(no subject)

[sanura]

The breakfast room was similarly upscale, but the breakfast itself was less generous. And the fruit in the yoghurt was fermented. Ew, carbonated pineapple. But the hotel was right outside the medieval city wall, and the town was small enough that one could park at one end and walk to the other. The one really interesting point of interest (to me, anyway) was the major church, which was on a charity kick in Tanzania as far as I could tell. It was a typical (and therefore beautiful) gothic church with a few restoration and construction problems (also typical), but there were works of Tanzanian art and religious paraphernalia carved in Tanzanian style, identified as gifts from the sister church in a town with a German name in Africa. But there was no place tourists were restricted from going, even behind the altar, which was unusual. Not that you couldn't see the (decent, by my standards, but not fantastic) stained glass windows quite well from further away. In any case, it was a nice church, well worthy of invasion for improv, as I suspect most churches in Europe are, and there are millions.

Having found the Dinkelsbuehl tourist office and determined that there was nothing else we desperately needed to see, we floundered our was back through the wall-gate to the road to Rothenburg.


Ah, Rothenburg. We spent five hours walking around there, after finding a surprise free parking spot right outside the walls. There were several gorgeous churches, and we went in each one we encountered, but I think we spent the most time in the Kriminalmuseum, the museum of medieval crime. It was both horrifying, with exhibits on the medieval process of law and a ghastly number of authentic instruments and illustrations (mostly woodcut) of torture, and fascinating, with hilarious vellum police ordinances, papal documents, a whole room full of sigils, and a building full of medieval books on magic (how to do it, how to avoid it, how to catch other people doing it and turn them in...), almost all but the last in both German and English. The instruments of law that stand out in my memory, besides the square-ended executioners' swords with beautifully calligraphed names on them, (I tried to block out most of the torture) were not identified very clearly in English, but stood off in a mostly-empty corner of the hall by themselves, not out of importance, but as though someone forgot to move them when the rest of the cases were emptied. Together with a gilded scepter and orb was a mewdieval crown, with a goden, gem-encrusted band on four sides. I love gem-encrusted, especially when the crust includes the lesser-known semiprecious stones of which I am so fond.

Trying to find the last church on my mental list of churches to see in Rotheburg, we got rather lost. Luckily, the last church we'd been in had maps, and mama picks up brochures from nearly everywhere we go, so we happened to have one when we found ourselves at the very southern end of town with little idea where we parked. Well, the gate and towers there were awfully cool, so we decided to walk along the wall till we found the entrance we'd come in. I climbed the stairs to the walltop and looked through the arrowslits for reconaissance when the came along, while mama stayed on the ground and went out each gate to check it. I guess it was a good quarter of the wall we walked, stopping occasionally on the narrow path behind somebody taking a picture. My camera had died right after the crime museum, when we first saw the valley over the wall, so I didn't get to hold anyone up myself.

The gates were tricky, with separate and sometimes invisible pedestrian exits on each side, one of which we'd come through. It was a major gate, but we hadn't seen it, coming over the covered bridge, hugging the wall, and going through the small door just before it, so it was hard to recognize. Still, we got out it more easily than the city of Rothenburg. Our directional dilemmas, looking back on it, seem particularly concentrated on that day.


Wuerzburg, the first stop on the Romantische Strasse (we did it backward), was the next town in our way. After parking almost immediately mit Parkschein from the Parkscheinautomat halfway around the block, we spent an hour looking at churches. I must say, Wuerzburg, I'm disappointed. The Stift Haug St. Johannes, which we saw first, was impressive (the organist was even practicing), but mostly because it was entirely painted white, with the occasional gilded basin of holy water and huge painting of Jesus undergoing some suffering or other (these rivaled the torture illustrations, being less woodcut and more realistic). It was a basilica, so it had a round dome and Roman rather than Gothic arches, but the effect wass spoiled by the white paint over the stone.

The Dom was the same way, although it was twice the size and had paintings in the domes instead of blank whiteness, and a few decorations on the arches; I guess the stone look means more to me than I realized. Another little church in Wuerzburg had more stone (and some medieval tablet knights) and wood, but the soaring arches were still a grungy white. The organist in that one seemed to be trying to revoice a Bach prelude before the concert advertised as later that evening. Wuerzburg was interesting, but I was glad to navigate us back to the car (Stift Haug had a map, and I used it; it sure is easier to navigate walking than driving), because my feet were tired and the rain in Rothen burg had stretched my right boot and it was starting to blister.


Having decided that we should stay in Frankfurt the night before the flight, rather than trying to find the airport in the morning, I directed us there from Wuerzburg, ostensibly an easy trip. Well, we hit the 5:00 traffic, all the way there. At least it was sunny, and we'd had satisfying sandwiches we made from the components of the Dinkelsbuehl breakfast. The classic rock station revealed its limited repertoire. Bayern Drei plays classic rock, but only occasionally. There were about eight terrible songs (including one by Shakira, if you can imagine my boundless delight) we heard at least twice, some three or four times over the three days we listened to that station. It boggled the mind. So did the traffic. Luckily, traffic jams don't stress me out unless I'm late for something.

Getting to Frankfurt was one thing; finding things there is a completely unrelated set of navigational skills, based mostly on blind luck. We circled the same set of streets maybe four times, tring to find the cool stuff we knew about and admiring the cool stuff we didn't know about on the way. Having walked our feet off earlier in the day, we stayed in the car, but from my muddled perspective I'm pretty sure we saw the Alte Nichoalskirche (covered completely in plastic and scaffolding), the Kaiserdom (from down the street a few blocks, but from both sides), the Alte Oper (the signs for that were abundantly clear, and we went by it several times), the Messe and Festhall, the outer edges of the Frankfurt Rathaus (composed of 16 buildings and called Roemer after the traders who came there from Rome), and a bunch of really cool skyscrapers.

Then we had to find a hotel. Suffice it to say, we traversed every inner road of the airport at least twice, followed a hotel sign which turned out to lead to a neighboring town through several miles of impenetrable forest, made it back to the airport, did it again, and back to the airport a different way before we found anything out about hotels.

The only signs for lodging led to the airport Sheraton. On the long shot that there might be low-class rooms for the teeming millions, I went in to ask the price. In, up an elevator, down five airport-scale halls, and to the reception desk. I was kindly and sympathetically informed that the Sheraton cost about 400 euro per night, but Hotel Information in the airport had a list of all the hotels in Frankfurt, their prices, and booking information. So, down the hall, across the pedestrian bridge from the Sheraton to the airport proper, two escalators down and 100m to the right, Hotel Information informs me that, due to a convention, every hotel in Frankfurt is fully booked for the night, and maybe if you go 50km out of town you'll find a room. Well, then.

Since the other hotel airport had signs we'd just noticed, we went in and made sure it was booked, too, before setting off through the woods again to the aforementioned neighboring town. Appropriately enough, it was Schwanheim. Ludwig's memory may have smoothed our way, because though our parking spot was indecently far from it, we found a hotel right away, where a group had made reservations and not shown up. And the guy was very nice, too, not worrying about the 40-cents short we were in change. It was another 7 euros more than Dinkelsbuehl, but the room that was open was more of a suite, with four beds and two baths down the hall. Boy, though, were we read to crash in that high-toned (for us) atmosphere.