A week in Košice

Just recently at work I thought that I had been unlucky in that I hadn’t had a business trip for a while.  Quite coincidentally, a few days later I was asked to a meeting where I was introduced to some business partners from Košice in Slovakia and was told that I had to go there to help sort out some problems.  “Košice?” I thought.  “Never heard of it.”  But anyone reading this blog knows that I am travel mad.  Who am I to turn down a trip to an exotic destination, even an unknown one?

The Currywurst tram at Stuttgart Airport - only in Germany!

An aircraft museum on the roof of Terminal 3!

I’ve never been to Eastern Europe before, apart from a week in the eastern sector of Berlin, which sort of counts I suppose, but not quite.  So I was slightly apprehensive – after all, it was only little more than 20 years ago that you couldn’t go there even if you wanted to (at least not without some great effort) and it was all locked away behind the iron curtain.  That has always given Eastern Europe an air of mystery for me – and probably for many of us – and it makes it the “unknown country” to an extent.  It is a slightly odd coincidence that it was Slovakia as the destination for my first foray into Eastern Europe, because when I was a child (about 9 or 10 years old) I used to think that the name Czechoslovakia was the most exotic sounding of names and I wanted to go there.  This was in about 1980 when the iron curtain was still up, so how a 10 year old living in Australia in 1980 even heard of the name Czechoslovakia, much less wanted to go there, is anyone’s guess.  But then I’m an oddball grown up so I suppose I was an oddball child!

So, the Slovakia half of Czechoslovakia for a week it is then.  I’ll have to do the Czech half later – especially given that one of the people I’ve been working with here in Košice this week said that Prague is “like being in a fairy tale.”  High praise indeed!  But first I’ll visit Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, which I intend to do some time in the new two or three months (yes I’ve been impressed enough with Slovakia to be already planning further trips here).
As an Australian it is easy to view Europe as small when compared to the vast waste of the Outback, but it is bigger than it looks.  These “short hops” to nearby countries take a surprising amount of time – out of bed at 4:30 am, out of the house at 5:30, on the train to Stuttgart at 6, on the Stuttgart S-Bahn by 7:30, finally on the plane at 10:30, stopover for a quick coffee in Vienna at midday (yes now I’m dropping names) and finally check in at the Hilton Košice just after 3.  That’s a long trip for a short hop across Europe – I could get half way to Australia in that time!

View from the Košice Hilton

My place of work for a week

On arrival I had a bit of a wander around the centre of town, which bills itself as “the best preserved old town in Eastern Europe.”  I’m not sure if that is true as I’ve not seen enough of Eastern Europe yet, but I would probably believe it!  It reminded me of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh in that the entire Hlavná ulica (Main Street) is almost perfectly preserved.  There are only about two modern buildings in the main street of town – one of which is a bloody Tesco!  The entire main street is almost perfectly preserved, as is the warren of narrow lanes around it.  I’m curious as to why.  Obviously the city escaped bombing during the war, but such a perfectly preserved street is still unusual.  Was it luck?  A lack of money under the Communists (doubtful, given the huge amount of 1960s Soviet apartments that ring the old town)?  Or was it cultural pride?  I suspect the latter.  Slovakia is a small country of only 5 million inhabitants, but I have noticed a definite cultural pride here, and certainly what I could only describe as a cultural richness.  For example, in the bookshops everything is in Slovak, which is unusual for such a small population.  Even in Finland, which has about the same population, I noticed that not everything is translated into Finnish in the bookshops, presumably because the market is not big enough.  But then the Slavic languages are related and mutually intelligible (especially Slovak and Czech) so maybe many of these books are in Czech – I’m not yet able to tell the difference!

Public transport Košice style

So that brings me to the Slovak language.  It’s impenetrable.  I asked someone how to say “thank you” – it’s “ďakujem.”  Five days later and I’m still struggling with it.  And that’s only my first word.  Six months after moving to Germany and having to slowly learn the language from scratch and I’m back to square one!  At least German is related to English and is without doubt the easiest language I’ve attempted to learn (the others being French, Norwegian and Finnish, so I’m no language beginner!) whereas Slovak is in the same family as Russian, which takes it into a whole different world, linguistically speaking (pardon the pun).  On the subject of German, it is not uncommon here, although Košice is so far east that it’s bordering Ukraine.  Last night a drunk Slovak man came up to me on the street and started asking me a question.  “English” I said, gesturing to myself.  “Deutsch?” he replied?  “Ja, ein bisschen” I said (yes, a little).  At which point he asked me in slurred words where the bus stop was for the number twenty three bus.  Unfortunately I couldn’t help him, but at least I understood him!

