On the Road: Berlin (Waiting in Dresden, June 7, 2018)

The Reichstag from Berlin Hauptbahnhof

I must say, I'm not at all impressed with public transportation in Germany. The systems are good enough: the buses are frequent, the trams are frequent and fast, and you can buy a wide range of tickets that are a good value, such as one-day unlimited tickets or one-week tickets, and a single ticket allows you to use buses, trams, or trains both above and under ground. However, the signage is appalling. Typically, there will be an extremely detailed map of the entire transit system of the city, offering far too much information with nothing pertinent readily apparent. It can be very hard to understand which direction the trains are going because the next stop is never shown at the stops. There are very few announcements (or often none). I left 45 minutes today to get from the famous Green Vault to the Hauptbahnhof, which should have been about three times more time than necessary, and I still missed my train to Prague because it was impossible to efficiently find the right tram. I had similar experiences in Berlin and Leipzig. Munich was simpler for some reason, with bus and tram stops generally right next to each other.

On my train run from Berlin to Dresden, the cars were marked each with two different numbers, one an LED display on the side of the train, another printed on paper and attached to each of the car doors. I was lucky to have chosen the information on the paper. I was correctly in my reserved seat while cars full of confused passengers spent the first 45 minutes of the ride moving to another car, towing heavy luggage through the aisles. I thought the Germans were supposed to be good at this sort of thing. Germany makes the subway systems of Paris and Tokyo, for example, seem dazzlingly well thought out and clearly marked. [I had similar troubles later in the trip, going from Prague to Munich again: somebody else had the same seat reservation as me and the train was more than an hour late because, for some reason, what was supposed to be direct run terminated early and we had to make two transfers to slow local trains]. When I complained about the double reservation at Munich, the man at the window said flatly that a double booking was impossible (until I showed him the other person's ticket, which I had photographed) and then he blamed it on the Czechs). He grudgingly refunded my reservation fee of €4.5. There was no apology.]

It was a simple process to get my ticket validated for the next train to Prague, but I ended up with 90 minutes to wait and thus with a little time to get caught up. I found not only Berlin's transportation system a disappointment. Much of the central part of the city is under construction (a new tunnel is going in under Unter den Linden, for instance) and every public space was set up with giant video screens and bleachers in anticipation of Germany doing well in the World Cup soccer matches now going on. The view was obscured virtually anywhere you looked. Unter den Linden had rather small lindens, I thought. I wonder why? It wasn't the luxuriant tree-shaded avenue I imagined. Were the trees destroyed in the war and only recently replanted?

Graffiti in Berlin

There is much scarring still evident from the war and from the Soviet period. Old, blackened stone buildings are side by side with simple modern buildings put up quickly right after the end of the hostilities or with something quite new and bland in style. Here and there very old buildings that have been restored stand out. It seems common here to rebuild significant buildings using the old stones where possible, new stone where not (a pale sandstone mostly), leaving the old stone uncleaned, making the restoration obvious, perhaps as a reminder. I saw this in Leipzig and here in Dresden, too, the starkest example being the Frauenkirche, which was left a pile of rubble from the day of its destruction in 1945 until after the reunification of the two Germanys.

Despite my complaining, Berlin was not without its attractions. Jonathan, my old friend from my time in Tokyo, came from Britain to spend a few days with me. We had trouble getting into the AirBnB apartment, but stopped for a drink at a nearby cafe while sorting things out. We walked along the River Spree and had dinner at a nearby Russian restaurant with decent borscht, kebabs, and lamb (the Turkish influence is everywhere). At breakfast the next morning, House Sparrows, well accustomed to croissant crumbs, ate from my hand. We went to look at the Brandenburg Gate, which was obscured by both construction and World Cup bleachers (which everywhere had a slightly forlorn look, as Germany has already been eliminated from the finals).

Performer being filmed on
Unter den Linden

We attempted to visit the Reichstag and Bundestag but found advance reservations were required. We had a quick look in the Willy Brandt Center, which we happened to pass, and stopped at the Neue Wache, a recently restored neo-classical building along Unter den Linden built originally as a guardhouse for troops of the crown prince of Prussia. Today it is described as Germany's "Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Dictatorship."

