After all the fun I had last weekend with my bike ride out to Lobdeburg, I decided to try to make it all the way to Weimar this weekend. Weimar is a somewhat smaller city (maybe 65000 people), about 23 km west of Jena. It's about half the way to Erfurt, the capital of the state of Thuringia, in which Jena is located. I mentioned my plan to Anna, a PhD student at the institute here, and she said that she'd like to come along as well.
And so we set out at around 9:30 on Saturday morning. The weather was quite nice, only partly cloudy, though a little colder than it's been lately. At first the trip seemed like it was going to be really tough, but we sort of took a little detour that required us to go straight up the side of a little mountain. Upon looking more carefully at the map, it seemed we didn't actually have to be on this little road, and we could head back down to the main bike path, which had much more gradual elevation changes.
From then on, the ride wasn't too bad, though the parts that were on a dirt path were incredibly muddy after the rains the night before. We ended up with our bicycles and pants covered in silty mud, but we did finally make it to Weimar (after stopping many times to check the map the the signs along the way) at 11:45. This was a bit longer than expected, but it still gave us over 4 hours to explore Weimar before we had to turn around to get back to Jena for 6:00 pm.
Despite its small size, Weimar is quite well known across Germany because of its history. Heck, it's even a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The first constitution of Germany was developed at a conference there in 1919, which gave birth to the Weimar Republic, which lasted from 1919 until 1933. It is also very famous for being the primary residence of Goethe, a giant of German literature, from 1794 until his death in 1832. Friedrich Schiller, another famous poet of this era and close friend of Goethe's, also lived in Weimar for some years during this time, and the two of them are immortalized all over the city. (And actually around Jena as well, and really anywhere that either of them even visited in Germany.) Here's Anna and me in front of a large statue of the two men in the middle of a square in the town centre - proof that we actually made it!
There are lots of museums in Weimar - it is as focused on the arts as Jena is on science and technology - but we were really more concerned with walking around the city and getting to know our way around. Besides, the weather was much too nice to spend the day inside. One of the largest is the Schlossmuseum (which translates to something like the palace museum), an art gallery. Here's a picture taken inside the courtyard with a big compass rose inlaid in the cobblestones. The museum makes up the whole building on all four sides of the courtyard, to give you some idea of scale.
And here's an incredibly friendly-looking lion guarding the entrance to the courtyard. He really looked like a cartoon character with his ringlets and huge eyes, and he's even smiling. Not the fiercest lion I've ever seen.
We did go into the "Ginkgo Museum", which was free, and really more like a glorified gift shop. But it did tell me more than I'd ever wanted to know about ginkgo trees. Goethe was fascinated by their morphology (which is quite bizarre, but I'm not going to go into the details), and he wrote a famous poem about them, and planted at least a couple around town. Anna was nice enough to translate most of the plaques in the museum for me. We also went out for some chinese food for lunch, and I even picked up a couple of Asian groceries that I haven't been able to find in Jena yet (rice paper wrappers and hoisin sauce).Then we went to see the UNESCO park, a nice green area near the Ilm river, where they had this strange fountain-like thing:
The water wasn't running now, it being winter, but in general it would flow around this partial circle, going over all the bumps in the way. The different things along the water's path are items symbolizing the chronological history of Weimar, starting with impressions of fossils and cave paintings, moving on to a scale model of the old city centre, and then the faces of some of its most famous inhabitants, and finally ending with things like a computer mouse encased in cement. Anna explained that it's designed to stimulate the soles of your feet, and in the summer people would take off their shoes and walk along the top in the water, feeling the bumps of all the items laid in the concrete. There's even a section part way through with a container of sand, to mix up the texture. I'm very curious if people actually use it - I'll have to go back in the summer to find out.
And then it was time to go. Here's one of the bike path signs showing us which way to head out of the city, to go the 23 km back to Jena. The return trip was much easier and faster, more like 1:40, and that was still with a couple breaks to check the map. Anna thinks that we should try for Erfurt next time, which (as you can see from the sign above) is about 56 km west of Jena. And of course we could take the train back, so we don't have to return right away (or in the dark). And there are tonnes of other towns within visiting distance as well. Who knows where I'll go next weekend!
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