Southern Germany

Continuing the series, the historic walled village of Villingen-Schwenningen in South Germany has a stone sculpture just inside the wall:

I was on a guided tour of the historical South German village of Villingen-Schwenningen last week when I learned that the local town hero was a man named Romäus, their version of Paul Bunyan.  His image is painted on one of the tower gates of the village wall:

The story goes that he travelled to the neighboring village of Rottweil, stole the massive, multi-ton doors to their village, and walked all the way back to Villingen, carrying the doors with him, no less!

As a tribute to the many friendly townpeople I met, I used Microsoft Lens to unstretch him!

According to Wikipedia, just like Paul Bunyan there are many stories, but here’s the one on the wall:

 

If you go to the German city of Konstanz you’ll find some imposing statues along the Rhine River:

OK, so let’s have a quick look at who these guys were. Unbelievably, three of them are bishops that lived and died a long, long, long time ago.

Here is Bishop Berthold, who died in 1078:

Here is Bishop Gebhard, who died in 995:

And finally, here is Bishop Conrad, who died in 975:

But who is the fourth guy?  It’s Leopold, the Grand Duke of Baden, who died quite recently, in 1852:

Quite an interesting conundrum. Was this a vanity project commissioned by the Duke before he died, to have his statue next to these old guys?

Somebody must know – but not me!

I am not really sure if aquaforming is a word.  I’m talking about the terraforming of streams, like this example in Algäu, Germany, shows:

I think just about everyone has seen numerous examples of this in just about every country. But, if you stop to think about it, when / where / who decided to add this to any given stream?

In some (wonderful) cases, there is documentation nearby.  There are some incredible examples of this in Germany’s Schwarzwald, or Black Forest, where the villages undertook massive terraforming projects to project the villages against torrential flooding.

And if you go hiking in the forests around Stuttgart, you are likely to encounter dry man-made canals, empty brick-lined reservoirs, and stone bridges over nothing – all the features of a sophisticated water abatement system that sits quietly for most of the year, and really only comes into its own during a downpour.

I’ll post some snaps of these as time permits.

I’ve recently blogged about the garbage vacuums in Germany. So you can imagine my thrill and pleasure when I got the privilege to photograph one in action!

As you can see, even the small children took a small break from their very busy day to watch the two men.

And you can be sure to expect no less than ultra-cleanliness from the South Germans, so after sucking out the garbage, the big orange van is equipped with a high temperature steam sprayer, and the whole area is steam cleaned.

My guess is that the entire process, from driving up to the garbage area, sucking out the garbage, and steam cleaning it – the entire process took no more than 7 or 8 minutes.

Unbelievable!

A view of the castle from below:

I’ve written many blogs about storks, and this is my latest snap, taken at the Franciscan cloister of Hegne just across from the Southern German village of Allensbach:

This little fellow is not an unusual sight in Southern Germany; I took this snap in the tiny hamlet of Hegne next to the village of Allensbach:

There are some people who would refer to this little guy incorrectly as a Blindschleich, or blind worm – but you can see from his fine peeper’s that he’s anything but blind.

At least I suspect it is, painted here on the inside of a small wooden hut for hikers nestled deep within the Schwabian Alb:

The Thirty Years’ War (Dreissigjähriger Krieg, in German) lasted from 1618 to 1648.  If you look closely at the coats of arms, you’ll see Baden on the left, and Württemberg on the right:

But to be honest, this is just a semi-educated guess.  If you have any better info, do let me know!

I’ve driven across this bridge hundreds of times, but recently I stopped underneath to take some pictures.

This is the Neckar Viaduct up close:

And this is the Neckar Viaduct, somewhat further away:

What’s just amazing is that this viaduct has a height of 125 meters, or just over 400 feet.  In comparison, the more famous Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco has a height of only 67 meters or around 200 feet. That means the Neckar Viaduct is almost twice as high as the Golden Gate Bridge!

Continuing the series,

This object caught my attention when I was visiting Southern Germany, not the least because of the way the concrete was depressed on one side and elevated on the other:

However, after walking around a bit I found this plaque on on the ground:

So, it appears to be work of art and not an actual meteorite!