In front of  Humboldt University, there was a large book market, and, a little incongruously, a small film crew photographing a woman with a dyed red mohawk haircut, stack heels, fishnet stockings, a corset, and a whip, strutting about, cracking the whip. We were on our way to the Gendarmenmarkt—again a disappointment as the entire square was filled with a giant screen and more soccer seating. I got to see the churches at either end, but it was impossible to get a real feel for the square the buildings are bookends to. One consolation was a surprisingly good lunch. I had a cold asparagus and lime soup and grilled mackerel.

The organ in Berlin Cathedral

Later we visited the Berlin Cathedral, another building badly destroyed during the war and rebuilt. The crypt below the church has a rather startlingly complete collection of sarcophagi of local royalty—a history of centuries of royal burial styles in one underground chamber. I was reminded of the cathedral at St. Denis, just north of Paris with a similar collection (although no bones, as the royals there were dumped from their resting places during the French Revolution). Some below the Berlin Cathedral were simple and made of wood. Most were elaborately carved stone. Among the many notables are King Frederick I and Queen Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, grandparents of Frederick the Great. They must have been very popular, as large memorial sarcophagi for the two are up in the cathedral as well.

Tagliolini with black truffles and pine nuts
at Focaccino, Berlin

Good food provided another consolation later. We had dinner at a Sicilian restaurant called Focaccino, having chosen Italian cuisine for a break from the meat and potatoes so often on offer. I had caponata as a starter and then tagliolini with black truffles and pine nuts, washed down with sparkling water and a Vermentino from Sardinia. The pasta was perfect. It was so good, in fact, that I went back the following night, after Jonathan had headed back to England, and had the pasta again.

Lion from the Ishtar Gate reconstruction in the Pergamon Museum

In the morning we had visited the Pergamon Museum, which, like just about every museum I've visited in Germany, was half closed, but the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, the main attraction, was in the section open to the public. It is much larger than I imagined and less complete. I hadn't known that it was mostly crated and sent to Germany in fragments and painstakingly rebuilt, much of it from modern tiles made for the restoration. It's mostly the animals and the lower friezes that are original. Still, it is impressive. Many other artifacts were from Miletus, in Turkey, a site I visited in 1983.

After parting with Jonathan at the Hauptbahnhof, I went back to the Museuminsel (The Museum Island, an island in the Spree where many of the major museums in Berlin are) to see the national collection of paintings and then the Neues Museum, which famously houses the bust of Nefertiti. The museums hold a vast collection of artifacts from all over the ancient world. Having seen them all, I'm confused about what I saw in which museum, but a few favorites follow.

Böcklin The Isle of the Dead (1883)

Among the paintings, it was fun to see one of the several versions of The Isle of the Dead  Böcklin painted (I believe the third of five, this one from 1883), having just seen his odd painting of the mermaid and fauns or centaurs in Munich. I haven't seen the other versions he painted, so I can't compare them, but the Isle in this one is conceived as a very small island surround on three sides by high cliffs that make it look like a stadium. A grove of tall cypresses are a backdrop to a low wall with an opening and a shallow flight of stairs leading in from where a small boat will soon land, the boat carrying a white-clad figure. Above in the rocks on either side are ruins, pale spots, like the standing figure in the boat. The island is a portal.

Edouard Manet In the Conservatory (1879)

I hadn't known that Manet's In the Conservatory (1879) is here. It's a painting I know well from reproductions. It's alway a pleasure to see in person these paintings that are new to me but seem like old friends. There was a special exhibition going on called Wanderlust, the theme being figures in the landscape broadly interpreted. It included works from all over the world and from various periods. Some of the paintings were depictions of actual wanderers, others more wanderers in the sense of seekers after knowledge, but sometimes figures that might be considered both. Many of the paintings were minor works of genre painting that didn't interest me much, but included were Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1817), on loan from its home in Hamburg—perhaps the epitome of romantic longing after something other—as well as his Monk by the Sea (1808/10). Monk by the Sea shows a lone figure on a dark stretch of coast looking out at a nearly black sea, dark clouds above. The waves are barely visible. I rather liked these two paintings.