That is probably the most successful conversation in German that I have had so far, and I was quite proud of myself.  Speaking to non native speakers of a language you are learning is far easier than speaking to a native speaker.  When I was in Oulu last year a drunken Russian woman came up to me in the street and started talking to me in Finnish (I’m starting to see a pattern here) and that too was the only decent Finnish conversation I had.  I understood every word she said (in Finnish with a strong Russian accent) and yet I could never understand a word of a native Finn!

With my Russian workmate in a Soviet nostalgia bar!

Well I am rambling a bit and that will do for my first post.  Not much has happened since I arrived on Monday as I am, after all, here on business and so I have been working.  This afternoon I finished work early and took some photos of the old town, which I will upload later, and tomorrow I will go to Spišský hrad (Spis Castle), 800 years old and one of the largest castles in Europe.  Stay tuned for a blog post when I finally get around to writing it in two weeks time (hopefully not)!

Güntzburg Altstadt

It’s funny how visiting one place always seems to lead to visiting another.  You make a list of places you want to visit and when you make an effort to make the list smaller with a visit to a place on the list, you discover another place and the list gets larger (or at least stays the same length).

So it was a couple of months ago when I went to Munich with some work colleagues to lounge under (real) palm trees in a (fake) tropical swimming pool.  As we were barrelling down the Autobahn as Germans do, we passed one of those brown signs that seem to be the international standard for pointing out things of interest to travellers and tourists.  This particular sign said something like “Historic Güntzburg Altstadt, 5 km ahead” and so I duly pulled out my mobile phone and marked it on my GPS map for later reference.  One place ticked off of my list, another place added…

Güntzburg's pretty High Street

So this morning when I awoke and saw that the sun was shining (after several days of absolutely appalling wind and snow) I knew that I had better rush off for my “Sunday exploring” while it lasted, and Güntzburg seemed a good choice.  When living in Germany as an avid explorer and amateur historian, it is always good to keep an eye out for towns ending in “burg.”  Burg is the Germanic word for castle or fort and in fact it’s where we get our borough and burgh (as in Edinburgh) in English.  It derives from the Germanic word for berg, which means “hill” as in prehistoric times hilltops were used as basic fortifications.  So any place ending with “burg” is a potentially historically interesting place, provided it hasn’t been pulverized by WWII bombing.  Unfortunately this was the fate of most –burg towns, but luckily there are enough of them that some survived intact, and Güntzburg is one of them.

The local bank

It’s only a 15 minute train ride from Ulm, so I have to wonder why I didn’t go there before now.
Güntzburg was originally founded by the Romans in about 70 BC on the River Donau (Danube) as the Donau was a part of the Limes – a line or fortifications that protected the northern part of the Roman Empire in Germania.  Many towns in this area owe their existence to the Romans (although Ulm, where I live, isn’t one of them, having been founded much later).  It’s quite impressive as you approach it by train as it sits on top of a small hill that is quite visibly higher than the surrounding countryside, as this provided a strategic advantage for its citizens – remember the etymological lesson about the words berg and burg above?

Lots of little alleys

It’s also quite interesting to note that Güntzburg has a very nice and modern railway station, which is clean, utterly free of graffiti, well built and nicely incorporates its original historical station buildings.  You may wonder why I am mentioning this but anyone reading this who has travelled extensively by train in Germany will know that the Germans win a number of awards for building the world’s must depressing, ugly, graffiti covered and soul destroying stations of anywhere in the world.  I have no idea why.  Even in the nicest of towns when you get off the train you feel as though you have just disembarked in the Bronx.  But not Güntzburg!  Top marks to the Bürgers (citizens) of Güntzburg for their top railway station!

