Andechs

Some people may be surprised that I've been in Germany almost three weeks and haven't really mentioned the beer yet.  Well the first part of my trip was more in wine country, but now that I'm in Bavaria it all begins.

Basing myself in Munich for a week (I'm having trouble pronouncing München), I made a trip out to Kloster Andechs.

Cycling up the hill.

The view when you're there.

The photosphere that probably doesn't work (but I'm sure the hip kids can get it working).

The mildy baroque interior of the church.  I could have gone nuts taking photos in there, but I was annoying the people who were praying.

And the most important part, the healthy meal at the end.  I might be a few weeks late for the proper time to drink doppelbock, but that's not going to stop me.

I have exquisitely bad timing with regard to attending a brewery tour pretty much anywhere around Munich this week.  I shall just have to try the beer instead.  Most monastery breweries these days are commercial concerns co-located with a monetary.  I'm told Andechs is actually run by a monk, but it's still a commercial business.  It would be nice to find a place where people devote themselves to spiritual enlightenment via the noble art of brewing, but I will have to keep searching.

Augsburg

This is the one photo I took in Augsburg.  I couldn't work out if this was a joke, or an advertisement, or if people actually steal the mirrors from this place.  I suppose people might smash them.

The reason I only took one photo is because I spent most of the time sleeping.  I didn't get a chance to form an opinion about the place at all.

The Green Danube

I rode from Ulm toward Donauwörth.  This is mostly along the Donau, and is about the easiest cycling you can get, it's mostly level.

You can just make out the (probably nuclear) power station.

I didn't take a lot of photos, but it's a very pleasant ride.  I stopped overnight in a town called Dillengen, then the next day struck out for Donauwörth and then south to Augsburg.

Following the signed bike paths after Donauwörth gets a bit hillier, then I got lost a bit heading south.  The signs on the Donau Radweg are very good and easy to follow, but changing paths onto the Romantische Straße I came across a T intersection where the sign told me to ride into the river.  I had a 50% shot and got it wrong.  This is not the end of the world, but it turned an 80km ride into a 100km ride.  I discovered that my GPS definitely likes to find hills for me to ride up.  Even when I knew I was going in the right direction, the GPS would say, "Look, Dom.  There's a hill over there.  Why don't you go ride up that and then backtrack 10k to the road I wanted you to take." Eventually I got into a rhythm where if the GPS was telling me to turn around at every opportunity, I was heading the right way.  This works well until you get to about 5km from your destination, then you have to do what it says or you'll start going in circles.

Still, I got there in the end.

In Ulm, um Ulm, und um Ulm herum

I'll give you one guess what book I've been reading.

Münster Dom.

Many steps later...

This is the look on my face when I chicken out of going up the last set of steps (e.g. the last quarter).  I was dizzy after leaving the Umeda Sky Building, but this was pure masochism (ahaha, well I suppose a cathedral is the best place for it).

In a softer light.

I quite liked Ulm, even though I am constantly corrected on the pronunciation of the town's name.  The city centre is small, but I enjoyed the spirit of the town.

One place I visited was the Museum der Brotcultur (http://www.museum-brotkultur.de).  At first with the English audio guide it was quite surreal, and it reminded me of the 7 & 1/2th floor video in Being John Malkovitch.  Even the woman who sold me the ticket suggested it would send me to sleep and made sure i knew how to press 'stop' on the audio guide.  Ultimately it turned out to be a very interesting and thought provoking museum about food production and famine throughout the ages.  There were some creepy religious overtones, but it's hard to separate religion  from the artifacts of the times.  There was even a Salvidor Dali sculpture in the gallery.

Buste de femme rétospectif (Retrospektive Frauenbüste) 1977 (1933).

Like most photos I take indoors, I'm sure I'll get I trouble for this one.

Trier

I found myself staying in a small town near Trier called Kenn (got that?).  As an aside, I discovered that the smell of cigarette smoke will get through a sealed Ortlieb dry bag (it was supposed to be a non smoking room, but language was a big problem for me here, so maybe I got something wrong).

The main reason I went was to check out the Roman ruins.  I'm a poor student of history, but I get a kick out of Roman stuff for some reason.  Trier was the largest Roman city north of the alps.

Constantine's foot.  I have no idea how they worked that one out, but I tip my hat to them.

