Augsburg

It's picture time again, but first a little background on Augsburg. The city of Augsburg is really old - it was founded in 15 BC by the Romans, about a hundred or so years before Regensburg. Augsburg served as a Roman provincial capital and later grew into an important merchant city, becoming very wealthy. Unlike Regensburg, Augsburg managed to hold onto this prosperity, meaning the people could actually afford to replace their older medieval buildings with newer architectural styles. This growth and industry also made Augsburg worth bombing in WWII, the scars of this are most visible on the Augsburg Dom.

Looking at the Dom from the outside, it's pretty apparent that the building has been pieced back together - the building materials aren't uniform and the stark contrast between the white plaster and the stone statues shows what was salvaged from the wreckage and what is new.

In this picture you can see on the columns and arches red outlines which mark where the stones used to be - now it is made out of cement/plaster.

a statue in front of the Dom

These are a bunch of books from the 1500s in St. Anna Kirche. They have a museum with a bunch of Martin Luther related stuff there since Augsburg apparently was an important city in that whole situation. My knowledge on this subject is pretty lacking.

A view of the streets. Augsburg has streetcars instead of buses, hence the rails and electric cables. In addition to being a bigger city than Regensburg in general, Augsburg is also a lot more spacious.



This is one of several waterways that runs through the city. I'm pretty sure that they served as a sewer system in the earlier days, nowadays they just look cool.

Here we have the Rathaus (town hall)

Goldene Saal (Golden Hall), inside the Rathaus

the ceiling

a side room

This is the Fuggerei, the first "social settlement" in Europe. This self-contained community functions similarly to government subsidized housing (except it's privately owned) and was set up in the 1500s by a family of incredibly wealthy bankers/merchants by the name of Fugger to serve as housing for their impoverished workers. Annual rent was and is essentially free - the current residents pay 88 cents a year to live there.

This isn't a free ride, however, and there are pretty strict rules governing who can live in the Fuggerei and what they have to do to stay there. Some of the requirements are that residents have to be poor, Catholic, have a good reputation/clean record, and have to pray three times a day for the Fugger family (the brothers who set up the Fuggerei were very worried about their salvation).

a sign posted in the apartment listing the rules for living there

A statue of Hans Jakob Fugger. You've got to love those pants.

Quick Update

Hey everybody!

Today our group headed to Augsburg, the 3rd biggest city in Bavaria (pop. ~260k), which is about 2.5 hours southwest of Regensburg (when you take the slow trains). At this point I'm pretty tired from that venture so this update is going to be short. I'll try to get some pictures and commentary about Augsburg up within a few days.

Things here are going pretty well. This coming week will be the last real week of our language crash course, followed by a week of tests, coinciding with my birthday. After that, I'll be off for about 3 weeks, one of which I have to be around for course selection related things, but the other two I'll be traveling (provided I can actually afford to). My plans at this point are distressingly vague, but making my way back to Normandy seems to be in order.

In the meantime, I'll be heading to Munich tomorrow for St. Patrick's Day festivities. I was initially rather surprised to hear that Munich even posesses an Irish community but, nonetheless, Munich seems to make a big deal of the occasion and that's all that matters. It looks like a large part of our group, along with a good chunk of the rest of the English speakers studying at the Universtity (including a few genuine Irish people) will be going. We'll see if I post pictures of that.

As an added bonus, I got a new flat/suite mate this week who, thankfully, is actually German (everybody else in our apartment is an international student, so it's nice to have a native speaker around to help the rest of us out). She just got back from a year working in Guatemala so she's in the middle of transitioning back to thinking in German - thankfully this seems to translate into her speaking slowly enough that I can follow.

That's about it, I hope you guys are all doing well. I would, however, like to leave you with a general bit of information I just learned: 10 min rice cooked for 50 minutes is still surprisingly edible. Setting a timer still remains a good idea.

...And We're Back.

Class and life in general have been pretty busy for the last week or so (hence the lack of regular updates).

On Monday, our group had a tour of the BMW factory which is right on the outskirts of town. The factory is a huge complex - almost as big as the entire Altstadt - which consists mostly of an assembly line where they make about a dozen different BMW models all at once. The scale of all of it was awe inspiring - we're truly living in the future.

The tour itself was a lot more interesting than I expected. When we started off with a powerpoint presentation and a motivational video, I kind of figured that we had been roped into a two-hour BMW ad, but despite the frequent propaganda, I was pleasantly surprised by how much they showed us and how close they let us get to the whole process. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take pictures so I'll just say that there were a lot of robots and a lot of expensive German cars.


Classes have been pretty good lately - we just had quite a few tests/quizzes over the last week or so and I managed to do pretty well on them so I'm pretty psyched right now. The end of our crash course is looming - less than a month to go, which is exciting since I get about three weeks off afterwards and I won't have to wake up at 7:30 every morning anymore, but at the same time it's been fun and I've learned a lot and I'm a bit worried about what three weeks without classes is going to do to my German. We'll see.


On a completely unrelated note, here are some random pictures. As you may be able to tell from some of these pictures, the weather here is starting to get warmer, though that doesn't necessarily mean that we see blue skies any more often.


The other day, and yesterday as well, I made some beer brauts, which is an excellent dish that has all of the necessary qualities of a good meal - it's cheap, easy, tasty, contains protein, and involves beer.

the finished result

Moving on to some sightseeing, here is a really old tower between Domplatz (where I'm standing) and Alterkornmarkt (through the arch). The funny thing is that right next to the Dom there is yet another church (you can see part of it on the left).

obligatory Dom picture

The eagle on top of the fountain in Domplatz

We had a tour of the Altstadt a couple of weeks back and the tour guide told us about this gentleman, Don Juan de Austria, an illegitimate son of Kaiser Karl V (Charles V) born in 1547 in Regensburg. Surprisingly enough, the Kaiser officially recognized his son and set him up with a position in Spain (hence the Spanish name). Don Juan managed to do pretty well for himself and ended up leading the Spanish Armada to victory against the Turks at Lepanto (famous naval battle). Wikipedia says he died from poisoning or Typhus at age 31.


Steinerne Brücke about 2 days ago - the water level is pretty high (woo spring!) and there were two kayakers playing around in the strong currents under the bridge (you can kinda see them in this picture).


Our tour guide explained to us that when Steinerne Bruecke was built, pretty much nothing was made out of stone due to the sheer expense involved. However, Regensburg was swimming in money at that time because it sits right on the trade route to the Middle East (aka the Danube). When people arrived at Regensburg for the first time (almost always by boat) and saw the massive stone bridge, it was probably the first time in their life that they had seen anything like it so they would immediately know that Regensburg was insanely rich.

This is a statue in the middle of Steinerne Brücke - I'm pretty sure the figure is supposed to be admiring the Dom.

a neat looking house

graffiti

and some more

Finally, a special treat: a panorama of Regensburg taken from Steinerne Brücke


[edit] It looks like Blogger doesn't like how huge the original was so here's a link to a larger version: click me