The local artists have been at work

So I wandered up the hill to the altstadt (old town), which is mostly intact, although the town walls are long gone.  You can still pretty much see where they were based on the contours of the hill on which the town sits.  It’s a typical German altstadt, with lots of back alleys and small streets that are closed to traffic – and some equally small ones that aren’t, something that I always consider ridiculous!  The usual suspects were there – the rathaus (town hall), multiple kirchen (churches), painted buildings and odd half timbered mediaeval building.  There’s not much to say about it that wouldn’t be the same as any other similarly sized altstadt (oh that’s a convenient excuse for the fact I’ve become bored with writing this entry!) so I’ll let the attached pictures speak for themselves.  I will say however that I shall definitely have to come back in the summer time when it is warmer!

One can only wander around an altstadt for so long on a chilly Sunday afternoon when all of the shops are closed, so after a nice meal in an old gasthof (inn/pub) I caught the train back to Ulm, where I found that the Donau had burst its banks due to the melting of the huge amounts of snow that had fallen over the past couple of days!

The flooded Donau!

Ulm, Land of Frozen Fog

I've started to realise recently just how cold it is going to get in Ulm.  As I write this my PC's weather gadget says that it's -2 degrees centigrade outside, and I have a feeling it's going to get much colder before it gets warmer!  Thank heaven I'm going to the Great Barrier Reef to sit under a palm tree next week!

Along with the cold, there's been a lot of fog recently.  In fact almost every day for the past month has been so foggy that I can't even see the building where I work (and it's a big building) when I get off of the bus!  I first started noticing it about a month ago.

Some fog on the approach to work, about a month ago

The picture above was when the fog first started to appear.  It was to get much worse before long!  Here is another picture taken from out of my office window a few days later.

The fog gets thicker!

Ok, we've all seen fog.  There's nothing special about that, although this fog was starting to get thick enough to go into the special "Holy cow, look at that" category, especially at night when waiting for the bus at 5:30 pm when it was pitch black and all you could see up the road was a line of footpath lights trailing away into the fog...

But then something really strange happened.  Something that I've never heard of before and certainly never thought I'd see - the temperature dropped rapidly to negative and all of the thick fog that was hanging around actually froze and dropped to the ground.  Here is that same view out of my office window this morning, taken from almost the same position as the photo above:

No, it's not snow - it's frozen fog!

By later on this afternoon so much fog had frozen and fallen to the ground that the sky started to turn blue and the sun came out.  Walking to work this morning it was quite odd because I had particles of frozen fog collecting on my jacket and they looked like tiny snowflakes, but there were no clouds in the sky - if I looked up I could just see the blue of the sky showing through the fog.

The frozen fog also presents a strange sight when it lands on trees and other objects, because unlike snow, which only gathers on the top of objects, the frozen fog collects all around the object - top, bottom and both sides!

Fog covered branches

And finally one last photo - about the only bright and colourful spot in a sea of grey!

Schloß Lichtenstein (Lichtenstein Castle)

After a failed attempt to visit Schloß Lichtenstein a couple of weeks back (which I completely failed to blog due to a combination of laziness and having only a tentative Internet connection at home) where we got lost in the forest near Bad Ulrach, my travel buddy William and I decided to have another crack at it today. Anything to get away from this Ulm nebel (fog) for the day! So off we drove out of Ulm towards Blaubeuren, with the fog quickly dispersing (at expected!) as soon as we were a few miles from Ulm. But now what's this? Here's a local German sheep farmer walking up the road towards us, leading his flock of a couple of hundred sheep! We - and all other cars on the road - were thus obliged to pull over and wait for the sheep to pass.

Dumb sheep walks into car

This was a photo opportunity that we couldn't pass up so we jumped out, exchanged a guten morgen with the nonplussed looking sheep farmer and proceeded to look like a couple of silly tourists with our cameras while the locals patiently sat in their cars and waited. Well it had to be done - it's not every day that one has to stop for a large flock of sheep! A few minutes earlier I had seen a couple of other similarly large flocks of sheep being driven around in the fields next to the road, so it must be the time of year when they take them all off to become lamb chops. That's terrible. I shouldn't have made that joke!

Lichstenstein Castle

When the road was clear we proceeded onwards to Bad Ulrach, past the spot where a path led into the forest where a "short walk" had turned into a "long hike" on a previous trip and arrived finally at Schloß Lichtenstein. Schloß Lichtenstein is only a small castle, although really it's not a castle at all but more a folly which was built in an eccentric Disneyland style by King Frederick I of Württemberg in 1802. German kings and princes of the 19th century had a habit of doing this - witness the famous Schloss Neuschwanstein which itself was the inspiration for the castle used by Disney in their famous logo.