Mythical creature in relief of King Ashurnasirpal II 

In the Pergamon Museum, stelae and stone reliefs from Assyria and elsewhere, much like those in the British Museum, were perhaps the highlight. I particularly liked a relief of King Ashurnasirpal II (reigned 883 to 859 BC) involved in a ritual flanked by winged divine beings. In this and similar reliefs the main figures frequently hold pine cones, but I don't know what their significance is. According to the wall labels, there are traces of color on many of the reliefs, suggesting they may originally have been brightly painted, which seems to have been common in antiquity, even if we are used to seeing bare stone.

Relief of King Ashurnasirpal II 

Bust of Nefertiti

The famed Nefertiti bust is what most people go to the Neues Museum in Berlin to see. It's the one thing in the museum you aren't allowed to photograph, except from a distance, from the adjoining rooms (if you care to try). It's another very familiar piece of art I'd never seen in person. I'd never understood its fame. It never seemed that extraordinary to me. Seeing it in person has changed my view. It is, indeed, beautiful.

It's astounding that it has survived so long in such good condition, despite the damage that's evident here and there (Nefertiti is missing an eye, for instance). I'd never noticed the subtle wrinkling under her eyes before. She seems alive and imperfectly perfect. As I have a very long lens on my camera, I had comparatively little trouble photographing her even though she was a good 30 feet away. The bust is stucco-coated limestone that has then been painted. Nefertiti was the wife of Akhenaten. According to Wikipedia, the bust is believed to have been made in 1345 BC by Thutmose, as it was found in his workshop in Amarna, Egypt, but little more seems to be known about its origins.

The Berlin Golden Hat

The museum goes out of the way to highlight where the Nefertiti bust is displayed but also provides extra help in finding one other item, The Berlin Golden Hat. I had never heard of it, but it appears to be considered the museum's second most important treasure. It's described as "one of the most significant creations of Bronze Age goldsmithing." Its exact origins are unknown. It appears to have been purchased in 1996 from an antique dealer, but three other Bronze Age gold hats are known to exist, all from north of the Alps—two from southern Germany, one from France. It's a ceremonial hat, believed to have been worn in rituals, but encoded in its decorations is also a system of calculating the 19-year cycle of the sun and the moon.

On the Road: Leipzig (July 2-3, 2018)

The Bach statue in front of
ThomasKirche, Leipzig

I had hoped to catch up on writing about the museums in Munich, but there's only so much time to write when you're traveling. This afternoon I head to Berlin already. I chose a latish train to allow time this morning for a visit to the Bach Museum in Leipzig, which was closed yesterday when it would have been more convenient. I sit now in a café not far from Bach's Thomaskirche, aiming to get myself fed early in the day today. Yesterday, traveling by rented car in the countryside in search of ancestors, I found myself in places where food was hard to find. I eventually had a lunch of fried trout and beer (Altenburger) in the town of Langenleuba-Niederhain. Everywhere beer.

Currants for sale

It happened to be a market day in Leipzig. I enjoyed watching people and looking at the bounty of fruit, cheeses, mushrooms, vegetables, and meat on offer. The variety of fruit was impressive: blueberries; cherries; peaches; apricots; red, black, and white currants; raspberries; gooseberries; figs; strawberries; and more. Some of the vendors were from as far away as Poland. Many vendors felt it important to say their produce was from Germany. "Deutsche Erdbeeren, Deutsche Himmelbeeren!" I bought cherries, black currants, and blueberries. I had a quick look at the Bach Museum and at Bach's Thomaskirche, where his remains lie today (having been moved there from a spot not far from where I was staying, near the Johannisplatz, the site of a church destroyed in WWII).

