David Grajal

After the harsh winter, I’m taking advantage of the first sunny, fresh days of the German spring to travel around south Germany. There are only a few cities left that I want to visit in the region. After that I will mark south Germany as done and I will start traveling to northern Germany and the closer countries.

One of the cities I recently visited is Bayreuth. This is a small, romantic city very well known because the important classical musical festival that is held on the city every year. All German cities look the same but each one has different peculiarities. Bayreuth is centered in the person of Wagner and I visited the Wagner house (where he is buried) and the Wagner opera house.

Walking aliens on Bayreuth

I went to Darmstadt to do my TOEFL examination. I’ve been in Darmstadt several times visiting my friend Clerigo and I know the city. After doing the exam, I went to Heildelberg for a Couchsurfing free hugs day event. It was a lot of fun and I met a lot of interesting people.

I used for the first time the VRN ticket to return to Würzburg. This is a very cheap ticket that only allows you to take the slow S-bahn between cities in the country side. This has been my most beautiful train trip in Germany so far. The local train between Heildelberg and Ostenburken follows a river trough a small valley with tiny beautiful towns. This area is not on the travel guides because there is nothing specially really worth of visiting but the entire region is relaxing and plain beautiful.

Dinosaur in Bayreuth

In the last years I lived in lots of places. I still remember the spacious, clear and lighted room and the humid, dark and tiny room in Madrid. I lived on a cool multinational house in Toronto but also with a family on a cellar. My last experience was on a tiny apartment in Seoul with Ann.

All of those places had in common one thing. I was living with other people. My apartment in Würzburg is my first place of my own.

Apartment in Würzburg

Now I have mats on the floors instead of massive amounts of dust. I have boxes filled with stuff instead of big piles of stuff. I have clear walls instead of circuit boards hanging from the wall. And I have stuff that has no other reason to be there than look nice.

It’s not a secret that I have no style. I’m a square headed male engineer and I have a pure analytical mind. I appreciate functionality over style. When I tried to decorate something the result is always a mess. I really like how the pictures look on decoration magazines, but I was not able to create nice spaces combining shapes and colors by my own.

This time I had the opportunity to take over Janette’s apartment. She worked for a decoration company on the last years and according to her, this place is her personal masterpiece. It really looks clean and nice. Zen. After taking out all her pink stuff , her princess palace become my apartment.

This was my first weekend with Spanish people since I’m living in Germany! Clérigo was hosting Antonio and Raquel for a weekend and we decided to go on a cultural road trip together. The plan was to visit Weimar, an important touristic city that neither of us had never visited. The five of us met together on Fulda.

Jumping@Fulda with random Germans

We chose the most exciting day because Fulda was hosting a concentration of right wing political parties and the entire city was dominated by police. We just ignored all the creepy Nazi and anti-Nazi people and focused on the city itself. The cathedral and the residence was interesting and we saw the most beautiful-baroque-style statue in Germany.

Weimar is considered the cultural hearth of Germany and the place where Goethe and Schiller lived. Goethe for Germans is as important as Shakespeare for English people or Cervantes for Spanish people. The city is full of museums and places dedicated to those two important guys that lived here. We visited the (boring) Goethe’s house and we walk all around the city.

On our way back, we all visited Würzburg. It was my first time as host in my city but we didn’t have a time to stroll on the city so we just went directly to Marienberg Fortress to have a general view of the city.

All the cities in Germany are full of parks and gardens. Late fall is the best time to visit them because everything is covered with yellow leaves and the trees have beautiful colors. Würzburg is even better because the vineyards that surround the city become yellowish and the city radiates a different, warmer light.

I liked Fulda and Weimar but I’ve living here enough time to realize that all German cities on the south look the same. I will not visit more German cities in this area because I don’t enjoy them anymore.

Bamberg was another step in my personal quest to explore South Germany. Bamberg is considered by all the travel guides like one of the most beautiful cities and one of the main touristic destinations in this country and the entire city is protected by UNESCO since 1993.

Bamberg emerged from WWII without being bombed. The night it was supposed to be bombed there was very bad weather and the bombers headed instead to Würzburg and Frankfurt. In that night Würzburg lost 80% of the medieval city and that’s the reason in Würzburg we have a beautiful modern downtown and Bamberg instead still has a wonderful medieval old city.

Little Venice in Bamberg

Bamberg probably looks now like it looked 400 years ago. The historic center is full of very narrow pedestrian streets and extremely old houses. As the entire old city is protected by UNESCO, the city is very well preserved because the people that is actually living there can’t change anything and they are forced to keep their houses clean and beautiful. Now that I think about it, it must be a nuisance for them.