I'm finding it difficult to find information about Schloß Lichtenstein. Like many things here in Germany, most of the information to be found is in German and the English entries in Wikipedia and other sources are rather short. My friend William thinks it is related to the royal family of Liechtenstein but note the different spelling! I'm yet to find the connection in my research but it may well be there. I'll know when my German is good enough to read the historical booklet I bought at the castle, which may take a while. Ask me sometime next year.

Castle Entrance

Whether there is a connection or not, there has been a castle there since the year 1200 although it was destroyed in 1311 and 1381 and it then fell into ruin until King Frederick I came along and build his modern castle on the spot. It's in pristine condition and the rooms we went into don't have any electricity so it has a very authentic feel, right down to the fact that it was terribly cold! Only a couple of rooms had heating and that was in the form of big enamelled iron wood stoves - there were none of the open fireplaces that one would find in an English castle.

It was only a small castle so the visit didn't take long. So we headed off to Nebelhöle (Fog Cave) for some delicious Swabian Maultaschen (my favourite food here in Germany!). We wanted to go into the cave but with no money left and cold feet it was time to head back to Ulm. Credit and debit cards are not really accepted here in Germany, where the banking system seems stuck somewhere in the first half of the 20th century (when you buy something on your credit card the bank automatically takes the ENTIRE AMOUNT of out of your savings account at the end of the month!) but that's a rant for another time.

Friedrichshafen and Bodensee

Or, to those outside Germany, Friedrichshafen and Lake Constance.  I'll use Bodensee because I'm trying to learn German.

Lunch view at Bodensee/Lake Constance

The Green House of Friedrichshafen

My workmate and exploring buddy William had rented a nice new hire car for a week so we decided we needed to give it a spin on the German autobahn, where they drive ridiculously fast.  No point pottering around Ulm in a new European car.  On the autobahn he mentioned that he didn't know the speed limit and hadn't seen any signs, at which point it occurred to me that there wasn't a speed limit!  We were heading for Friedrichshafen (that never gets any easier to type, no matter how many times I write it), a drive of about 100 kilometres each way.  Friedrichshafen is on the edge of Bodensee, a wonderful freshwater lake that borders Germany, Switzerland and Austria and which is large enough to not be able to see the other side, which gives it a "by the ocean" feel, even though you are in the middle of Europe and have the Alps between you and the sea!  Someone did mention that it doesn't feel entirely "by the ocean" because it doesn't have the salty smell of a real ocean.  Good point but it's oceanic enough for me, especially when I was sitting out the front of one of the seaside restaurants drinking Italian coffee and looking out towards Switzerland!  Being south of Ulm, Friedrichshafen is about 100 kilometres closer to Italy and it showed, with lots of Italian coffeeshops by the water, which is just fine for a caffiene addict like me!

In the spring or summer I hope to ride my pushbike from Ulm to Bodensee.  There is an apparently quite popular route that goes there and it's flat all the way.  Sounds good!

Pretty but cold!

So we had coffee and wandered around thinking how pretty Bodensee is and how nice it would be in the summer.  Although it looks good in the photos on this page, it was starting to get pretty chilly and my London "winter" clothes were proving to be not quite up to the job of keeping me warm!  This was especially the case when we walked out to the end of the breakwater jetty by the harbour and up the 8 or 9 storey high tower at the end of it.  Beautiful view but can we go down now please?

Friedrichshafen and the Zeppelin Museum

As pretty as the outdoors were, I had discovered before leaving that Friedrichshafen was where the famous (or is that infamous?) Zeppelins were built between 1900 and 1937, and as such there is a Zeppelin Museum there.  Now of course a nerd like me can't possibly resist a Zeppelin museum and so we went in there and spent the entire rest of the afternoon there, until it closed!  It's in the old hafenbahnhof (harbour railway station), a beautiful 1930s Bauhaus building.  Apart from the typically nerdy type of things that one would expect to find in a Zeppelin museum such as propellers, engines etc. (there isn't much left of the original Zeppelins) and large amounts of various tacky "souvenirs" from the Zeppelin's heyday (it was, after all, a phenomenally popular attraction in its day and from what I understand from the museum, Germany underwent what could only be described as "Zeppelin mania" during the 1920s and 1930s), there is also a full sized mockup of a part of the interior of the passenger cabin from that most famous Zeppelin of them all - the Hindenberg.

