Augsburg

Next stop:  Augsburg.  Given that this is my husband’s hometown, this part of the visit was heavily tilted towards visiting his family, and less a matter of tourism.

On Thursday, however, we made a detour,  adding (according to google when we mapped it out) 1 ½ hours onto the drive by stopping in Strasbourg along the way.  It is, indeed, a magical thing to be able to just program the GPS to go to Strasbourg, city center, look for parking garages when you get to what the system deems to be the center (sure, parking’s expensive, but not really that outrageous for a couple hours), find yourself a map (these are generally available as signs on the streetcorners, if nothing else), and make your way to the center, and the main sights – in this case, the cathedral.

So here are a couple observations on Strasbourg:

The cathedral is indeed impressive, all Gothic-y and stained glassed and all.  But of all the cathedrals on our tour thus far, it was also the most tourist-choked, especially with schoolgroups – and, while there was no charge to enter the cathedral, it felt very much like a tourist site rather than a holy place.  On top of which, the organist started playing – not any music but just long, low, loud notes.  I’d say he was tuning the organ but I don’t see how you would do such a thing.

The architecture of the city center itself was clearly a hybrid of French and German – some half-timbered, some, well, more French-looking — as befits this city which has changed hands over time.  Some of the streets even had their old names – e.g., “Blindergasse” as the German name for a street now named something like “Rue des Aveugles” – that is Street of the Blind. And, as we walked back to the parking garage, there were three soldiers in front of us, walking towards an old-ish church midway between the cathedral and the parking garage.  And they joined up with a couple more, and seemed to be standing guard in front of the church, as if there was some threat reported there.  What exactly was going on we never figured out.

Anyway, we walked back to the car and continued on to Augsburg – to an extremely funky old apartment in the city center, just a couple blocks, really, from the center, the Rathaus.  The apartment is in a very old building, on the fourth/top floor, with a very, very green rooftop garden (the owner requests guests water the plants), with a TV, hammocks, and the only table large enough for the family, in the apartment.  There was also only one “regular” bedroom, as well as a fold-out bed, and sheets to put on the couch, and parking was a bit of a mess; much of the area is residents-only, or residents-or-pay during the week; the first three nights we had a 10 -15 minute walk from the car (and it helped significantly that my husband knew the area), and only the last day, Sunday, did we find somewhere closer.  But the whole place was furnished in a funky style, and the kids thought it was fantastic, though I felt a bit odd about staying not at a special-purpose rental apartment, but at the “host’s” own home.  I suppose this is “authentic” Air B&B, as we were greeted by a young couple, who said they were headed off to their campsite just out of town, and that they loved to camp in the summer so that’s why they offered the place for rent.  And, while that’s believable from the decorations and guidebooks showing travel to Kenya and Thailand and so forth, at the same time, they do offer the place year-round, so one suspects that the true story is that Augsburg isn’t that much of a tourist draw, so they are only booked sporadically, and then bunk elsewhere for the time, to earn extra cash.

So on Friday we had a relatively simple day:  breakfast at my mother-in-law’s, then a “tour of Neusaess,” the directly-adjacent suburb of my husband’s childhood.  In the evening, a barbeque at my sister- and brother-in-law’s, with some cousins also in attendance.

Saturday we went into Oberammergau, or, rather, to the nearby mountain.  I am most certainly not a hiker, so we took the cable car up, then hiked down, and, well, the kids had a great time.  I did not.  Then we went to a pool nearby, which had a couple waterslides and such for the kids.

Sunday we stayed closer to home.  We started the day with church at St. Ulrich’s, the major basilica in the city.  Turned out, it was the concluding service for “St. Ulrich’s week” and was a special “service of nations” in which people from the various Catholic immigrant communities participated, so we had readings and petitions in other languages, and special greetings from the city council, and, well, in the end it lasted for nearly 2 hours, but the kids were so impressed with the African gospel procession they didn’t complain.  We then met my mother-in-law for lunch, then, with her, toured the Fuggerei (“the oldest social settlement in the world”) with her and walked around the city a bit.

Monday was Legoland.  As a nice bonus, we managed to get 2 for 1 coupons off our apple juice cartons the prior week, by happenstance, really, after I’d tried to look online without success.  My 9 year old, as expected, enjoyed himself the most, though, his favorite thing was not, as you’d think, the rides, but instead looking at the Lego Neuschwanstein and everything else in Miniland.

And that’s that for Augsburg.