The courtyard of Colditz Castle

On the way, I stopped at Colditz and took a quick self-guided tour of the castle infamous as a WWII prison for allied officers, and, I learned, as a psychiatric "hospital" used even before the concentration camps were set up as a place to extinguish patients rather than care for them, usually by intentional starvation (after the war, it was used as an actual hospital). A bit incongruously, there was an exhibit of nude photography from the East German era, that was as interesting for the cameras on display as for the photographs. In the prison museum is a collection of artifacts, including fake German uniforms prisoners painstakingly made for escape attempts from blankets and cardboard, complete with insignia and other details. The famous glider was never used, apparently. The prison was liberated before an attempt could be made. It was to have been catapulted from the windows above the chapel (just to the right of the tower in my photograph of the courtyard here).

Wheat fields near Langenleuba-Niederhain

Langenleuba-Niederhain, the town from which the German ancestors on my mother's side emigrated, is about 50 minutes south of Leipzig. It was a quick drive through flat farmland (mostly wheat and corn) studded with dark lollipop trees along the roads and relieved here and there by patches of forest or a village with red-orange or black and grey roofs and always a church spire. Huge combines were harvesting wheat. Crows in the fields behind them appeared to be gleaning kernels left behind. Raptors (probably kites) circled overhead, perhaps looking for mice or voles.

A traditional house, Langenleuba-Niederhain

I found the church in Langenleuba-Niederhain after asking directions several times. It's a bit outside of the cluster of buildings at the center of the village. I was disappointed to find no graves of any kind there. I also found the closest cemetery (and another closer to the village of Flemmingen), but in both the oldest burial I could find was from 1966 and most were much newer than that. Strange in Europe to find a cemetery with no old graves. A woman tending a gravesite said there were no old graves in the area. A man at the library told me the same and that there were no records as old as I was seeking anyway (lost in the war? Lost in the confusion following the fall of East Germany?). I didn't quite understand the explanation given but it sounded as if they had all disappeared. I learned also that records for Langenleuba-Niederhain are kept in Flemmingen at the Pfarramt there (in the custody of one Herr Coblenz at Pfarramt 27 Flemmingen, Thuringen, 04618, who was not at home either of the two times I tried to enquire).

Eventually, I gave up, but there were buildings both old and new in the traditional Saxon style in the village and in the neighboring villages, always with a stone ground floor (often but not always with shallowly arched wooden lintels over the first-storey windows) and a half-timbered second story. The drawing we have of the home of ancestor Christoph Heinig in the town is one of these (Christoph was father of Gottfried Heinig, my great-great-grandfather, who arrived in the US in 1859). Perhaps a letter to Mr. Coblenz will turn something up.

On the Road: Munich Art Museums (continued)

After visiting the Alte Pinakothek, I walked the short distance to the Neue Pinakothek, which turned out to be not as Neue as I had imagined. The building is new, but the art is mostly 19th century art. I have always associated the place with Impressionist and Post Impressionist art, but the museum was founded by King Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1853 (the original building was destroyed during World War II; the building that houses the collection today opened in 1981) and much of the collection is art that was contemporary around that time and not long after—in other words, 19th century art. It's not until the last three or four of more than twenty galleries that any modern painting appears (modern in the art historical sense).

The Anatomist (1869) by Gabriel von Max

Among the older works, there were some oddities that caught my eye, including a painting entitled The Anatomist (1869) by Gabriel von Max. The anatomist of the title is in shadow, alone in a dark room with a pretty female corpse, lifting the white cloth that drapes her, about to expose a lifeless white breast. He seems perplexed more than anything, as if doesn't quite know what to do with the body. Another odd painting shows a group of monkeys sitting on top of what appear to be crates for shipping paintings. The edge of a gilded frame appears to the left side. The amusing title is Apes as Art Critics (1889). It was also painted by Gabriel von Max.

