Nights 5 & 6: Tübingen

Guess who has internet again! Here's an update I wrote earlier on the train.

Once I’d arrived in Tübingen on Friday evening, I figured out the bus system and made my way to the small but cute apartment of a very sweet older couple who had agreed to take me in on my somewhat emergency basis two days before. I dropped off my stuff in the office where the guest bed was and then joined Wolfgang in the teeny tiny kitchen to help cut potatoes for dinner. (Yes mother, potatoes.) Every Wolfgang I’ve met so far has had crazy wonderful hair and I’m hoping the next one I’m staying with in a couple days doesn’t disappoint. This Wolfgang was pretty great and talked to me about this and that while we prepared for dinner and his wife prepared to her upcoming trip to Israel. However, I soon realized there was a problem after he’d been talking for some time and I still could still hardly understand anything he said. I’m pretty happy with my German comprehension skillz and have been able to figure out most accents pretty quickly, but this one went riiight over my head. I concentrated as hard as I could and made understanding remarks based on key words, tone, and facial expressions, which worked out pretty well except that I was always a little afraid of misunderstanding something important or making an offensive or inappropriate remark. His wife didn’t come from the area and spoke quite understandably without the local dialect. Phew.

They were both very tired and stressed after having worked all day and very busy with their various projects, but they still took the time to prepare a special dinner for me both nights I was there, complete with wine and flowers and candles and the full shebang. I was touched and very grateful. I was also very grateful to whoever it was in the apartment next to theirs that left their wireless network unsecured. Thanks for that.

Saturday I had all to myself, as my hosts were both gone at all-day conferences. I was delighted to see sun streaming in through the blinds and was even more delighted to get outside and find that it actually was warm and beautiful, no façade. They’d loaned me a city map and house key, so I grabbed my things for the day and headed out into the cute and extremely old university town as it was waking up. I passed a flea market along the Neckar River and explored the super old part of the town for a while, which was filled with old winding alleyways creeping up and down between the buildings and hills. Tübingen also has a pretty fantastic Rathaus (town hall).


As one of my favorite things to do is photograph places from high up, I soon found my way up to the old castle situated on the highest hill in the middle of the town. It was full of fun passages that wound around here and there with many ancient little lookout points that rendered great city views. I also read on a plaque inside that some important man had discovered DNA during an experiment in one of the castle’s kitchens back in the day. How cool is that!





Once fully satiated, I decided to hike back up the hills to where lookout points were marked on my map. I went up and up and up and finally found the spots that were marked, though the view wasn’t as great as I’d hoped. I was also a little disappointed to find that the big outlook tower on the highest hill was closed. Bummer. It was still a very wonderful and refreshing hike. I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the downtown part of the old city before making my way back to the apartment when the warm sunlight started to fade. Wolfgang came into my room to ask me something that evening, the only parts of which I could understand being “you + me + music in church + ten minutes.” I couldn’t decipher more than that, but said “Sure!” and was soon walking back downtown to the oldest church in the city where, as I later learned, there is a classical music concert and evening prayer every Saturday evening. That night there was a small orchestra playing a gorgeous funereal concerto for solo violin by… I want to say Kaufmann, but that may not be right. Either way, it was beautifully performed and the sound of the music floating around the huge old space was almost magical. After the concert, Wolfgang took me on a night tour around the quiet old town. I didn’t catch all the history, but it was still interesting. The difference in atmosphere between the still, dark, quiet streets from the hustle and bustle earlier was stunning.

The wife had to leave early the next morning to catch her flight to Israel, so I had some breakfast with them and bade her farewell. (She was gone by the time I’d gathered up enough guts to ask Wolfgang to take his picture in front of the house, to which he obliged without difficulty.) With his help, I decided to take a slightly longer route to Freiburg that cut through the Schwartzwald (Black Forest) via several cute medieval towns. Around noon, he walked me to the train station and saw me off on my way to what would be a much longer day than expected.

It shouldn’t have taken me almost twelve hours to get from Tübingen to Freiburg, buuut it did. Everything started off just fine; I took a regional train to the little old village of Horb and was (literally) almost blown away by the powerful winds as I climbed up to the church high above the city. It was still beautiful and sunny, so I didn’t think much of it. There wasn’t really much to look at there, though I did enjoy the little tiny attic doors to the top city levels from houses situated far below.


When I went to catch the train to the next little town, I found out that something was wrong and that no other trains could continue in that direction until whatever it was was fixed. I figured it would be easier to just take a train back to Stuttgart and thus get to Freiburg by the normal route than to navigate the temporary buses, so I hopped back on a mostly empty train north and enjoyed the lovely sun on the countryside.



That is, I enjoyed it until the big wind blew a big tree down over the tracks in front of the train so we couldn't go any further and had to instead go backwards and then take the S-Bahn from an out of the way station to the Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof. That was okay, too, because I still had lots of time to spare and wasn't in any hurry. However, it stopped being okay when the central station stopped all train traffic about three minutes after I arrived and I had to sit there in the cold, windy station with how ever many zillions of grumpy travelers for hours and hours waiting for the loudspeaker to make any announcement about getting to Karlsruhe, where I needed to transfer to another train to Freiburg. I guess the wind that I'd become acquainted with earlier had completely screwed over the Deutsche Bahn by throwing trees down all over and who knows what else.

Long story short, I had to wait there for hours 'til they sent us all to some other out of the way station and then back to Stuttgart and then finally on to Karlsruhe where we had to wait several more hours with them telling us to get on trains and then get off and so on and so on. Not nice. I finally got to Freiburg past 11pm and then had to catch the last tram to somewhere near my next family's home, where I was met by the mother and driven the short distance back. I'll write about that awkwardness later.