Day two in wine country

And now for our second day riding around through the countryside north of Jena. We got up at a reasonable time and had a huge feast of a breakfast at the bar below our hotel (which was included in the price, and which was laid out for us when we got downstairs), and slowly made our way out of town. Just outside of Naumburg Marie got to see her first ever field filled with sunflowers, and once we'd convinced her that no farmers were going to come out and shoot her (or even yell at her in German, which might be almost as bad), we convinced that she could go and frolic amongst the flowers.
From there on there was a whole lot of riding in blistering heat, sometimes through lovely shaded areas...
But more often along sun-baked roads with no shade in sight (though with lots of picturesque grape vines along the way).

The ride was also substantially hillier than the day before, which didn't make the heat any easier. When we were only a couple short kilometers from Bad Kösen we found ourselves riding up quite a large hill, which had at its very top a both selling ice cold water and wine. This wasn't along a real road, just along the bike path, and it was really at the top of the hill, so that people coming from either direction were exhausted and sweaty by the time they made it there. That man could have charged us anything for the water really, and we'd have payed it. And once we were sitting in the cool shade it didn't seem that a bottle of nicely chilled rosé could be anything but good. Besides, it was almost noon...
We carried along the trail for most of the day, stopping in Bad Kösen to see the elaborate water wheel apparatus that runs through the town, and even making it by a random castle on the way. (Guess what - it was on the very top of a mountain.)
Near the castle we also came across a really dark memorial from the first world war, with a giant lion crouching over a pile of bones. It's not really clear from this photo how big the lion really is, but I'd say the head is at least 7 m above the ground. And it was in a really unexpected clearing at the top of the hill, at what would have otherwise been a lovely picnic spot. (Since it was at the top of the hill, it acted more as a lie-in-the-shade-and-try-to-catch-your-breath spot for us.)
And our last stop of the day was in Bad Sulza. We didn't actually get any pictures from there, but I'll find one on the internet to give you an idea of where we were. Any town in Germany that starts with the word "Bad" has at least some traditional role as a spa town of sorts. Bad Sulza is no exception, and it's home to natural hot salt water springs, despite being so far from the sea. There's a crazy new-age spa complex built there, with 7 different salt water pools and a variety of saunas. Although it seems odd to go to a hot springs on one of the hottest days of the year, after all our riding it was good to relax and soak our muscles. We didn't take pictures inside the spa, but I nabbed a couple pictures from their website:
This picture only shows the view towards the building, but it's in a really beautiful spot that allows you to float around effortlessly (the water's really salty, so you're really buoyant) while surrounded by a view of the forested hillsides.
The pools (called Toskana Therme) are well known for their "Liquid Sound" programs, where they pipe music through the water. The sound travels really well through the water, and it's actually really relaxing to lie in the water and hear the music. They even have a special round building dedicated just to this, where you're not supposed to talk, and they pipe new age music through the water and project coloured lights onto the domed ceiling. It is very relaxing, but it does feel a bit like they're trying to brainwash you into joining some sort of cult. Still, it was quite a unique experience. (They even have special liquid sound events on full moon nights complete with light shows throughout the whole complex and DJs and the like, but I'm not quite sure it's our cup of tea.)

Our trip through wine country

The weekend after Marie arrived we decided to tour an area about 50 km north from where we live, in the southern end of Sachsen-Anhalt (the state north of Thueringen). We headed out Saturday morning, taking our bikes with us on the train to Freyburg. The first stop was the tourist information office, where a very helpful woman gave us some pamphlets and recommended we stop by a nearby village where they were having a wine festival that afternoon.

After that we headed over to the Rotkäppchen Sektkellerei to catch the daily 11:00 tour. Rotkäppchen means little red riding hood, and it refers to the red foil cover on the bottles of bubbly (Sekt) produced by the winery. Naturally the tour was in German, so I did my best of translating the odd bit as we walked through. Basically the woman leading the tour would talk for 10 minutes or so, and I'd sum it up for Marie and Jeremi in two sentences, which is about what I got. We did get a few pics from the tour though, which was only the first stop on our weekend of non-stop winy goodness. Here's a view of the main hall in the Sektkellerei, where they have concerts and events sometimes.
Here's a picture of the old oval-shaped barrels that they used to use for the sekt production. I think that they said the barrels were oval-shaped so that they could be rolled, but so that they couldn't roll away. You can see the tiny doors at the bottom, where they would send kids in to scrub them out between batches. During the tour the guide invited a kid to crawl inside and try it out. You can see another door cut into this barrel, as apparently someone got stuck on the tour once.
The next stop on the tour was the large (no longer used) cuvé barrel, where they used to blend the wine between years. It's the largest carved barrel in Germany, or something like that. Again, the tour was all in German (and it was a few weeks back now), so I'm not swearing by any of this. (Unlike the usual gospel-truth quality of our blog assertions.) As you can see written on the side of the barrel, it would hold enough for 160 000 bottles. There are also lines from a poem by Schiller on the side.
And finally, the moment that we were waiting for the whole time, the tasting. This was just the first of many glasses on this particular day, but bubbly is a good way to start any day, don't you think?