Apes as Art Critics (1889) by Gabriel von Max

Arnold Böcklin, Playing in the Waves (1883)

Another oddity was Arnold Böcklin's Playing in the Waves (1883), which shows a group of people (if "people" is the right word) playing in the ocean. The men appear to be centaurs and at least the large foreground figure is a mermaid. The upturned bottom of the swimmer diving under the waves at upper right is a particularly amusing touch that suggests at least some of the swimmers are human. I liked this painting the more I looked at it, strange as it is. It's not clear to me what's going on here, but it made me laugh. Aside from that, the use of color is appealing and the way the half-submerged figures disappear into the depths as the light fades under the surface of the water is convincing. I wonder about the title. "Playing" might be the wrong term. The mermaid doesn't look especially happy....

Nymphéas (1915), Claude Monet

 There were many good pieces by Caspar David Friedrich as well. I particularly liked Riegengebirgs Landscape with Fog Rising (1819-20), but the atmospheric effects didn't photograph well.

Vincent Van Gogh, View of Arles (1889)

The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist galleries at the end of the museum, if you follow the suggested route, are impressive. The walls are painted strong colors that suddenly bring the museum alive as you turn a corner—a bit startling at first, as the colors the Impressionists used were when these paintings were new. All three of the Van Goghs here I've seen before but only in reproduction. There is an early Cézanne still life, a large Monet waterlily, one of the Van Gogh sunflower paintings, a very large, very interesting Bonnard view of a colliery using a lot of his characteristic yellows and oranges despite the subject matter, and a beautiful Gauguin, among others. I had thought there were more modern works in the museum than were on display, but it was wonderful to see these. Perhaps a lot is kept in storage and rotated often, or maybe lent frequently. I don't know....

Lignite Colliery (1918), Pierre Bonnard

The Birth–Te Manari No Atua, Paul Gauguin, 1896

Vincent Van Gogh, Vase with Sunflowers (1888)

Poster designs by Ikko Tanaka
at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Next, I visited Pinakothek der Moderne to see its collection of modern art. There was a lot to see and I was tired by the time I got there, so I went around in something of a daze, but I got to see a special exhibit of graphic design by Ikko Tanaka in addition to the permanent collection, which, not surprisingly, is strong in German artists and artists working in Germany, including Max Beckmann and the Expressionists. I rarely get enthusiastic about sculpture, but a pice by Oskar Schlemmer caught my eye (below) along with a few pieces by painters unfamiliar to me.

Black and white at
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

In a large gallery of starkly black and white paintings, a woman dressed from head to toe in black was an irresistible subject. I'm not sure she was unaware as I photographed her from a distance.

Abstrakte Figur (Freiplastik G)
Oskar Schlemmer (1921)

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On the Road: Munich to Leipzig (July 1, 2018)

On the ICE express from Munich to Leipzig by way of Nuremberg and Erfurt, the countryside is mostly wheat and corn fields but also I have seen large fields of vines trained up high on wires—surely hops for making beer. This is Bavaria after all. I didn't make it to a beer hall while in Munich, but I have a bottle of the local brew in my bag for later. The people of Munich certainly consume a lot of it. There are beer halls everywhere and beer bottles everywhere, too, although, in general the city is quite clean.

Great Spotted Woodpecker, English Garden, Munich
July 1, 2018

I spent the morning walking around the English Garden, which includes some surprisingly thick stands of large trees, as well as streams and lakes and large open meadows. A team of Indian or Pakistani amateur cricket players was using one of the meadows for some practice, sharing the space with a flock of geese.

Fieldfare
English Garden, Munich, July 1, 2018

I went to the garden to do some bird watching. I heard a lot of loudly singing birds, but, the singers tend to stay high in the trees and hidden, which is rather frustrating. That said, I saw the ubiquitous local blackbirds and many tits (Great Tits, I think in this case), and I did add two new birds to my life list: the Fieldfare (a Robin-like thrush) and the Great Spotted Woodpecker. I managed to get photos of both. It was interesting also to see female Mandarin Ducks, which look only subtly different from the females of our closely related Wood Ducks.

