the driver and got off one stop too late, near Eschbach, guessed we might find a trail behind a recently-mowed hay field, and ended up at a creek. Since Stefan was the only one of us wearing waterproofed shoes, he gallantly carried me and Elias to the far bank. There we followed a path covered with a lifetime supply of sheep poop until it disappeared in a field. We waved to the sheep across the fence, then switchbacked through the waist-high grasses and flowers until we found a logging road that went directly up the Berg.

The logging road eventually ended at a huge pile of sawed up pine trees--uncharacteristically untidy for Germany--so we descended a bit and took an alternate route: a muddy wildflower- and weed-covered road that ended at a fence in a field of stinging nettles and raspberry brambles. After squeezing through a gap in the fence, we comforted an understandably distraught, scratched-up, stinging-nettle-zapped Elias, decided we'd have better luck bushwhacking through pine branches, and retraced our steps. Trail-less, we continued upward around branches, over sticks and moss-covered rocks, through thinning brambles and nettles, until at last we reached a graded gravel road. There, Elias and I traded right socks, as his was threatening to give him a blister, and we briefly admired that my size 10 foot fits into the sock of a nine-year-old boy.

When the gravel road met up with a mostly paved one, Elias offered a sacrificial gelatin-free gummi bear to a patch of stinging nettles, and it was relatively easy going after that. We followed the ridge for a few more miles, eventually encountering fourteen stations-of-the-cross markers that led us down to St. Peter.

Looking at the photographs above, taken from the ridge, you're probably thinking the hike was pretty easy. I didn't take any pictures of the miserable bits with the evil expanse of stinging nettles. The photo to the left, taken at a small open spot with a wee tilting chapel surrounded by the sourest blackberries in the world, hardly does justice to the incline.

We arrived in St. Peter about 20 minutes before the concert, and stopped off at a little cafe across from the church for the quickest and tastiest Kuchen inhalation ever. Then into the church we went for some Buxtehude, Couperin, and--bestill my beating heart--Schumann.

Johannes Götz played Schumann's B-A-C-H fugues numbers 5 and 2 and the canon in A-flat, and I learned that I am not the only organist baffled by certain aspects of these pieces. It's no wonder Clara Schumann was able to build an entire career out of being the only person who could properly interpret her husband's musical genius. I'm certain that despite their bizarreness, these pieces can be played convincingly, and I'm giving myself the rest of 2010 to figure out how to play the B-A-C-H fugues in a way that, short of leaving me satisfied, at least doesn't make me irritated.

As an encore, Götz played a transcription of Schumann's Lied, "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai," which ends inconclusively on the dominant of the submediant. In nontechnical terms, that means that most of the audience sat in stunned silence waiting for the piece to end, not realizing it already had.

After the concert, we headed to our favorite Italian restaurant and ate gnocchi on the balcony, watching storm clouds roll in over distant Freiburg. Then: a bus to Denzlingen, a train to Herdern, and a rainy walk to Urbanstrasse, and we were home. All in all, quite a fine day.

Augustiner Museum

The Augustiner Museum was closed for renovations last year, so it wasn't until this past Saturday that we were finally able to pay it a visit. Small but beautifully arranged, the museum includes some impressively tall statues and gargoyles from the Muenster--centuries-old originals that were replaced to prevent decay--respectively depicting the twelve apostles and the seven deadly sins. And thanks to the backside of a c. 1500 altar cabinet painted by Martin Schaffner et al., we learned that 15th-century sinners got what was coming to them for playing backgammon naked.

Back in Freiburg

Thanks to an odd twist of fate, as of this afternoon we're back in our old apartment in Freiburg for the next few weeks. We spent the past three nights staying with friends Wolfgang, Christina, and Terisa on the building's third floor (which would be the fourth floor in the U.S.--I want full credit for all those stairs) while the tenants who replaced us in December moved out. That was more than sufficient time for Terisa, age 3.5, to fall madly in love with Elias (actually, he was targeted before we even arrived). Elias in turn demonstrated he's a remarkably gracious and good-humored 9-year-old.

Elias is spending this week at a summer camp at the Weiherhof school, practically in our backyard. He attended the same camp last year, and we thought it would be a good way for him to meet up with kids again and hone his German. The teachers were delighted to see him this morning, and Elias was delighted to reconnect with three of his best school friends. After camp, Elias went across the street to trade soccer cards with his faithful pen-pal and fellow camper Johannes.

Nothing is sacred

I'm sure German can be a poetic language when it wants to be, yet it is a language of unexpectedly limited vocabulary. This is ironic, given that German allows speakers to invent new words by smashing multiple old ones together; but German ran out of phonetic Ur-combinations some time ago. Thus it has to use the same word, die Dichtung, to mean both poetry (hail Goethe, hail Schiller, hail Heine) and gasket (hail exhaust manifold, hail intake air duct).

Granted, English does the same thing. Take the noun key, for example, which can be both something to unlock a door (der Schlüssel) and something to affect sound production in a musical instrument (die Taste).

Still, you'd think concepts like poetry are sacred enough that the Volk would have found a different word/concept to share with gasket--say, das Radieschen (radish) or der Elch (elk). Maybe gaskets were invented before verse.

If poetry is not sacred enough, what is? We merely need turn to the word for mother--die Mutter--to learn that nothing is. Die Mutter means both mother and screw nut. The crass English double meanings of screw and nut perhaps highlight that I shouldn't be too critical of German. Still, mother and nut?

German reserves der Vater solely for male progenitors, so maybe we can simply blame all of this on The Patriarchy.

Getting around

There's lots of room to park at the Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof.