Castles on the Rhine

This post is woefully overdue, but I'm running out of time in Jülich so work is getting hectic.



Tuesday last week I visited Castle Marksburg and about seven other castles and towers in various states of ruination along the Middle Rhine. Barons of various degrees built all sort of fortifications along the Rhine to levy taxes on the river traffic and "sell protection." The Mafia was alive and well in medieval Germany.

Marksburg is really fantastic and in excellent condition. It was never captured or destroyed, the only castle in this area to remain so, and is now the headquarters and offices of the Deutsche Burgenvereinigung (German Castle Association). It's the ancestral home of the Count Katzenelnbogen, which for some reason means "Cat's Elbows". Visitors are advised to control their dogs.



We were given an excellent English tour by a German hunchback with a bundle of enormous iron keys. I'm not kidding.


The castle residents sported a variety of lung diseases. All the beds were deliberately too short, forcing you to sleep sitting up. If you fell over in the night, you risked drowning in your own phlegm.


This anatomically-correct coat of arms hangs just inside the main gate. I think the Landgraves of Hess were compensating for something.


The castle kitchen was very impressive. The meals for the great hall were prepared and arranged on these tables and then the entire table would be carried up the uneven stairs to the hungry guests. They could have passed the food bucket-brigade-style to the main hall, but they were too busy carrying that heavy table to stop and think about it.


I found this chastity belt in the armory. Guaranteed to prevent damnation or your virginity back!



Back in the day, the castle's walls were plastered and painted, inside and out. This was common to every castle, but our movies filmed in castle ruins make most people think the plaster is unusual. The German Castle Association is restoring the plaster and paint according to contemporary color sketches.


After Marksburg, we drove through a few small towns on the Rhine. It was just like what you've seen in postcards and tourism movies: beautifully-constructed traditional-style houses with old churches and fragments of the ancient town walls scattered between. The Rhine has very few bridges, so most people cross with ferries. The ferry advertisements, typically German, sound more like warnings. My favorite: "Without this ferry, you don't stand a chance!"


This is wine country and vineyards abound. Germany is at approximately a 45-degree latitude, so most of the grapevines are planted on a 45-degree slope to receive maximum direct sunlight throughout the day.


There's a cat-and-mouse pun started by, or related to, Count "Cat's Elbows" Katzenelnbogen that runs up and down this valley. This is Burg Maus, the "Mouse Castle". There's "Mouse Tower" further downstream.


The impressive Burg Rheinfels, the Rock of the Rhine.


Here's Burg Gutenfels, Castle "Good Rock". The origional owners were pirates of a sort, levying heavy taxes on the river traffic. It's a hotel now, so they're maintaining the tradition of extorting passersby.


The nobles of Burg Gutenfels built this interesting tower on a small island in the middle of the Rhine. It's blatantly intended for levying taxes on passing barges, and sinking those who don't feel spendy. The Germans recaptured it from the Spanish in 1504 when a small girl showed the German forces a way to sneek up on the castle undetected. The tennents of the modern Hotel Gutenfels wish she was still around so they could sneek out undetected.


Burg Sooneck.

Smoking

Just about everyone smokes in Germany. This is ironic given the severity of the German cigarette warning labels, which are printed in black letters you could read from space. None of this wimpy "The surgen general recommends...." stuff. For example:

Smoking can lead to impotence due to circulatory system disorders.

Rauchen kann zu Durchblutungsstörungen führen Impotenz

Smoking while pregnant harms your unborn child.

Rauchen in der Schwangerschaft schadet Ihrem Kind

Smoking can lead to a slow and painful death.

Rauchen kann zu einem langsamen und schmerzhaften Tod führen

Protect children! Don't let them breath your tobaco smoke!

Schützen Sie Kinder -- lassen Sie sie nicht Ihren Tabakrauch einatmen

Smoking damages you and the people around you considerably!

Rauchen fügt Ihnen und den Menschen in Ihrer Umgebung erheblichen Schaden zu

Smoking can be deadly.

Rauchen kann tödlich sein

Smoking causes fatal lung cancer.

Rauchen verursacht tödlichen Lungenkrebs

Your doctor or pharmacist can help you give up smoking.

Ihr Arzt oder Apotheker kann Ihnen dabei helfen, das Rauchen aufzugeben

Germany in the finals!

Germany has made it all the way to the final match of the European Soccer Championship! I watched the half-final game against Turkey in the bar, and I got some great footage of the Germans at their wildest. Check out this video! (The kids at the end are the best.)


The crowd spilled out of the bar and into the street. Tensions were really high and everyone was half-drunk. The guy with the German flag on his cheek (first row, middle) screamed that the Germans were playing like **** for the first ten minutes of the match, and then wanted to fight me when I (and the two guys sitting next to me) told him "Relax man! It's just the first 10 minutes!" After some intense staring he gave it up, and by half-time he had forgotten it completely and gave me a big, beery hug.


The Turkish competition! They look happy here, but by the end of the match they were pouting like two-year-olds.


The match ended 3:2 for Germany, and everyone went wild! What an awesome night!

Drachenboot-fest in Essen!

Last week I was lucky enough to compete in a Drachenboot (Dragon boat) race at Essen Baldeneysee. I got in at the last minute because a friend/coworker at Jülich got a nasty mosquito bite on his hand and couldn't compete. Poor guy's entire hand was puffed up like a balloon!

I looked up dragon boats before the race and found some fantastic pictures. I thought we'd be paddling something like this:


but our were a bit more modest:


A dragon boat is a really long, narrow paddle boat with a caller in the prow and a helmsman in the stern. Our boats had 20 paddlers and massive animal-hide drums for the caller to beat time with. The sport originated in China and is popular in Germany. There's even a national dragon boat association! The Berlin team was the world champion in 2005.


The drums were my favorite part. Waaaaaay better than the plastic dragon prow. The beating sounds like a giant heart and makes me feel like Ben-Hur.

Our valiant team, composed of mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and nerds in general, was called "Die Blauen Füchse" (the blue foxes). The explanation for the name, given in English, went like this: "There is a kindergarten called the foxes. And when you drink too much, you are blue. So we are the blue foxes." Apparently, we are a walking tribute to juvenile delinquency.


The team!

We raced four times, and every race was fantastic! The race starts with the announcement "Are you ready? Attention! Go!" and then everyone paddles furiously. We splashed and tossed water everywhere and if anyone's stroke got out of sync he was sure to toss buckets of water in your face. There was a gentle headwind for the whole of the course, which grew into a powerful, gusting wind by the end of the day. We finished each run with an inch or two of water in the bottom of the boat, and several gallons in my lap. It was easy to see which side of the boat you sat on; your inward side was your only hope of a dry stitch.



There were 36 teams in total, all of them crazy and most of them sporting outlandish costumes. There was a prize for best team uniform, so people came dressed as old fogies, hippies, sea creatures, secretaries, pirates, and monks. Team Love Boat wore tie-dye, and team Daytona showed up as race car drivers, and even brought their own mini-cars.

I wish we had dressed up and mentioned it to my friend Ivo. "Come on!", I said, "We're not even competing. You'd think 25 mathematicians would come up with something." We both thought a moment and then said, in the same breath: "Integral signs." Nerds on parade.



Some teams were really competitive and showed up in skin-tight waterproof shorts and spandex. Never in my life have I seen more banana hammocks, even counting the 15-or-so triathlons I've done. These people know they have to win to regain any self respect for their appearance. Its not like a bike race where you're going too fast for anyone to see anything. And when that cloth gets wet... well... the Germans have a relaxed sense of decency.



It was brilliant sailing weather, and by the end of the day boats of every size were flying up and down the lake. One guy nearly capsized his dinghy on an jibe when his jib tangled in the forestays. (That's the last time I show off my nautical vernacular. I swear.)



The wind gave a spirit of joy to the giant yellow people, prompting them to hug small children.



This is team Dragon Hunter, by far the best-dressed team in the place. Not only did they dress as monks, and not only did they bring Gregorian music to play as they boarded their boat, but they even dressed in hokie colors! They won the much coveted costume party prize.

We played around on the lake all day, and in the end came in 16th of 36. Not too shabby for a boat full of geeks. If you want to see what we look like in action, take a look at this movie I made.

The adventures didn't end at the lake, though. The weather had been fantastic all day, but on the way home we got caught on the Autobahn in the most intense hail storm I've ever seen! The hail was a good 1/2" across and brought traffic to a screeching halt. We had to cover our ears for the sound of ice smashing on the roof, but we didn't get really worried until we started watching cracks crawl across the windshield. We were literally watching the ice destroy the window before our very eyes! The hail was so large it tore branches off trees and smashed up dozens of cars. Our windshield was a complete write-off, and the car was covered in dents. It looked like a toddler had taken a ball-peen hammer to the car. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture.

Not being the owner of this dearly lamented automobile, I had a marvelous day.

