MY BOGGY BLOG: find your way through the murk

Rothenburg and Regensburg

TRAVELING WITH KIDS

Our twins, G and L, turned 15 yesterday, and our younger son D is 11. So we don't really have little kids to deal with, but I'm still figuring out the rhythm and methods that work best in traveling to a foreign country with kids. Since we are here for more than a month, we have the luxury of time on our side-- after a day of going out to sight-see, we can come back to home-base and have a low-key day.

This is so different from when B. and I were on our honeymoon in Paris 17 years ago. We had 11 days and we crammed everything into every minute we could. Ah, we were young then too, so we could walk all day and take the Metro here and there, tape our blisters at night and do it again the next day. Now that we're, ahem, older and we have the kids, we can go to a town and walk most of the day, but we are all very tired and foot-sore. Kids get crabby and over-tired if you try to do too much. Or if you don't consider their interest level.

And D, at 11, is having a few meltdowns, which is totally expected. When I think that he is having a big trip like this and being in a foreign country for a month at such a young age, well, I don't have any frame of reference! We never really traveled in my family growing up. By age 11, the big trip I'd had was a day trip to Taylor's Falls, Minnesota, in which we crossed over the border into Wisconsin, and to me that was a big deal! D's meltdowns are coming mainly at night when he is tired and he whines about being away from his favorite things back home-- his home routine, his computer, his video games, his friends. Why did we have to go on this dumb trip anyway? I try to be sympathetic and give him some extra loving. What seems to help soothe him is reading to him from the book series we've been reading through together at home-- A Series of Unfortunate Events. We are on The Slippery Slope.

The teens are actually much easier on this trip!

ROTHENBURG

On Tuesday we took the Autobahn to Rothenburg ob de Tauber, about an hour's drive away. B has done all the driving here so far (he's the one with a good sense of direction and I am still kind of lost on these windy little streets), and although he was intimidated by it at first, he really did enjoy the Autobahn. There are no speed limits, so traffic is very fast-- he got up to 180k (about 100 mph) a few times, gulp! I didn't like it, but to drive the A., you do have to keep up with traffic. The trick is to keep the left lane going fast and to pass, while the right lane is for the slightly slower traffic.

The city of Rothenburg has an old part of town that is a walled city dating back to medieval times. We parked outside the walls and walked in-- what you see is windy narrow cobblestone roads with tall pointy buildings and houses in a gingerbread style (if the gingerbread had more white to it than brown). The walls circling the city have wooden enclosures at the top, so you can climb steps and walk all along the wall-- the roofed enclosures are open on the inner-city side, so you can look down on the buildings as you walk along, and the outer-city side is walled off with little lookout holes every few yards. I know I am totally botching the old-millitary-fort vocabulary here-!

We stayed up on the wall for awhile, then went down to cross the town. We could hear outdoor music and applause, and we found the open Marktplatz where an orchestra was playing gorgeous symphonies before the crowd gathered. We stopped and listened, and it was one of those moments when you have to marvel at how perfect everything is---- heartbreakingly beautiful music, a sunny day, and all around the most picturesque old city, one building more pretty than the next.

We went to Jakobskirche next, the church of St. James, parts of which were first built back in 1311. As an American, this is always just so amazing (and perhaps to Europeans just shrug it off as no big deal)-- that people who lived 700 years ago were building this church, with all its amazing arches and artistry! I like to stand in a place like this and try to imagine who those people were, what their lives were like, what was it like to attend a service here back then.

One of the attractions of this Gothic masterpiece is the Heilige Blut altar (Holy Blood altar), upstairs away from the main portion of the church. This altar has impressive and elaborate woodcarvings of Jesus and the Last Supper, and it is said that a drop of his blood is stored in a round crystal on the cross that is above the Last Supper scene.

Our wanderings around the town led us to some shopping, the kids enjoying a teddy bear museum and a shop full of knives and swords. We went into the Weihnackten (Christmas) shop that people had told us to visit. It's just like visiting a musem with every inch filled with Christmas--it goes on and on, and is quite a sight to see! Every few feet there is a smiling store clerk trying to hand you a basket so you'll shop til you drop. We bought a few little things. Personally, I've seen shops like this at home, in Tennessee and a few other states, and my eyes start to glaze over. We bought a few little things.

We next saw the Mittelaterliches Kriminalmuseum, which was a museum filled with instruments of torture and punishment-- four floors of brutal implements, chastity belts, masks of shame, cages, iron maidens, neck braces, executioners swords. DD had been into torture previously (she claims not so much anymore) and she'd done school reports on it, so we thought this would be a hit. Really, it was fascinating, and it helped that all the signs giving info about each item were in English as well. It really made me wonder about what was happening in our collective psyche back in the Middle Ages, that so many means of shaming or hurting people seemed necessary to the order of the day.

Our feet were very weary by this time, so before we left town, we stopped for schneeballn, a treat they were selling all over Rothenburg. One guidebook I'd read said they were kind of bland, but we had to try them for ourselves. And they were! My husband described them as wiffleballs made of pie crust, some covered in chocolate or cinnamon-sugar, and that was pretty accurate.