In Bamberg I met Petra, a very nice couchsurfer who kindly spent the entire day with me. She was the perfect host because she has been living in Bamberg for the last 13 years and she loves to walk around the city telling anecdotes and histories about it. She says that it helps her to realize how beautiful is the city and I can’t agree more with her. We had fun together drinking smoke beer (she hates it!) and making silly jumping pictures.

Petra and me, in the Altes Rathaus (city hall)

Making silly jumping pictures

I think that I visited the city at the perfect time. In late fall, the streets looked specially beautiful because the trees were starting to lose their leafs. Bamberg’s streets are clearly beautiful by itself but that day they were specially interesting because they were painted with amazing multicolor natural patterns.

I'm just saying hello to the best spaniard girl in town

This was another weekend trip traveling in the South of Germany. This time I went to Stuttgart which is only 2 hours by train from Würzburg. Stuttgart was founded in the 10th century and it’s the 6th largest city in Germany. It is most famous for its automotive industry – both Porsche and Mercedes-Benz have their headquarters in Stuttgart and both have car museums. Actually the museums are what makes the visit worthwhile. Once I arrived at Stuttgart train station and after climbing the tower situated in the train station, I headed to the Mercedes-Benz Museum.

Stuttgart Main Square

The Mercedes-Benz Museum was newly built in 2006 in an astonishing architecture. For me was an amazing experience. I’m not really into cars, but it was very interesting to discover the origins of the company, which is linked to the origins of the motor industry. The museum is arranged to lead you through the history of the automobile, and also show some context of what was going on in the world around it. It was really specially interesting the WWII period in Germany and what happen with the company after the war.

At the beginning it's showed the earliest motors and some of their uses. Here is one on a motorized bicycle, Probably the first motorcycle

After the first rooms, where there were some very old engines and cars cars and the history about how Daimler and Benz invented the car concept, they finally get to a question I had wondered… where did the name “Mercedes” come from. A board member of the Daimler company, designed a “modern” car, specifying that it must be named after his daughter, Mercedes. This new car was a big hit, won lots of races and was loved all over the European motoring scene. After two years of great success, the company decided to brand all cars with the Mercedes name.

Here is the first one.

Mercedes

What I liked more about the museum? Something that probably no other would appreciate. The museum is designed to visit from the top floor up to the main floor and it has a main course and a secundary or optional one. Following the walls of the main course there is an overview of the technical, medical or political advances in the XX century and in the background there is an amazing collection of pictures related to historical events. Most of them are not car specific and they have very interesting historic pictures. I thought that I was not going to be the only one interested in that collection and I’ve tried to find information on the internet but I couldn’t find any references of the Mercedes-Benz picture collection and of course I couldn’t find any historic collection with good quality for free. Those pictures are very old and they probably are in public domain. Do you know where I can find them?

PapaMovil

In the night I was hosted in Ramses’s and Alberto’s home. Ramses studied with me in Valladolid and Alberto is a new friend that loves to speak about economics and politics. Of course we had a very interesting evening eating Spanish food and drinking German beer. Thanks for the nice evening and for hosting me, boys!

The next day I headed to Ulm, the place where Albert Einstein was born, a town at the edge to Bavaria in Baden-Württemberg. In Ulm is the cathedral with the tallest steeple in the world (161,53m). It was an amazing experience to climb up there. I needed 20 minutes to climb the 768 steps. But it was worth it. It was an amazing view. In a clear day you are supposed to see up to the Alps, but even it was a perfect day I couldn’t see them. It was quite impressive because the city is small and there are no tall buildings so the cathedral appear to be way taller than it really is. You can see the entire region including closer cities from there.

Ulm Munster

No, it's not google maps. This is the view from Ulm's cathedral

After Ulm I went to Tübinger, an university city with a very well preserved medieval downtown and a very relaxed atmosphere. It was not bombed in WWII and it looks much as it would have in the 1600s. I was only for a few hours in the city but I fell in loved with the charming medieval streets and I really liked to just walk around the medieval downtown. I want to visit it again in a more relaxed way in the near future because Tübinger seemed a very beautiful place.

Tübinger

On my way back, I stopped again in Stuttgart and I went to the Cannstatter Volksfest which is considered by many to be the second largest beer festival in the world after the Oktoberfest. I came here last year with Clerigo before moving to Canada and this year we met again. It was nice because actually I had not seen him since Volksfest 2007. We spoke about how is life living in Germany. He had been in the festival for the entire day drinking like an authentic German (He has been living in Germany for almost 2 years now) but I arrived in the afternoon and all the tents were completely full. It was impossible to enter in the huge beer gardens so we were just speaking for a while and then I headed back to Würzburg.

Clerigo and me on the VolkFest in Stuttgart