Scenes from Jülich

Here are a few tidbits from last week.

Ballooning is popular around here. Every once in a while I see one or two of these drifting around. On holidays you might see as many as a dozen drifting around the countryside.



The countryside around Jülich is homogeneous, but beautiful. On the way home from work I sometimes wander down the footpaths through fields of wheat, barley, hops, sugar beets and strawberries.


It's getting late for wildflowers, but there's still a few out here.


Coal mining and electricity production are the major economic stays of the region. Here's one of the half-dozen or so coal-burning power plants in my neighborhood.


I found these kids at a street festival a few weekends ago showing off their breakdancing moves. You can watch the whole video here.

Fußball Party!

The European Soccer Championship is dominating German TV, radio, newspaper, etc., and I love it. I've been watching more soccer than ever, usually accompanied by large frothing beers and boisterous friends. If you ever want to see just how foreign the Germans can be, do as I did last Thursday and attend a Fußball party.

The scene!

I went to a large café in Aachen with two of my coworkers to watch Germany vs. Croatia. Let me try to explain what a German café is like to my fellow Americans. They're a bit like an American sports bar - crowded, dark, and filled with tobacco smoke - but with tastefully-arranged flowers on every table, full menus, no age limit, and well-trained waiters. They're a bit like a restaurant, with atmosphere, conversation, and three-course meals (if you want them), but also very like a coffee shop, since they sell cappuccino, hot chocolate, and even warm milk. It's a place where you can order a beer, a coloring book for your kid, pizza, espresso, a kids meal, a pack of smokes, a shot of gin, a hot chocolate, and a steak, all at the same time.

My friends and I were sat behind a group of adolescent Croatians, in front of a grandmother waving a German flag, and next to a family with a six-year-old. The air was thick with tobacco, shouting Germans, and beer fumes.

To add further incongruity, the café was giving away free condoms. Mine was yellow with pearls.

We had to arrive almost two hours ahead of game time to get a seat, but that gave me lots of time to watch German soccer commentary. Every few minutes or so, the talking heads were interrupted by a short cartoon featuring the adorable antics of four kids playing soccer. The Fußball version of the Peanuts, methinks. These interruptions became more frequent as game-start approached, forming a sort of count-down to the game. Way cool.

The game!

Germans never do things by halves. I often get the impression that when a German does something, they do it for the thing's sake, rather than the purpose of the thing ("German bloody-mindedness"). For example, when a German works, the object is not to get things done, the object is to work. Productivity is incidental. Obviously, this is not true, but it's a facet of the German attitude.

When a German is at a soccer party, the objective is to throw a soccer party. They loose all their traditional reserve and scream, swear, and jump around like maniacs. A point for the German team sends them into raptures suggesting the safe delivery of their first-born child. Points against their team reduce them to open-mouthed disbelief and gasps of horror. The beer-glass casualties can be horrific.

Unfortunately, Germany allowed Croatia to score in the first half, and then never could get ahead of them. By half-time it was looking grim, and even when Germany scored in the second half I was pretty sure of the outcome. The party around me never flagged though.

With only a few minutes left, the German coach made his move and sub'ed one of my favorite players: Bastian Schweinsteiger. I don't know anything about him, except that his name roughly translates to "Pig Path". Schweinsteiger! Schweinsteiger! Schweinsteiger! The crowd went wild! Everything looked great, until he got a red card for pushing the Croatian who fouled him. Now the Germans were down a point, and a player. Even so, the Germans kept the party going. Alas! but to no avail. The game closed, 2:1 against Germany.

After the game the German composure, weighted with the disappointment of defeat, slowly settled down. I walked to the train station through the murmuring, slightly drunken crowds. On the way home, I saw an entire row of German faces wearing the exact same expression of resigned disappointment. I couldn't help but laugh.

Forest Critters

The forest around Forschungszentrum Jülich is crawling with all kinds of woodland critters.  Most mornings on the way to work I see a half-dozen different kinds of birds, frogs, snails the size of golf balls, hares, giant slugs, and a brown fox.  I'm still on the look out for Snow White.

Greens.  Eat your greens.

Hedge hog!  This guy was completely unconcerned about me taking his photo.  Just stared at me a bit, munching a beetle, and then wandered slowly away.  Guess I would too, if I was covered in spines.

Magic mushrooms.  This is how the good research gets done.

Black beetles everywhere.  These guys are about the size of a dime.

These guys are everywhere too.  Don't go walking in the dark unless you enjoy mashing soft-boiled eggs with your feet.

Two very naughty Gastropods.