We hobbled our way back to the car. Cobblestone streets are killers on the feet!

REGENSBURG

Yesterday (Thursday, Aug 3) we got up early to go to take the train to Regensburg, another town about an hour away. We'd been told by our hosts to purchase the tickets to this town in the trainstation bakery-- all other tickets are purchased at the machines in the station, but these are special. We were a bit intimidated to approach the bakery since our previous times there we'd found out that their English is about as good as our German (nicht gut!). But we muddled our way through buying tickets and breakfast foods, and then we got on the train. You could sit upstairs or downstairs and we went up--- no wonder if was so comfortable, we were mistakenly sitting in first class! But no one checked our ticket, so we just rode there, oblivious!

There is a big shopping mall attached to the train station in Regensburg, and the kids really liked being in such a familiar environment, so we stayed and shopped a bit. Found bathrooms that we had to pay 30 cents to use (you often have to pay for a toilet here in Germany). After awhile, we went outside to the street to begin sight-seeing.

I am very lucky to be married to a man who really does have a map in his head, along with a compass and I think a GPS thingy. He always knows what direction he is facing, he can go a place once and then it is in his head forever, he can get lost but still figure out the direction he needs to go to get unlost. This all comes in very handy, especially in a foreign town. My head, meanwhile, has big holes where the maps-and-directions parts should be, and they are instead filled with, I think, the organizational skills, daily schedules and remembering sensory details about every place we've ever been--- all the things that are lacking in DH's head! So you see, we complement each other (and sometimes actually compliment eachother!)

But for some reason, when we first left the mall in Regensburg, DH was sure we were going the right direction to see the center of the town. As we waited at the traffic light to cross the street, we had a guy next to us say outloud to us that German drivers are crazy (as we watched someone doing some weird move). As we crossed the street, we talked with him and he was delighted that we were from Minnesota, since he was from Wisconsin! He appeared to be in his late 20's, introduced himself to us as Dave, and told us he'd been stationed here in the millitary 6 years ago and had loved it and stayed. We chatted a bit and he was very friendly. And I asked him if we were going in the right direction and he informed us we needed to go in the total opposite direction. So DH's map-in-head re-oriiented itself and we were fine for the rest of the day.

First we got on a bus-- we're just starting to figure out that riding the bus in a town can be a real foot-saver and it seems to be real cheap. We went to Dom St. Peter, which the guidebook says is "one of Bavaria's most important Gothic cathedrals." This was another church from the 13th century, with so many sculptures and altars and stained-glass windows to look at.

Next we went back on the bus to the Histosches Museum, a 4-story museum with exhibits from the stone ages to the middle ages. DD loves studying Latin in school and since we won't be able to go to Rome on this trip, we thought she could at least see some of the Roman artifacts from when Germany was a part of the Roman Empire. There were coins and pottery and weapons and stone slabs. There were pieces of crypts, statues taken from the church, elaborate altars from the middle ages. There was enough there, and enough variety, to interest everyone in the family, yay!

We stopped at a grocery store and picked up some snacks to eat before we hit our last stop. It was starting to sprinkle, but we found a short wall underneat some trees where we could sit and eat. It was also pretty cool outside that day, and most of us were underdressed. I think this cold rainy-nes is not typical of August here, but we still weren't minding the reprieve from the heat wave back home.

We had to walk aways to get to the Schloss Turn and Taxis estate. This is one of the largest aristocratic homes in Europe, and from what I gathered on the tour, the building was a monastery for 1,000 years first. The Taxis family was responsible for establishing the European postal system in the 1500s, and so the family was upgraded to nobility status and given this building for their palace in the 1700s. First we saw, on a self-tour, the carriage museum of the family, which had about 20 different carriages and sleighs that were used by the family around the turn of the century. Very elaborate, some lined with fur, some small, some large. No pictures allowed, unfortunately.

Then we signed up for the tour of the palace, not realizing that it was going to be 90 minutes long wth no stops for rest, and our feet were already tired. The tour was in German but we were given cassettes and headsets to listen to an English version of the tour (but the tour guide seemed to go on much longer and give more details than were on our pre-recorded tour. The palace was amazing, every room more splendid than the next. My favorite was the sliver room, which instead of the gold that guilded most of the other rooms, this one was in silver with light blue walls and furnishings. I also liked the rooms of Princess Theresa (of course!), who was an important figure of her time in the dealings with other countries and the postal system. She had a special mirror room to get dressed in, and her bedroom next door had a bed that was ornate with gold swans above and around it. There was also a mirrored ballroom with electric lights (very innovative for the time), a large chapel which the family still uses, and you can walk downstairs to see the original walls of the monastery, and we peered through grates in the floor of the church to see the crypts of the family.

It was a long tour but even teenager were impressed by the oppulence. And after that, we were back to the mall (hobbling on very tired feet), where we grabbed a quick dinner and took the train home. Not first class this time!

Posted by sapphire at August 4, 2006 12:38 AM