Bodensee aka Lake Constance

Meersburg
1.5 hours drive south from Tuebingen lies the Bodensee, known in English as Lake Constance. This stretch of water is shared between Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and in fact the Swiss border bisects the city of Konstanz. The Bodensee is the largest lake in Europe, and the source of the Rhein River.

This is another beautiful part of Europe. The lake is busy with all kinds of boating activities, ranging from pedalboats and rowing dinghies up to keelboat cruising and racing, and passenger and vehicular ferries. Unfortunately, a local boating licence is required for any vessel bigger than a pedalboat, and boat rentals are not exactly cheap.

We left the car at Meersburg to check out the old castle there, which claims to be the oldest in Germany (although it appears a lot more modern as the outer parts of the building are only a couple of hundred years old). We then took the ferry across to Konstanz to go for a wander.

Meersburg was buzzing with a German Red Cross exercise. All the DRK units from the region were out in force with simulated fires (complete with the biggest smoke machine I've seen), car accidents, motorbike accidents, etc. They really do this well - the "victims" were made up with very realistic (latex and stage makeup) injuries, and they used wrecked cars and horribly realistic mutilated dummies to simulate accident scenes. In hindsight, I wish I had some photos to post, however it seemed to ghoulish at the time to photograph the dummy with its head squashed between the bumper of the car and pillar of a building, with blood and brains splattered liberally across the scene.

The DRK also had information stands, showcasing their equipment, and most interestingly, their sniffer dog training program. They train labradors to search for survivors at disaster sites (building collapses, aircraft wrecks, etc).

Konstanz
Konstanz is just another pretty little city on the border between Germany and Switzerland. I didn't find anything particularly unique or noteworthy about the local architecture, but the harbour entrance is quite pretty. With it's little lighthouse and rotating statue.

The statue is apparently quite controversial - she is thought to be exposing too much flesh.





The Organ Grinder
Organ grinders are a fairly common site throughout Europe, with their little animated dancing monkey (or in this case, conductor). This guy is apparently blind. The dog is a guide dog, and the woman on the steps is either an organ grinder groupie, or his wife - all I know is that she followed him home.

Of all the organ grinders I've seen so far, this is my favourite. It had a nice tone to it, and a little glockenspiel with wonderful clarity. Nevertheless, I don't think I'll be pursuing a career in this field...

Downtown Tuebingen

I found the time to take a few more pictures of Tuebingen the other day. Just a couple though...

Tuebingen Town Hall (Rathaus) and plaza.

The Neckar River, with a glimpse of the Neckar Island on the left (a small island with a pedestrian bridge and park facilities), and the houses leading up to Hoelderlinturm.

Hoelderlinturm and Stockerkahn. Hoelderlinturm is the name of the turret on the left, which was home to the German poet Friedrich Hoelderlin. I don't know much about him, except that his work wasn't appreciated until after his death, and that he spent his life as a guest of his friend who owned this building while he struggled with some form of mental illness.

The Stockerkahn is a type of punt. The Neckar is very shallow (a couple of meters at most), and for a few Euros, a bloke will take you on a lap of the island in one of these punts.

What's In The Oven???

My latest hobby revolves around Rhea's neat little hand-me-down combination grill/microwave/convection oven. At first glance, it doesn't look particularly exciting. The display is almost dead, leaving the user to guess what settings they have entered, and the oven doesn't quite fit on the shelf, so it's propped up with a couple of stainless steel egg cups... We have a manual, with instructions in several languages, but it seems to overlook a few things, such as what the buttons actually do, and what the hieroglyphs mean. Nevertheless, I've been turning out some pretty tasty meals in this little oven.

Flammkuchen

• 1 thin, crispy pizza base
• sour cream
• finely diced soft bacon ("Speck")
  
• finely chopped onions

Spread a thin layer of sour cream over the pizza base, and scatter the onion and bacon over the top. Bake in a hot oven until the base is crisp, and the cream golden. Or better still, buy the ready-made product from the supermarket! This is a specialty from the Alsace region, and makes an excellent light meal.

For all German recipes, it's important to use the right type of bacon. German bacon comes in rashers, diced, or fillets. All cuts are available either smoked or raw. The main difference between German and Australian bacon seems to be that German bacon is softer and meatier than the dry equivalent in Australia. You can buy "speck" (German bacon) from some delicatessens in Sydney.

Rotisserie Grilled Pork Fillet with Smoky BBQ Marinade

• 1 large pork fillet
• 1 packet of smoky BBQ sauce
• 1 jam jar lid to improvise a replacement for the missing rotisserie bracket

Marinate the pork in the sauce for 24 hours. Thread the pork onto the rotisserie skewer and secure with the attached prongs. Place a baking dish half full of water under the skewer, and grill for 1 hour until the pork is cooked through. After 20 minutes, spread some more marinade on the pork. Do this every 10-15 minutes until the meat is ready. Serve with buttered baby potatoes and red capsicum lightly sauteed in olive oil.

Do not use the "Autocook" feature or microwave settings with the improvised rotisserie bracket - sparks will fly!!!

Asian Salad with rare "False Fillet" of Beef

• 1 false fillet of beef (looks like fillet, but is larger and has sinew through the middle...)
• salad greens
• finely sliced cucumber
  
• 1/4 of a red onion
• 3 tomatoes
  
• a bunch of mint
• a bunch of basil
  
• a pinch of chopped lemon grass
• 1 fresh lime
  
• chilli
  
• sea salt (coarse)

Rub the beef in sea salt and stand for a few hours. Grill in the oven on the high shelf until the juices start to appear on top. Turn and grill for another 5-10 minutes. Remove from grill and rest for 5 minutes.

Mix the salad greens in a bowl with the tomato, cucumber, and herbs. Carve the beef into fine slices and place on top of the salad. Sprinkle the onions and chilli over the beef, and squeeze the lime over the beef and salad.

Grilled Argentinian Beef Steak with Seasoning

Grill the steaks on the high shelf of the oven, turning once when the juices show. Sprinkle with Argentinian steak seasoning prior to serving.

Sonntag Broetchen (Sunday Bread Rolls)

• 1 tin of vacuum packed bread dough

This is fun - pop open the tin and 6 little dough cylinders explode out of it onto your baking paper. Roll them into some semblance of balls, score the tops with a knife, and pop them into the oven (preheat to 180C). 12 minutes later, you find 6 delicious, fresh bread rolls in the oven!!!

Of course, I'm also cooking up lots of interesting things on the stove, but I really find this little oven more challenging and therefore more interesting to use!

Berlin

Berlin is, not surprisingly, a very big city. Our first day in Berlin was slightly complicated by pouring rain. It bucketed down, prompting us to seek out museums and attractions close to subway stations. Berlin has an excellent commuter rail network, and this served us well.

We managed to visit the Brandenburg Gate and holocaust memorial before the downpour began. The holocaust memorial is a strange sculpture or piece of installation art - a massive forest of concrete obelisks, all the same width and breadth but of varying heights, geometrically aligned in a matrix over a shallow depression in the ground. The effect as you wander through it is quite strange, and the only obvious connection to the holocaust seems to be the fact that the holocaust museum is located underground beneath the monument. The queue at the museum was ridiculously long, so we wandered off towards the Bundesreich, hoping to watch the impending storm from the glass observation dome atop the building. Foiled again! Yet another ridiculously long queue extended outside the building, so we set off to the Pergamon Museum, which is when the rain really started....

Plan B: Museums next to subway stations...

Haus am Checkpoint Charlie is a fascinating museum in a building right next to the old checkpoint. The American guardhouse (or possibly a reconstruction thereof) sits in the
middle of the street, complete with some enterprising people dressed as soldiers for tourists to take photos at the checkpoint. This museum documents the history of the Berlin Wall, and many of the escape attempts that took place throughout its history. Apart from the museum, there is hardly any evidence that the city was once so radically divided, complete with tanks and armed soldiers to assert the division and terms of agreement.

Cultural Affairs

The Blue Man Group is currently playing in Berlin, and having enjoyed the show so much in Boston, we decided to check it out. We managed to get a couple of student tickets (I love my TAFE card - only one museum has rejected it so far!) about a third of the way across the very front row of the stalls. These seats come with rain ponchos to protect the audience from the paint and food debris that might escape the stage... The show has been modified quite a bit since I saw it last, and the voice-overs have of course been translated. It's still an awesome theatrical experience, with some amazing visual effects and the BMG trademark percussion performances.

Just down the road from the Blue Man Theater (the German word for "Theatre"...) is the Sony Centre - an enormous steel and glass plaza containing a big Sony shop, lots of upmarket restaurants and cafes, and a cinema. The menu at the Australian restaurant looked OK, but I'm not in Germany to eat Australian food...

The Pergamon Museum is quite interesting. This purpose-built museum houses an extensive collection of antiquities excavated by German archaeologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the enormous Pergamon altar and the city gate of Miletus. Wikipedia has a good write-up on the museum here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Museum

We visited a few of Rhea's friends in Berlin, which took us to the outer suburbs and the to the shore of the Muggelsee. The Muggelsee is a large, sprawling lake which serves as an aquatic playground for the people of Berlin. Little marinas around the shores of the lake provide berths for small sports cruisers and even moderate sized keelboats (Bavarias seem particularly popular here).

The river tour of Berlin was the final hilight of this brief visit. The surprisingly long riverboats run regular cruises for tourists, passing many of the historical buildings in the city. It's interesting to see how many of the old stone buildings still show signs of bullet holes in the masonry. It's hardly surprising given the events of WWII, but it's still strange to see.

And that's about all you can cram into two days in Berlin, although neither of us was particularly disappointed about heading across to the holiday house in Belgium where we could relax in comfort and take a break from the daily routine of traipsing through crowded cities and museums!

Medieval Dresden

As luck would have it, our visit to Dresden coincided with the Dresden Stadtfest, which involved turning the riverside promenade into a row of small beer gardens and a small stage where various folk singers entertained the drinkers. Of far more interest to us was the medieval market which occupied the plaza between numerous historical buildings.

Rustic stalls with appropriately costumed vendors were peddling all sorts of produce and craftwork, ranging from carved wooden ornaments and toys to fruit wines and fresh juices, mead, beer, bread, and hearty stews and roasts. I couldn't walk past the spit roasted pig without stopping to taste a few slices, accompanied by some sweet sauerkraut.

The most curious sight in this market had to be the "medieval merry-go-round". Strictly for small children, this ride was "father-powered" - the father of one of the riders could earn a free ride for his child by climbing into the "giant hamster wheel" and walking, causing a series of belts and pulleys to make the ride turn. Very clever.

A Scenic Tour of Italy - Venice to La Spezia

The driving directions from Venice to La Spezia are pretty simple – jump on the motorway, drive to Ferarra, on to Bologne, through to Lucca, and then up to La Spezia. About 350km, which should take about 4 hours. However, to break the monotony of the motorways, see a bit more of the countryside, and save about 20 euros in motorway tolls, we decided to take a scenic route which I found in our European road atlas. It looked a bit more direct than the motorways, and promised some beautiful views of northern Italy.

What I didn’t count on was:

• The road atlas doesn’t show all the minor roads, making navigation a little more challenging
• The road atlas doesn’t show all the towns, so unless the local signs indicate a town that is on our map, choosing the right route becomes guesswork
• Small Italian villages like to have festivals on weekends, and close off the route through the centre of town, since the locals can find their way around the roadblock using unmarked roads.
• The slightly wavy line indicating a winding road on the road atlas is in reality a wonderfully windy, narrow road that motorcyclists love, but one that confines motorists to second gear and inevitably induces motion sickness in the navigator.

In spite of all the obstacles set before us, we made it all the way across Italy to the hotel on half a tank of fuel, in about 8 hours (non-stop), only to find that I’d made a mistake with the on-line booking. We were confirmed for 1/10/07, however we arrived on 1/9/07, and they were booked out. Fortunately, the friendly duty manager phoned around to find us a room somewhere in the district (many hotels are booked out due to the holiday season), and finally came up with one down the road for 80 euros – nearly twice what we had budgeted. Fortunately this setback was just for one night, and we’re now settled into the much nicer (although cat-scented) venue we’d originally hoped for – for about 50 euros per night.

Of course, as you can see from the photos, the drive was worth it! The variety of scenery, from mountains, to farmland, to marble quarries and sales yards lining the streets was all fascinating!

Our room overlooks a valley of vineyards and possibly olive trees. 5 minutes drive through the mountain gets us to some picturesque beach-side villages, with sandy beaches and clean water to swim in.

Venice

Venice is a very special city. I had never realised that Venice really is just a few city blocks built right in the water on a handful of mostly submerged islands. Some of the footpaths along the grand canal seem to be permanently submerged, the rendering on many older buildings is badly damaged up to the first floor, and a few tall buildings canting towards each other above narrow alley ways or minor canals are all reminders of the fragility of this city. We spent the day getting lost in the labyrinth of passages and bridges, regaining our bearings by jumping on the nearest vaporetto (commuter ferry), and peering through shop windows. Venice is probably a wonderful place to shop if you have a princely budget and like extravagant clothing, ornaments and jewellery, in which case you would probably hire a gondola for a day (about 70 euro per hour!) and a personal guide to show you around. We settled for window shopping and jostling our way aboard the crowded vaporettos to extract exceptional value from our 13 euro 12 hour tickets!

