Fasching in Mainz - Friday

Friday seemed to be a quiet day. The kids had the day off of school and there were lots of preparations. The stands for food, beer, and rides are being set up on the cathedral square.

Some shops around the main area of festivities are boarding up their windows - this one using Fasching colors. 

Even the statue of Gutenberg is decorated for the event.

TV cameras are set up at the main grandstand for the parade viewing.

Etiquette reminders are posted (The pisser is a pitiful costume.) It's a 35 Euro fine for "Wildpinkeln."

Clean up has already begun.

And, to pick up a theme of the level of kids' independence here - a small girl, wearing her Fasching costume (or maybe she just likes skeleton tights!) doing a little grocery shopping.

Fasching in Mainz - Thursday!

Fasching (Carnival) is a BIG deal in Mainz! So my goal is to put up a short post every day between now and Tuesday sharing some of the party! The first few are from the train station today. All the Fasching decorations are in blue, yellow, red, and white.

There are stands everywhere should you be unprepared for Fasching fashion.

And parades everywhere, even IN the train station.

These are from a concert/street party. This is Thursday afternoon - I can only imagine what Monday and Tuesday will be like!

Frankfurt

Despite living so close to Frankfurt, we rarely actually visit! With Jenni here, though, we had an excuse to go and a fun day in the city. This first was just a fun building we saw. It's a lawyer's office.

 We visited the cathedral, of course. I forgot my camera, and my phone doesn't take great pictures in low light, but I thought this altar was really beautiful, as was the organ.

This is the view of the city across the Main River. We had visited the Städel Museum and took this picture as we walked back to the train station across a wonderful pedestrian bridge. The Städel was a nice surprise - I wasn't really expecting much, but it's a good art museum. I especially loved all the room full of works by Max Beckmann (only in part because there's usually an animal in each of his pictures so it's fun to look for them!)

They've built a wall around the old Jewish cemetery and in the wall is a marker for each of the Frankfurt Jews killed in the holocaust - 11,000 of them.

 Not much is left of the old cemetery itself.

Probably the most famous building in Frankfurt - the town hall.

Bonn

We had a lovely day trip to Bonn in January. We visited the cathedral, of course.

And also Beethoven's house (where he was born - not actually all that interesting!) 

We walked around the outside of the university in Bonn, enjoying one of the few green spaces in the city.

We also visited 2 museums - the very excellent German history museum in Bonn and a special exhibition on space exploration at the art museum. First the German history museum, which covers, basically, from WWII to present day. The museum begins with the Holocaust and then moves into the post-war period. There was a reproduction of a newspaper with graphic pictures from the Holocaust and the headline: "This disgraceful deed: your debt." I'm not including the photo here, as it's quite disturbing.

This picture is from a display of the reconstruction that happened in the first ten years after the war, showing a number of cities (this one is Kassel). Most of the reconstruction was done by women, children, and old men, given that men of fighting age were either dead or, at least in the period immediately after the war, in POW camps.

The story of the Berlin airlift is a great tale. (Daring Young Men: The Heroism and Triumph of The Berlin Airlift-June 1948-May 1949 is a good account of it if you're interested.) They were often called "raisin bombers" for the very popular boxes of raisins they dropped, and this is a model someone made of one from raisins.

I didn't take any pictures of the space exhibition (I would've gotten Darth Vader if pictures were allowed) but it was an odd mix of history and technology with art and fantasy. They were combined in a way not typical of American museums. My favorite part was a wooden sphere that you could crawl into, and then could see the northern and southern hemisphere constellations via tiny holes in the wood.

We also came upon a demonstration in front of the city hall of Bonn. It had to do with keeping a particular school open.

Sunday morning at the bakery

Worms!

While friends were visiting we took a day trip to Worms, which is a great little city to visit. It is most famous as being the location of the trial of Martin Luther where he was declared a heretic. It has a beautiful Romanesque cathedral, a Jewish cemetery that survived the war, and a rebuilt synagogue and museum of Jewish life. One can also visit a museum to the Nibelungenlied, which left me a bit baffled.

Cathedral from Jewish cemetery

Jewish cemetery

Luther Monument

Some of my favorite traveling companions!

Lorch, Freiburg, Lörrach, and Baden Baden

Just after Christmas we took a short trip to the Black Forest area of Germany. We stopped first in Lorch to see the 8th century Abbey (a World Heritage site) and, oddly enough, the largest tobacco museum in Germany. Who knew?

8th Century Abbey at Lorch

 From there we went to Freiburg, where we spent several days.Our first evening we ate in a bar/restaurant with great bathrooms.

Stall door in the toilet at a restaurant

 The highlight of Freiburg is the cathedral. Gail swears it's a federal law that every cathedral in Germany must have scaffolding on it.

Freiburg Cathedral

Inside it's beautiful. In different sections of the church one can see the different architectural styles of the periods in which it was built. This is the high altar, decorated for Christmas.

Altar at Freiburg Cathedral

 Where there's a tower we'll climb the tower, even in the snow!

The stained glass in the cathedral is beautiful. Many of the windows were sponsored by various professional guilds many centuries ago.

Freiburg Cathedral stained glass (sponsored by the bakers' guild, as shown by the pretzels!)

15th Century stained glass from the Freiburg Cathedral (now at the Augustiner Museum)

Gargoyle

 There are lots of beautiful buildings in Freiburg!

Freiburg Historisches Kaufhaus

And we also found this disturbing stained glass in a small church. Never seen anything quite like it.

The sidewalks in Freiburg are all made of river stone. Tradition dictates that a symbol of the business be incorporated into the sidewalk in front of the building. 

Our friends Fabienne and Michel and their kids met us in Lörrach for lunch and we also visited the Vitra design museum, which was really fun (and a better choice on a very snowy day than the hike we'd planned!) 

One of the goals was to go sledding in the Black Forest. Ironically, there was too much snow and we couldn't safely drive to any of the areas where there's good sledding. So we did a little in town and a little on the way back with our friends in Neuthard. We also stopped at the Baden Baden Christmas Market.

At the Baden Baden Christmas Market