Female Mandarin Duck
English Garden, Munich
July 1, 2018

On the Road: Munich (June 30, 2018)

Bols: The Governers of the Amsterdam Wine Merchants' Guild (1659)

Aching feet, but I'm happy. I spent the whole day at the Pinakotheken—Alte, Neue, and der Moderne, in Munich. Half the Alte Pinakothek (yes, half of the entire museum) was closed for renovation, which was very disappointing, but perhaps a blessing in disguise. I would probably not have made it to the other two museums otherwise.

I can't complain. I got to see a few paintings that I've always wanted to see—in particular The Governers of the Amsterdam Wine Merchants' Guild (1659), by Bols. I had a postcard of this painting pinned over my desk at work for many years, although I can't remember where I got the card. The figure at far left, is a servant, according to the wall label, not one of the governors. He holds a pipette for sampling wine and a tastevin, the only indicators of the profession of the main subjects. Seeing the painting in person, I noticed that, aside from the marvelous faces, the cushion on the stool (lower right) is particularly well done; it seemed so real, I wanted to touch it.

Rubens: The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt (c. 1616)

The early German section of the museum was open, as were the Reubens rooms. Among the paintings by Rubens, I especially wanted to see The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt (c. 1616) as my mother once saw it and, impressed by it, had on a number of occasions described it to me. It's quite impressive—large and full of action. I love the expression on the face of the man top center (half obscured by the raised arm of the man in the white turban to right of him). The hippo, too, is wonderful. The wall label suggests Rubens may have based his depiction of the hippo on a stuffed hippo that was on display in Rome in 1601, although the painting is dated to about 15 years later than that.

Cranach the Elder
Lucretia

Early German portraits and religious figures have a certain distinctive quirkiness that appeals to me deeply. The bodies are sometimes a bit exaggerated or not quite right in some way (yet oddly convincing). The clothing is often interesting. The figures in portraits usually hold something of interest in their hands that indicates a profession or social rank. There are often inscriptions in otherwise blank areas of the image. Interesting hats abound. Memling, Balding, and the Cranachs are quite familiar. It was thrilling to see Cranach the Elder's Lucretia, with her cloak so diaphanous as to be virtually non-existent (although it is more apparent in person than in my photograph here).

Bernhard Strigel: Conrad Rehlinger the Elder (left)
and The Eight Children of Conrad Rehlinger (right)

In addition to these, I saw a number of very strong works by one Bernhard Strigel that impressed me, and, fittingly, a portrait by a painter named Maler (meaning "painter" in German) that I liked very much, also a portrait by a painter named Meulich. Strigel, Maler, and Meulich I'd never noted before, although chances are I've seen their work elsewhere. In the French section, it was also fun to see one of the several versions of Resting Girl on a Sofa by François Boucher (1753).

Boucher: Resting Girl on a Sofa (1753)

There were too many very beautiful paintings to mention or to show here. Again, maybe it was a blessing that half the museum was closed....

Hans Muelich: Portrait of Andreas Ligsalz

Hans Maler: Portrait of Wolfgang Ronner

Hans Baldung: Portrait of Christoph I, Margrave of Baden

On the Road: Munich (June 29, 2018)

Chandelier in the main building of Nymphenburg Palace

Today is my first day traveling alone after ten days as a chaperone with a youth orchestra touring Central Europe. I had hoped to continue reflecting my travels with the orchestra here in my personal blog, but blogging for the tour group left me no time. Now I find myself in Munich, staying walking distance from the Nymphenburg Palace, which turned out to be well worth the time it took to visit.

I spent about three hours seeing the main palace building and the extensive gardens around it, crisscrossed by paths and canals, with ponds large and small, the famous garden pavilions, and a museum of carriages and sleighs housed in what once were the palace stables. It's worth it to buy the ticket that gives access to all the sights on the grounds.

A Chinese-inspired wall decoration

The palace was built in the early 18th century as a summer retreat from court life for Bavaria's royal family, but was later expanded and modified. The rooms of the main building are interesting for their interior decorations, often using textiles or tiles in what was known as the "Chinese style," reflecting fanciful notions of life in China and a mishmash of Asian influences. Some of the decorations appear to have been authentically made in China, but they were made for the European export market rather than for domestic consumption and they have been tailored to European tastes, in some places incorporating Western-style linear perspective, for example.