When people think of Germany, not a lot of people think about volcanos. But in fact, Southern Germany has a region called Hegau that is dotted with dozens exposed and extinct volcanos.  This snap shows just a few of them:

A few of them are topped with the ruins of medieval castles, and I’ll post further snaps as time permits.

Because it’s so impressive I’ve written several times about the Thyssen Krupp Test Tower in Southern Germany. Here is a snap of it I took from the autobahn, showing just how incredible it looks towering above the South German countryside.

You’ve heard of the great sandstorms of the Sahara Desert.

You’ve heard of the great windstorms in Oklahoma.

And if you like science fiction, you’ve read about the great firestorms of the Tesla Trees in the Flame Forests of Hyperion.

Here, then, is a storm you’ve probably never heard about: the Great Pollen Storms of Southern Germany.  For just a few days each spring, when conditions in Germany are right, the wind can kick up enormous pollen storms:

 

How’s that for a blog title!

Here is an interesting fountain located in the Marktplatz in Stuttgart which, like most fountains in Germany but NO fountains in Switzerland, does not have drinkable water but which does, unlike most fountains in Germany, sports a jungle of algae:

But what a lot of people don’t know is that, deep under the Markplatz, there is a hotel, now closed, constructed from a World War II bunker.

I haven’t blogged about it yet, but France has commercialized their regional cultural subgroups for years.  Shopping centers almost universally contain a store called “En Passant en Alsace” or “En Passant en Bourgogne” that sell the local products from regions such as Alsace and Bourgogne.  The huge supermarkets (known as Hypermarchés) have an aisle that, at various times, sell the products of a different region of France than where the Hypermarché is located.

Now it seems the Schwabians in Germany are getting in on the action!

Here is a snap of a “Schwabian vending machine” located at the Stuttgart main train station,

As you can see from the display, you can order Schwabian specialities such as Maultaschen and schwabian potato salad:

I’ll refrain here from any jokes (such as, in order to save money there are real Schwabians behind the wall dispensing the products instead of expensive machines).

Stuttgart 21 is a long planned (10+ years), hotly debated (100+ police arrests and dozens of canisters of teargas, some of them used against elementary school students) improvement project to the German Railways (Deutsche Bahn), comprising 2 big pieces.

The first piece is a high speed rail line between Stuttgart and the very-large-but-still-too-far-for-easy-rail-commuting city of Ulm.  Here’s a snap of a railroad viaduct leading to a mountain tunnel, towering above the village of Wiesenstieg,

And the second piece is transforming the Stuttgart main train station (Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof) into a massive underground shopping center,

For the record, I originally opposed this project when I first learned about it in 1998, for one reason alone: compared to all the other public toilets at train stations, the public toilets at the Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof were and still are today atrocious. For a culture in Germany known for its tidiness (e.g. Kehrwoche), if you can’t trust them to operate a toilet correctly, how could you trust them for a project this big?

Not too far from downtown Stuttgart, Germany, sits a very small park with a very small pond but a very huge cathedral:

What is NOT a mystery is what these things are: The pond is called the Feuersee (in German, “fire lake”) – and the cathedral is called the Johanneskirche.  The church was built in 1864, so it is relatively new – but you can still see some damage from bombing in World War II.  The pond was created somewhat earlier, in 1701. It was designed as a small reservoir for fighting fires, hence the name, Fire Lake.

What the MYSTERY is: how did this Fire Lake actually work?

In the middle of the pond you can see three intake pipes (one of them is shown in the photo above) – but where exactly did the water go?  How was it pumped out?  Was it transported to horse-drawn fire wagons, or was something more sophisticated in place?

Having living nearly 10 years in Germany, I’ve visited the Feuersee many times – but I’ve never seen any historical placques that describe how all this worked – or when/if they stopped using it.

In a recent post I talked about the UNESCO historical village of Briesach Neuf.  Well, just across the Rhein River is this villages larger namesake, Breisach: