Travel: Good days and bad days

Sometimes everything goes as planned when travelling. Museums are open, parking spots magically appear and language barriers melt away. Other days are a lesson in what not to do when visiting new places.

Case in point: Leipzig was wonderful. Even though it was crowded, everything pretty much worked. The train from Munich was on time, even though our hotel was on a pedestrianized street it wasn't very far from the cab stand, and the hotel itself was pretty fancy and totally accessible.

Thomaskirche was right across the courtyard from the hotel, and we spent a lovely hour or so listening to a visiting choir rehearsing.  We admired the very well maintained old church, marvelled at the two organs, and gawked properly at the Bach stained glass window. After a short walk to look at the Mendelssohn statue, we adjourned to a nearby outdoor cafe and got a charge out of our table mates, who spoke no English but had some tourist Hungarian. After a little rest, we sat in the hotel bar, also outside, right across the street from the Bach statue, for a nightcap.

The next morning we had a nice breakfast in the hotel and then scurried across the street to attend Sunday service in Thomaskirche. We had missed the afternoon performance of the famed boys choir the previous afternoon and were hoping to hear them.  And we did, and it was lovely, even though the sound seemed to get a bit swallowed up in the nave. The sermon, which was unintelligible to us, went on for some time, and the service clocked in at 90 minutes.  Nice to hear to good old Lutheran hymns sung with gusto and played at proper speed.

After church we went to the Bach museum, right next to our hotel. It was really well done, with interactive exhibits and lots of opportunity to listen. Then we checked out of the hotel and went to get the rental car so we could go to Halle, a half hour drive, where Handel was born.

One strange thing about Leipzig:  Thousands of German lay Catholics were having a conference, all wearing green t-shirts, green scarves and green caps. At first I thought it was a bus tour, but seeing hundreds more of them suggested I needed to dig further. Leipzig, like most of the former East Germany, is pretty much post-Christian, but those who do claim religious affiliation are mostly Lutherans. I at first thought it odd that lay Catholics would want to congregate in the heart of Protestant Germany, but the more I thought about it, it seemed a lovely place to have a meeting.  And it embodied the spirit of ecumenicism to boot. And, it explained why hotel rooms were so expensive that weekend.

We had a little trouble finding the Handel Haus museum and a parking place, but were rewarded by some nice exhibits.  Since Handel really didn't work in Halle, the museum was a little thin, and one floor was taken up by period instruments that had nothing to do with Handel, but it was still nice.

Then we went off to Naumburg, a small city about an hour away from Leipzig.  We only had to circle the town twice before we found the hotel. At first I thought we had made a terrible mistake -- the doors were locked and there was clearly no one around.  But there was a buzzer, which we pressed, and a nice English-speaking woman told us how to retrieve our key from the Key Boy. After settling in, we ate in a nice cafe next to one of the old city gates at Marienplatz. The food was abundant and heavy, with gravy on the braised pork, hollandaise on the asparagus and butter dripping from the roasted potatoes.

The next day was not quite so successful. It began with breakfast, when the attendant asked us (I think) if we wanted coffee.  We already had coffee--instant from a jar on the table--so we said no, thinking that instant was all there was. The next day, of course, we figured out that it was decaf in the jar, and that there was indeed real coffee on offer. Maybe it was the lack of caffeine that jinxed the rest of the day.

We then started off to see the organ that Bach played. After not too much circling we found both St. Wenceslas church and a parking space. St. Wenceslas is a gothic structure that needs TLC.  It has a remarkable and ornate Baroque altarpiece, which is somewhat tarnished. The organ, which is gilded and highlighted with robbin's egg blue paint, doesn't quite fit with the rest of the church. There were some monuments to guys in armor, some shrines to local notables who had supported the church in centuries past, and a general air of decay. All the steps to the many entrances were covered with moss, suggesting that traffic is light.

We thought we had seen all there was to see and were leaving when the attendant said emphatically that there was a concert at 12 o'clock. Why we determined this makes no sense, because even our extremely limited German was good enough to read the signs that advertised concerts at 12 o'clock on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. It was Monday.

I guess we heard what we wanted to hear, as when we returned at 11:50 (gotta get there early to get a good seat), there was no concert. So off we headed to Weimar.  Our goal was the Bauhaus Museum.

It literally took us at least an hour and maybe more to locate it--the city fathers and mothers have decided they don't want cars in the Centrum. It's a laudable idea, but finding not only the actual museum but also a walkable place to park proved almost impossible.  So when we finally miraculously found not one but three spaces nearby, we grabbed one.

However, OLGS was suspicious and he may have been right.  There was a sign that suggested the spaces were reserved for people visiting or working at the shops nearby. Who knows? But the thought of having the rental car towed was enough to make our trip to the Bauhaus Museum very short indeed--we walked down the pedestrianized mall, took a look, went inside to get some flyers, and then went back to the car. So much for Weimar, which looked like a lovely and bustling small city.

Finding our way back to Naumburg was also a challenge, due to construction and the lack of gas stations with bathrooms! However, we finally got there, slightly discouraged to the point where seeking out a different restaurant for dinner was just too much. We drove around the closed cathedral, which also had moss problems, went to the same outdoor cafe, and called it a day.

The next day dawned bright and clear, a good omen. We made it back to Leipzig within an hour, although we could have done it much more quickly if OLGS had felt able to drive at 150 kms.  We drove in the truck lane, which was fast enough by American standards.

Got to the Berlin train early, got on board, found our assigned seats, and relaxed because we were going to a place where we knew the landscape better and more people spoke our language.

The moral of the story: Serendipity when traveling is great if you are flexible. No parking space? Fine. Pedestrianized streets not listed on map? No problem--if time, language and mobility are not issues. When they are, it is best to plan ahead carefully.

Back in the day, OLGS and I had a policy that we would not travel to places where we didn't speak the language.  That limited us to France, the UK, Canada, Hungary and some Francophone African countries and Caribbean islands. We broadened this to include Italy, where French and high-school Latin allowed us to cope with the language barrier. However, we miscalculated the extent to which people in the former East Germany speak English.

Another moral: Go back to the original rule: Visit countries where you speak the language.  Or at least take a phrasebook.