Portrait of Katerina Botsari by Joseph Karl Steiler,
one of the 36 beauties in the Gallery of Beauties

I very much enjoyed seeing the famous Gallery of Beauties—36 portraits, painted between 1827 and 1850 (mostly by court painter Joseph Karl Stieler) for Ludwig I of Bavaria, reflecting the king's taste in women. I'd say he had a good eye; many are indeed beauties. I was rather taken by a number of them but perhaps liked Katerina "Rosa" Botsari best. According to Wikipedia, she was a member of the Souliot Botsaris family in the service of Queen Amalia of Greece and "admired throughout the European courts." King Ludwig also had a quite democratic outlook. Most of the portraits are of royalty or other nobility, but some of the women depicted are commoners.

Royal horse carriage

Carriages and sleighs may sound dull, but the Marstallmuseum houses a fabulous collection of royal conveyances that has to be seen to be believed. The one pictured here is among the simplest in the collection. Others are so heavily decorated with cherubs and sphinxes and all manner of other gilded ornament that it's a wonder they were able to move. The largest of them required a team of eight horses to pull. In addition to sleighs and carriages, the museum displays a wide variety of horse trappings, including a horse blanket with hundreds of bells attached used on horses that pulled sleighs through the snow. The horse must have been audible long before it arrived. A sign points out that one of the carriages cost the equivalent of about 140 times a baker's annual salary at the time, which, if my calculations are correct, would be the equivalent of going on $6,000,000 in today's money. These were the custom-built super-luxury yachts of their day.

Detail of ceiling decoration
in the Amelienburg

Each of the garden pavilions is interesting in its own way. The earliest, the Pagodenburg (1717-1719), is decorated inside with blue and white Dutch tiles. The design is supposed to evoke blue and white Chinese porcelain. The Amalienburg (1734-1739), decorated with mirrors and in silver and blue, the colors of the Bavarian royal family was a gift from Elector Karl Albrecht to his wife Amalia, who was a daughter of Emperor Joseph I. My online research suggests that many consider it to be the finest extant example of a European pleasure pavilion in the rococo tradition.

The Badenburg is remarkable for its tiled pool. According to the Munich Tourist Office, Josef Effner built the pavilion between 1719 and 1721, although it was later remodeled. The pool was heated. The walls on the upper level are made of faux-marble (stucco painted to look like marble). We saw a fair amount of this stucco marble on the orchestra tour, but none was as well done as this. Finally, the Magdalenenklause (Magdalene Hermitage) is a rather bizarre church built on the palace grounds between 1725 and 1728 as a place for religious reflection. It is decorated inside as a grotto with stone and shells. The effect is rather gloomy, but worth seeing once just because the place is so strange.

Interior of the Magdolenenkrause

The gardens themselves are very pretty. It was a pleasure just to stroll in the woods and meadows of the extensive grounds. Birds were singing everywhere, but I was unable to see many or identify any in the woods beyond the common Blue Tit and what I believe are Chaffinches. In the ponds and canals were European Coots, several types of geese (including Barnacle Goose, Canada Goose, and Greylag Goose), Tufted Ducks, and a couple of varieties of Grebe, one of which was a Great Crested Grebe (pictured)—among others.

A grebe in a canal at The Nymphenburg Palace

Salzburg and Salt (June 21, 2018)

The Friesacher Hotel, Salzburg
Outstanding breakfast buffet!

Salzburg today is known for music, but it was salt that made Salzburg prosperous. At the start of my day, I enjoyed a bountiful breakfast buffet—overflowing with choices: whole grain breads, hams, salamis, smoked salmon, eight or nine cheeses, liverwurst, cereals, eggs, omelettes, cakes, pastries, and more—before leaving my quintessentially Austrian hotel (the Friesacher) for the center of Old Salzburg, where a guide led me on a walking tour that included views of the famous Mozart Statue in the Mozartplatz and of the Nonnberg Convent (where the real Maria Von Trappe studied), the Hohensalzburg Fortress, and a visit to Mozart's birth house.