Passenger hallway "in" the Hindenburg

Sleeping cabin '30s Hindenburg style!

I'm told that the interior is quite faithful to the original.  It is amazingly modern and I thought that it didn't look too different to the interior of a modern cruise ship!  Certainly it doesn't look like something built 75 years ago, but then at that point Europe was in the throes of Art Deco mania, and Germany was leading the way with its wonderful modernist Bauhaus movement, so I suppose it's no surprise that the inside of the Hindenberg looked almost 21st century!  One thing that was quite noticeable however was that everything was obviously built to be as light as possible.  It was quite easy to see that the walls - while looking quite solid - could have been picked up with one hand.  Indeed I had seen a video earlier in the day where a small boy picked up a 5 metre long triangular girder and was able to hold it in one hand!

Long haired passenger in the Hindenburg lounge

But now the museum was closing and we had to leave, me grumbling about "I can't read the bloody information panels" and "The problem with German museums is that there's no point going until you can read German" - sayings that have become my catchcry since coming here.  As a slightly obsessive museum goer who insists on reading every word of every information panel, I can tell you I'm suffering!

So then it was a slightly longer trip home along the back roads, through pretty little villages and the larger Ravensburg, a slightly panicked "Oh no, we're almost out of petrol" moment just before Ulm, a lovely kebab plate at the local Turkish kebab shop (only €5.50 - bargain!) and that was the end of my third weekend in Germany!

Wanderings in Eselsberg

If you take a look at a map of Ulm, you have - unsurprisignly - the cathedral and old town in the middle of the map, Söflingen in the west and Wissenshaftsstadt (Science City) in the north west. This is where I work. It's a nice easy name to remember when you first arrive in Germany. In between the city and my work is the Universität, Botanischer Gartens and (if you look with Google Maps and its satellite view) a large amount of green forested area. I'm not sure if this forested area is protected or if it's just a coincidence that it has survived the developers, but it's very green and very lush and whenever the bus has gone through there on the way to work I have thought that I should hop off one day to have a wander around.

Wandering through the secluded forest - minutes from Ulm!

So on Saturday I had to work a bit in order to build up some flexitime for my trip to Australia and I decided to walk home from work. It's getting cold here in Ulm now and every night a thick fog descends, sometimes quite early, but by mid afternoon it's usually gone and the sun comes out and Ulm looks a treat! So I set out from work under a glorious blue sky and headed into the forest, which was a little spooky really. I was completely alone and the forest was... well very "foresty." It's very different to the Australian bush that I'm used to and seemed very lonely and secluded. What made it more spooky is that the birds have all flown south for the winter, so whenever I stopped walking and stopped to listen, I heard absolutely nothing at all! It was eerie. Complete and utter silence with not a leaf blowing in the wind - as there wasn't any - and not a single birdsong. Not a tweet. No cars, no people, no birds, just me on this road through the forest which seemed to be miles from anywhere, except that it was just a 25 minute brisk walk from Ulm! It's a very compact city, Ulm. Some people might even claim it is just a large town!

Imagine living in this bastion

The other reason I had wanted to walk through Eselsberg is because there are a lot of flats and houses for rent in the area. I had originally thought it would not be a particularly nice area to live in but after walking through I realised it was actually quite pleasant. The further up the hill you go the more modern the buildings become, and wherever you live you are not far from the forest. As I headed down the hill I came into a suburb with the evocative name of "Fort Unterer Eselsberg." Now you don't need to speak German to figure out what that means! I had been through in the bus and thought that it was named after a fort that used to be there, but to my surprise I now stumbled upon the entirely intact 19th century fort after which the suburb takes its name! I thought it might have been converted into flats at first but it's actually used as some sort of offices for either companies or the local council. I couldn't tell. But wow, if it had been flats then what an amazing place to live! It would be worth living there just so you could say at the end of the day "Well bye everyone! I have to go back home to my fort now!"

This is one of the so-called "Bundesfestung" - federal forts - of Fortress Ulm, built after the Napoleonic Wars to keep those pesky French at bay. The whole of Ulm was an enormous fortress about 150 years ago. This is a subject that I intend to research and explore in the coming months!