Five of this bridge's pillars date back to Roman times.

The Kaiserthermen, or Imperial Baths.  I'm still working on getting the photosphere images working on the blog, it may have to wait until I get home, so you shall just have to imagine what it's like to stand there.

For me the cool thing was the underground passages.  On automatic settings my camera makes them look like this:

But to the eye they look a lot more like this: 

In case I haven't mentioned, I switched from using a old film SLR that is entirely mechanical, without a light meter, to a digital camera about one week before I started traveling.  This scenario was interesting for me because I don't think I'd have been able to work out how to take it on film.  In fact, I'm not sure I could have done it using an optical viewfinder at all.  I'm quite enjoying using this new camera.

The amphitheater.

Underneath the amphitheater.

Porta Negra.

One of the reasons why the black gate was not torn down to salvage the stone was that it was used as a church for a long time.  There's a level where the aesthetic sharply changes from Roman to a much later Christian era.

The upper levels seem relatively unchanged, though.

Some tour group had these blokes dressed up in Roman uniforms shouting at them in German.  I reckon it would have been awesome if they spoke in Latin and just expected the tourists to work it out.

The Rhein

After banging on about it for months, I didn't actually buy the bike of my dreams.  In the end it came down to a combination of the shop not taking credit cards (like just about everywhere I Germany) and that I was doing this immediately before Easter, so a bank transfer was going to take way too long.  So I got a boring bike.

I may be wearing a clown suit, but it's very cold by my standards.

In the last couple of days I rose from Frankfurt to Koblenz along the Rhein.  I have to wonder what this must have been like to live in during old times, there are stretches where there are castles around every bend.  Were they friendly, or could you not travel five kilometers without intruding on an enemy's land?  An ordinary person might just look this up or ask somebody, not me.  (Okay, some of them were abbeys)

Ich bin ein Frankfurter

I don't think that has the right ring to it.  JFK missed a tremendous opportunity with that one.

I risked getting Paris syndrome by traveling from Osaka to Frankfurt via Charles de Gaulle Airport, but I seem to have made it through intact.  There were a Japanese couple on the plane wearing striped shirts and berets, clearly pretty keen on their trip to Paris.  It looked like fun to me, but I was straight onto the next flight.

There are probably all kinds of reasons why this is wrong and why it makes me a bad person, but in Frankfurt there were lots of men who dressed like villians in action movies or computer games.  I half expected Liam Neeson to turn up and mercilessly slaughter everybody.  Now I'm sure this is really just that costume designers had a look at what the average bloke in Europe wears, but I couldn't get it out of my head.  I'm going to blame Hollywood anyway.  Combined with the stories people told me about how many thieves are out to prey on tourists in Europe, I was a bit afraid to ever stop and pull out my camera.  Not that I actually know any of this, but coming directly from Japan, where almost nobody would steal your stuff, I was aware that I'd need a shift in mindset.

I did actually have a German guy ask me directions (I think), and a lot of people seem surprised I don't speak German.  I would like to think this means I'm capable of at least briefly not looking like a tourist, but now that I write this I recall that I get a lot of strange looks just walking into a room, so that can't be right.  It will surely make no sense once you see my cycling get-up.

If I were to get a kick out of taking photos of things called "Dom", well I've come to the right county.  Yet I refrained from photographing the streetsign for Domstraße.

I take comfort in the knowledge my water bottle does not contain body parts.

Choza!

I don't know how you spell his name.  Choza's original best friend was German, so now Paul has to tell him to stop humping people's legs in German, accent and all ("Halt!").

Sapporo, part two

I've been looking for one of those.

I went to the animal prison.  I don't suppose this reveals much unique about Japan, but here are some photos anyway.

Wherever you go in Japan there's always a food that is the local speciality.  To me it seems these are dishes you can get all over the place, but you go to the region to get the real deal.

So for Sapporo it's miso ramen, with the other thing being "Gengis Kahn", a lamb dish that you preferably eat at the Sapporo Biergarten.  I ate both, but only got a photo of one.

(As compared to the other photo of me eating this dish:

Originally captioned "Dom contemplating the futility of a comb over.")

I suspect Matthew McConaughy and Woody Harrelson didn't get their man.  These were everywhere (yeah, I know, they're to stop the snow destroying people's gardens).

 It kept getting colder.  Fresh snow the day I left.