Mozart composed The Magic Flute on this instrument

It was interesting to see the room where Mozart was born and to get a sense of how the Mozart family lived, but some of the displays were badly lit and hard to see. The guide moved quickly and the small rooms were overflowing with other tour groups. Despite that, some of the artifacts made a deep impression. Of special interest was a small, improbably modest-looking keyboard instrument that the guide revealed was the instrument Mozart used to compose some of his last and greatest compositions, including The Magic Flute, which remains by far my favorite opera by any composer. It was moving to see an instrument used to create a piece of music that has become a human cultural treasure.

Ceramic room heater in the Mozart House

Of interest to me were the large, often elaborately decorated ceramic oven-like structures against the wall in the corners of many of the rooms. These appear to have been room heaters, apparently fed with firewood from outside to avoid smoke. The guide didn't remark on them until I asked. They aren't part of the official tour. It seemed strange not to mention them while a great deal of time was devoted to mostly mediocre portraits of the Mozart family and associates—although there was a rather nice pencil portrait of Mozart's sister in one of the cases.

Coat of arms of Leonhard von Keutschach
I love the turnip

Hohensalzburg Fortress, which dominates the town, is accessed by a steep, fast funicular railway. The ride is dramatic. You rush up the mountain and in a few seconds have a panoramic view of the city below. The fort was of some interest and the surrounding scenery impressive. Among the coats of arms displayed on various buildings around the fortifications was that of Prince Archbishop Leonhard von Keutschach (1495-1515). It sports a turnip. I used my free time after lunch to see a show of Japanese photography that happened to be at Salzburg's modern art museum. Lunch was pasta with chorizo made at the restaurant proprietor's "piggery" and Mediterranean vegetables with a local weissbier (Stiegl); the pasta dish was delicious but excessively salty—which seems to be the way the Austrians like their food. Fruits and vegetables for sale at an outdoor stand looked very tempting, particularly the berries, including fresh red currants and gooseberries, fruits we very seldom see in California.

Market produce, Salzburg

Later in the afternoon I toured the salt mine at Hallein (about 30 minutes south of Salzburg). For many hundreds of years salt has been mined near Salzburg. Celtic settlers in the area began mining salt in the area with wood and iron hand tools as early as 200BC. After a long lapse, mining began again in the medieval period and continued into the 20th century. Tourism has long been part of activity at the mine (the Hallein mine bills itself as the oldest exhibition mine in the world; visitors have been allowed to tour the shafts since the 16th century).

The local beer, Salzburg

Modern mining used modern methods. The salt deposits at Hallein are not crystalline. The salt is in seams about 40% salt mixed with clay, limestone, and other substances. The salt has always been extracted with water (to create brine that is then heated to cause evaporation and crystallization), but industrial-scale slurry mining eventually became the norm with water pumped directly into mine excavations and brine pumped out after insoluble components settle out of the mix.

Visitors enter the mine as modern miners did, wearing white, hooded uniforms (provided by the mine for the tour, ill-fitting and probably unnecessary, but part of the fun) and on a small-gauge railway with no cars, straddling a metal beam (there are no seats), everyone pushed close together in seated single file, and then move further underground on a series of wooden slides, polished with use. Both the fast-moving train and the slides were a hit, with shouts of "Wheee..." echoing through the mine shafts as we raced through the dimly lit tunnels on the train, each holding on to the closest passenger in front of us, or on the slides. Once underground at mining levels, a slow boat takes visitors across one of several underground lakes, remnants of the slurry-based mining process (the 100-yard trip a bit comically dramatized with colored lights and incongruous music). Walking about a mile through the tunnels to the exit point takes visitors across the Austrian–German border underground and back again, no passport required.

Wooden slides in the salt mine

The weather has been hot and humid. It's been nice to have the delicious alpenwasser (water from the Alps) available everywhere, even from street fountains in old Salzburg.