After finishing the tour, we headed up to the castle in Freyburg which, like all castles in Germany, was directly on top of the biggest hill around. We left our bikes at the bottom of the hill and walked up the Eselweg, which tranlates to the donkey path. It was the path used for bringing water up from the river (using donkeys of course) for a good 600 years, before they managed to dig a deep enough well at the top of the hill.

The castle was lovely, and it had been quite well restored after reunification. There were also fabulous audio guides (iPod nanos) in English (and French and German). The castle is very famous for being the home of St. Elisabeth, who was the Herzogin (duchess?) of the region. She devoted her life to serving the poor and sick, and died of "exhaustion" at the age of 24 after already having three kids. This year, 2007, is the 800th anniversary of her birth, and the whole region is celebrating "Elisabeth year", with lectures about the cult of Elisabeth, art exhibits related to her life and times, and even a musical about her life. We did get a few pictures from the castle, beginning with this catapult, which Marie had to get a picture of for her brother:


Here's a view through one of the latticed windows.

One of the most interesting things to me was the discussion of the toilets in the castle, which were built into the walls a bit like outhouses, but instead of falling into a pit they'd just drop several meters down to the ground surrounding the castle walls. Eventually the stink became too much, and they devised a compliclated system of water chutes to rinse the feces down the hill a bit.

Here's a view of the upstairs part of the "double chapel". There was a decree by the catholic church at the time that the royalty must worship with the plebs, which of course didn't go over so well with the royals. So they devised this bizarre two-storey chapel, where the nobility sat upstairs, the rest sat below, and there was a small trapdoor between the two levels so that they were worshipping together. Right.
And Marie took a nice picture of one of the spiral staircases:
And another lovely picture taken in the gardens outside of the castle, again by the oh-so-artistic Marie.
After getting our fill of culture and history for the day (or week) we got back on our bikes and headed toward the nearby town of Roßbach, whch was having a wine festival that afternoon. And so we had a couple of nice cold bottles of rosé and white there, and a bit of grilled meat. Here are Marie and Jeremi enjoying the cool, refreshing, tastiness. Jeremi's got a horrible fake grin in the photo, but you'll have to believe me that the other pictures were worse.

And then we were back on our bikes, at least for a couple of kilometers before stopping at another winery run by a couple of researchers who work in Jena. This place was a little paradise, as is shown by the lovely swing under the apple trees.

We sent Jeremi inside to scope out the scene for us, and he returned with a lovely bottle of white. So good in fact, that we bought a spare to bring home with us.
After that one, we were getting a bit peckish, and we ordered the most lovely cheese platter. It's possible that our growing inebriation made it seem better than it actually was, but it really did seem incredible to us at the time. (I should also mention that it was 38 degrees outside this weekend, and we were riding bikes in the sun while drinking all day. I think this may have intensified the effect of the alcohol somewhat.)

And then we were back on our bikes, heading toward Naumburg for the evening. The original plan had been to continue onto Bad Kösen that night, but at that point we were thinking that it might be a good idea to find a place to stay and get some cold water before going too much further. Here are Marie and Jeremi heading back down the road. I know that it's a bit out of focus, but believe me, it looked fuzzy to me by that time as well. And then we found ourselves in the lovely town of Naumburg, which is famous around these parts for its lovely cathedral. We couldn't actually get in that night, as there was a concert on. Marie thought that she'd found a secret route in an open door, but we found ourselves in a room with a boys' choir changing, and decided that perhaps we'd better leave before we got into trouble. And so instead we took pictures around the beautiful courtyard. The first one shows a strange scene of fairies under some masonic imagery. Not quite sure what that's about. I took pictures while Marie and Jeremi tried to puzzle it out.