“I don’t queue”

Rhea and I have adopted this motto, as neither of us have the patience to stand in line with a hundred other tourists just to go into a crowded museum, church, or whatever they’re waiting for. Unless it’s something we both definitely want to see, we admire the outside of the building, and move on to something that is not on the itinerary of the tour groups.

And so our tour of Venice was almost certainly unorthodox. We wandered from island to island through the places where real Venetians live, around their houses and schools, the produce market, watched the daily commercial routines of goods deliveries and postal service, and poked our heads into a couple of churches and cathedrals. Most German cathedrals are free to enter, but you can pay for guided tours, brochures, etc. Not so in Venice – it’s another 2.50 to enter each church just to marvel at the artwork. From the doorway, they really didn’t appear any more special than the cathedrals I’ve visited elsewhere in Europe, and last time I checked, the pope was doing pretty well financially, so we saved our money to visit one particular cathedral which Rhea wanted to see. To our surprise, Rhea’s cathedral was probably the only one in Venice with free admission!

Austria to Venice

They say there are no kangaroos in Austria, but we wouldn’t know. Apart from a few hours wandering around Salzburg (during which it drizzled rain intermittently), we drove from Salzburg to Venice through torrential rain and some hail. The rain was so heavy at times that we couldn’t see the road ahead, which was so slick with water that we were frequently aquaplaning – quite a frightening scenario in a little car on a very fast motorway! The rain eased a little after we left Austria, and cleared to isolated storms as we approached the Italian coast.

First impressions of Italy:

· Lots of flat, green farmland
· Ramshackle farm buildings, that look 300 years old, almost completely ruined on one side, but apparently still inhabited...
· Expensive – it’s almost impossible to find accommodation for less than 25 euros per person per night in the places we’re going.

Dog Culture

Europeans like to take their dogs to town, and on holidays, and anywhere else they choose to go. This phenomenon is so prevalent that most B&Bs indicate whether pets are welcome (most seem to be OK with small dogs, and some are happy to accommodate large dogs too), there is a surprising number of public drinking bowls for dogs, and dogs are allowed on public transport provided they are suitably restrained by their handler. Surprisingly, the footpaths seem to remain almost perfectly safe, which had me very puzzled in Venice where I didn’t see a single patch of grass – although plenty of signs advertised the penalties for unacceptable behaviour ranging from failing to clean up after your dog to going bare-chested in public...

The only things about this pet culture that seem to be a problem are the people who carry around half a dozen toy-sized dogs in baskets and handbags, and the fact that the corridor of the hotel I’m currently sitting in reeks of cats – although I’ve seen no sign of cats since we arrived.

Life’s Little Essentials – the European Way

It seems that in Europe has its price – from parking spaces to public amenities. Unless you have a twelve hour bladder, always fill your pockets with spare change before you leave home. (And go before you leave to save a few extra euros!) The protocol varies from place to place. In most bars and restaurants, it is enough that you are paying for your meal drinks, and they very generously allow you to use their facilities free of charge! However, in some restaurants and most public places you will find a white-coated “attendant” next to a little plate on a table in the hallway to the rest rooms. The charge for admission is generally 50 cents (A$0.75), which you usually pay on the way out. If the facilities are not up to your expectations, you leave a little less.

The service centres along the autobahns have a much more equitable system. Every 30km or so you can usually find a service centre which is basically a rest area with a little restaurant or snack bar, and usually a petrol station. One of these franchises provides a great system whereby the entrance to the rest rooms is blocked by an automated turnstile. Put your 50c in the slot, take the coupon it spits out, and you now have access to your choice of clean and well-stocked gents’ or ladies’ facilities. When you’re done, you can present the coupon for a 50c rebate in the restaurant. Perfect!

The final point of interest on the topic of relief is the amazing variation between the porcelain ware across Europe. Of course, American and Australian varieties are essentially the same, with Australia maintaining a permanent low tide, and America staying high (I could never understand how dogs on TV could drink from the bowl until I went to the US). The Germans have their own special design. Instead of placing the drain at the back of the bowl, as with Australian and US models, the drain is at the very front, and kept at low tide. The back of the bowl contains a slightly concave plateau to capture one’s offering, thereby preventing any “splash-back”.

Italy presented yet another variation, which I’ll refer to as the “patented Italian arse bath”. It is like a toilet, only smaller. Half of the Italians I’ve seen so far couldn’t possibly have used it. At first glance it’s a kind of bidet. Then flip up the bowl insert, and you have hinged a ring-seat, with an interesting notch in the middle at the front. Maybe it’s a tool rest? Anyway, you probably have to stay at 80 euro a night hotels in the middle of rural Italy to find this little gem...