Some pretty German houses

Getting started in Germany!

I must say that I should have started this blog two weeks ago, when I first arrived in Germany.  But I confess to being a notorious procrastinator when it comes to writing about my travels.  If I don't write about my travels as soon as they happen when I'm still excited about them, then it becomes a chore and then I really have to force myself to write.  So of course in that case there's the distinct possibility that I'll never get around to it...

This time I think I have a somewhat valid excuse and that is that after slumming it around South East England for two months, living in many hotels (sometimes a different one each night), with family and with friends, not to mention an unexpected trip to Australia, I really didn't have the energy to sit down and write about it!  And when I first got to Germany I moved into my very basic (but nice) flat and I didn't even have a table or an Internet connection.  So again, blogging was really not something I could be bothered to do, even though I wanted to document my initial "Oh wow, look at that!" impressions of my new home here in Ulm.  Oh well, it's a personal sort of excitement anyway that is difficult to convey!

The problem with this business of living in different countries is that as wonderful as it is, there's no escaping the fact that the logistics of the relocation are a damnable nuisance.

The house that isn't my house - it's the one on the left!

But now I've been here for two weeks and two days and I've settled into my temporary flat, so I can finally sit down and put thoughts to keyboard.  It might be only temporary until I find a permanent place but I can tell you what, after those two months of vagrancy it's heaven to have my own "home!"  I've got my Xbox 360 and my computers nicely setup in the living room, a messy kitchen and a slightly untidy living room and thus it now feels like home.  ;-)  I don't even have to pack up my suitcase to take it to work with me every morning.  Do you know how nice that is?

Even the girl in my local coffee shop automatically brings me my morning cappuccino without me having to ask, so I must be settled in!

I'm in a place called Söflingen (pronounced "Zerflingen"), which is a little suburb-that-used-to-be-a-village on the edge of Ulm.  Until part way through the last century there were open fields between here and Ulm and Söflingen was an independent village in its own right.  Even today, Söflingeners consider themselves to not be from Ulm, even though Söflingen has been well and truly absorbed by Ulm.  I'm a bit spoilt by living here to start with because it's one of the nicer parts of Ulm and so when looking at houses in the less salubrious parts of town I find myself turning my nose up.  It's like going to London for the first time and staying in the King's Road in Chelsea when you know that ultimately you're going to be living in Dagenham (for those not familiar with London, you really don't want to live in Dagenham, which was once judged "The unhappiest place in the UK").

But earlier this week I applied for a 4 Zimmer (room) flat in the Fischerviertel (Fisherman's Quarter) in the Alte Stadt (Old Town).  Flats are classified slightly differently here - instead of saying "a 2 bedroom flat" they will say "a 3 room flat" (lounge + 2 bedrooms).  And a room has to be a certain size by law before it can be classed as a room, so you get oddities such as "a 2,5 room flat" which is a 2 room flat (usually lounge/kitchen combined and 1 separate bedroom) with another room that is very small so they are only allowed to say it's a half a room.


Oh and it gets odder.  My temporary flat is apparently a 1 room flat as it is a studio apartment with a large combined living room/bedroom/kitchen (the bathroom doesn't count in the room count and nor does the kitchen if it's separate, or the hall).  Ok fair enough.  Except that in the middle of the flat are stairs leading upstairs to another room that is more than large enough to make a comfortable main bedroom and is at least 50% as large as the main living area.  But it's in the roof so as large as it is, it's classified as a wardrobe!  So I have a 1 room flat.  With wardrobe.  That you could fit a car in.

Odd.  As are many things in Germany.  And don't get me started on how to put out the rubbish because that's even more complex and I haven't figured it out yet.  Every time I go to the area where the (multiple and varied) rubbish bins are I flee in fear of the next door neighbours yelling at me for using the wrong one!

But I digress.  Back to the flat in Fischerviertel.  It's newish (1970s) and is surrounded by half timbered 17th century houses that are very pretty.  And it's huge.  And there are no light fittings, just bare wires coming out of the ceiling (which is normal in Germany) but at least it has a kitchen sink (which is not - the tenants usually take it with them when they go).  These are both rants for another blog entry.  Cross your fingers for me that I get a "yes" answer!