After leaving the church we found a place to stay (after many failed attempts), and then headed into the main square of the town for some beers. Marie took a picture of this heavily dormered building which also had some strange masonic symbols on it. She was beginning to suspect a conspiracy really, but managed to forget all that after a couple more drinks.
Now, if you've made it this far, I salute you. To find out what happened on Sunday, please stay tuned for the next post! (I'll give you a hint though - it involved more wine and bicycles.)

The womb

Marie got here last Tuesday, Hooray! So Wednesday we went bar exploring in Jena. We went to Einstein for a beer and then found Rocket. Up a couple of stairs close to the entrance was a table and benches in a little room lined with semi shag carpet. Here you can see us feeling up the shagginess.




And a few days later we also discovered that we had roamed around looking for donairs and had small fragmented memories of this when we saw this picture.


At first we couldn't quite recall when this was taken. But then we sort of remembered. The statue behind Julia and Marie is a representation of the founder of the university here, Johann Friedrich. He's also called Hanfried (Jo-"hanfried"-rich). It was a fun night.

Gone for the weekend

In case anyone is trying to get in touch with us this weekend, we'll be away until Sunday night. (Feel free to come and rob us if you're in the area.)

Long time no blogging...

So we've been a bit bad about blogging lately, so I'll get everyone up to speed as quickly as possible. The big news is that Marie arrived yesterday and will be staying here for almost a month. For those of you who don't know her, she's a friend of mine from McGill who I (and sort of Jeremi) lived with in Halfax and who we went to visit in South Korea a couple of years back. She's working as a teacher now in Truro, Nova Scotia, teaching grade 2 French immersion, and she's enjoying her summer holidays with us now in Jena. We'll be travelling around Europe a bit with her over the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

Since our last post our only big bike trip was with Calin and Susanne and Franz, a guy from Austria who also works at our institute. We rode down to Kahla, which is about 20 km south of Jena, and is known for its ceramics. The ride was really pleasant, but Kahla on a Sunday afternoon was a bit quieter than we'd expected. A bit like a ghost town, really. Here are some pictures of Jeremi and I in the central city square.

And here are (from left) Franz, Calin, Jeremi, and Susanne, preparing for the ride home.

On the way back we went a bit off the path, and stopped at a really lovely beer garden near Bürgau, just south of Jena. It's right on the river, by a lovely stone bridge, and the weather was just perfect.

Jeremi was still riding his turquoise bike at this point, which has given him one problem after another. We weren't sure it would make it all the way back, especially as the bent back wheel was causing the tire some trouble, but it did. Here's the hernia in the back tire when we arrived back home.

Since then he's found a new used bike (which has also had a few technical troubles) and the old turquoise beast has been patched up a bit and relegated to being the guest bike. Lucky Marie!

Over Canada Day weekend there was a big party at the Camsdorfer bridge here in Jena. Every year they shut down the bridge to traffic and have a big festival on it, with bands, beer, and food tents. There were also fireworks on the Saturday night, which we liked to believe were actually an early celebration of Canada Day. Unfortunately we didn't bring a camera, so we can't show you the people we were there with (from Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and, of course, Germany), or the jacket of the German guy near us in the crowd which had "Ontario Park Ranger, Camp David" embroidered on it, or even the crazy guy in the crowd who was playing the tambourine on Jeremi's belly. Oh what a night. (Incidentally, the guy with the jacket was German, he bought the jacket in Germany, and he didn't know that Ontario was in Canada or that Camp David was in the US. It's not the first time I've seen Ontario written on clothes - a guy at work had a shirt with a picture of a moose on it that said something about Ontario Elk, and I asked him if he'd got it in Canada, and he told me it was from a Swedish company.) After the party at the bridge (the Camsdorferbrückenfest) we went dancing until the wee hours at the Rosenkeller, this crazy underground bar with stone walls that's been around since the 12th or 13th century.

And finally, our last bit of news is our institute's summer party, put on by the grad students and post docs. It's actually the party for our institute and the one next door (the MPI for chemical ecology). Like all German parties (at least in Thüringen), it was centred around beer and bratwurst. A highlight for us was being introduced to a Canadian PhD student, Brent, from the institute next door. He's from Lethbridge, and at one point he and Jeremi were the only people there not wearing sweaters. We did get a few pictures from the party, mostly of Jeremi falling asleep towards the end of the evening (at least the end of the evening for us).