Regensburg, 17.05.04-19.05.04

Monday morning met Benka and Oska at the Roissy airport, and together we boarded a flight to Munich. They even let me sit by the window, and the weather was nice so mostly I could see the land, but I forgot to take a proper map with me as usual and had to guess the geographic features from memory. Oh well, one doesn't really need a lot of guessing to recognize Bernese Oberland, not if one has seen it before from the ground, in any case. But I would have liked to remember what all the rivers were, and some of the lakes. So we saw the mountains. They looked fake. To me mountains always look fake, even if I am standing on them, but especially from a plane. To Benka too.

Oska started whining about my Magen David and about how I shouldn't wear it in Germany. I told him that I'd worn it in Germany before without causing Hitler to awaken and arise or any similar calamity. He continued whining though, and I took it off and put it in my purse, all the time growling that lack of sleep and ingestion of airplane food apparently caused at least temporary brain damage. And sure enough, after a good night's sleep and some sausages Oska declared Germany to be a perfectly safe place to wear a Magen David.

Oska is a dangerous person, in that he really knows a lot of stuff, and he also tends to speak in a rather authoritative tone about things that he knows nothing of, so I tend to take him with a grain of salt unless I think that he is talking about the stuff he knows. Lately he has even taken to giving me rather copious advice about my love life. Mind you, that's the man who told me that no man would ever have sex with me if I don't know about Fourier transform. I was 13 or 14 then, and believed him. I stopped taking his advice on erotic and romantic matters seriously upon finding out experimentally that most men apparently don't quiz their sex partners on the Fourier transform before hopping into sack. Knew a guy who talked about Mandelbrot sets in bed though, but that was after sex and everybody was drunk and it's not the same thing anyway.

Got to the airport, got a car. Avis asked some ungodly money (15 euros a day) for including a second driver, and we had trouble opening the trunk, but otherwise was OK. Drove to Regensburg. Germany is very green.

Regensburg is awfully pretty, never seen anything like that in Germany before. I'd only seen Frankfurt, Saarbrucken and Karlsruhe and they had been all bombed rather severely during WWII. Regensburg apparently wasn't, or at least not much. Gothic building everywhere and a lot of narrow pedestrian streets.

The hotel (Munchner Hof) was very nice and had a big suite with a kitchenette. The staff was very friendly, too. We did not know about the kitchenette and were somewhat surprised when we opened a closet and found it.

The city has a beautiful Gothic cathedral, Dom St. Peter. Across the street from the cathedral there is a house with a note that proudly says that Napoleon Bonaparte had stayed there for 2 days at some point. Then there is Alte Kapelle, which is a newer church and not nearly as impressive, too much golden decoration inside. Right near the hotel is Neupfarrplatz, and from a window of the room I can see Neupfarrkirche, a simple but pleasant green Gothic thing. There are some cafes with a lot of tables on the square, and a few stands that sell cheap asparagus and very expensive cherries. Cherries are very expensive this year, both in Europe and (according to Benka) in the US. Wonder whether it's because the cherry season is bad, or whether it's because it's just late.

There is a Kaufhof department store on the square, and we disapprove of its modern and fairly ugly architecture and its nonacceptance of credit cards. Benka tries to find underwear and pantyhose for grandma and fails. I, on the other hand, find a lot of my favorite candy (Ferrero's Pocket Coffee) for very little money, but Oska and Benka immediately confiscate and eat half of it.

I go out on my own to find Danube, which in not hard. Danube is very fast here, unlike in Vienna, and fairly wide, too. There is even a little beach there. People hang out there but do not go into the water. I find an old-looking bridge called Steinerne Brucke and go to the other side. There is some castle-like contraption down the river (probably a castle but too far away to see well) and another one straight ahead when you look from the bridge. There is a very cute Gothic tower in the beginning of the bridge (downtown side) too, with a clock. When you look at the city from the bridge you see a lot more Gothic towers than you'd ever realized there were in Regensburg.

I go get Benka and Oska and we go to the bridge and across the river and then back and walk around the town. The old town is fairly big for a small town like that. We decide not to go to Nuremberg the next day but just to hang out in Regensburg.

The next day we walk around town again, find the old town hall, eat, have a beer outside (that is, Oska and I have beers and Benka sneers at us and our beers), take pictures, buy an incredibly expensive phone card at the post office (10 euros, and the calls to the US cost almost a euro a minute), get pissed off and also buy a cheaper one from a Middle Eastern guy who owns sort of an internet cafe without the cafe part. The guy sells us an Irish card that costs 10 euros and gives you about 150 minutes of calls to the US if you are calling from Germany, or 250 of calling from Austria.

Unlike in Paris there are very few bookstores here, at least in the old town, and none that sell DVDs. There is an outlet of the fast food chain Nordsee, which is the best fast food chain in the world and the rescue for a weary traveler who is trying to avoid sausage and sauerkraut in German-speaking countries. There are a lot of jewelry shops with ungodly prices, and a lot of tourist groups with guides.

On Wednesday morning as we are about to leave I remember that we did not see Porta Praetoria, a city gate built by Romans, and we go there. There is indeed a piece of gate with really old stones sticking out of it. Now I am happy and we can go.