Sunday, 19 May 2024 Berlin to Merseburg to Weimar, with colleagues

Written 31 August 2024

On Sunday, the Hyatt had added little Portuguese-style cream tarts to the breakfast buffet. Good idea!

The original plan for the day was for colleagues (and friends!) Gritta Veit-Köhler and Leon Hoffman to pick us up at the Hyatt and to drive us, via a lunch stop and cathedral tour in Merseburg, to Weimar. But then word reached Gritta that the great bustards were mating at a site not too far off our route, so we agreed to being picked up an hour earlier than planned, at 8:30 am, and having a chance to see them.

In advance, they had asked us the dimensions of our luggage, so that they could plan theirs accordingly, with the result that, when we met them at the curb outside the hotel, everything exactly fit into the wayback of their hatchback car. Our luggage was rectangular and rigid, so they packed duffel bags that would bend and exactly fit around ours.

We were soon out of the city and headed southwest, in territory that had been East Germany. As you can see in this photo of modern wind turbines, the weather was gray, cool, and drizzly.

David and Gritta both study benthic harpacticoid copepods (teensy, many-leggedy crustaceans that inhabit the mud at the bottom of the sea), so many years ago now she came to Tallahassee to work in David's lab for several months. She's been back to Tallahassee a couple of times for follow-up field work, and the last time, she brought along her fiancé Leon, now her husband. Gritta is younger than the rest of us, so she's still working, at the Senckenburg Institute in Wilhelmshaven, up on the North Sea. Leon is Dutch and used to work for international oil companies, but when he retired, he moved to Wilhelmshaven to pursue his passion for malacology—he's a bivalve specialist. We've been scheming for years about getting together with them in Germany, and they were kind enough to drive all the way into Berlin to pick us up and show us around for a while. Gritta and David spent weeks planning our itinerary.

On the way, in the village of Brück, we spotted a stork on its nest. Barn swallows (the ones with reddish breasts) were also zooming around. So was a a kite (the bird, not the child's flying toy). As we passed through villages, Leon and Gritta explained to us that there are "street villages" (where all the houses are lined up along the sides of the road), "street villages with a wide spot and a fountain in the middle," and "agglomerations" (villages that have streets branching off or parallel to the main road).

In addition to the Holstein cows shown here at the right, we saw one field of Haflinger horses, small work horses that are always chestnut with flaxen mane and tail. The ones we saw were so scruffy they looked more like the Przewalski's horses you only ever see in zoos.

We passed many grain fields attractively dotted with with red poppies and blue cornflowers.

Talking about wildlife, Leon and Gritta told us that Germany has far too many deer but that wolves have come over from Poland and may help with the problem. Leon said wolves have spread all the way into the Netherlands.

Our first stop was the Belziger Landschaftswiesen Natural Preserve, near the town of Freienthal. Despite consulting the map shown here, it took us a couple of tries to get to the parking area our friends had in mind. The roads were just rough tracks, and most of the preserve was road-free.

The splotch in the right-hand photo is not a close-up of a lichen but a quick shot of a mud puddle we passed on our way from the car to the observation site. That's how thick the pollen was. After a short walk along the muddy trail through the drizzle, we reached a large blind maintained on the site for observations and climbed up to its top floor. It's usually kept buttoned up tight to keep the the wildlife out, so we had to unlatch and lift the shutters that cover the observation ports.

Here's the view we had with the naked eye. The bustards are out there, big as turkeys and strutting in plain sight, just this side of the trees in the distance, but without Leon and Gritta, way more experienced and skillful birders than we are, we would never have seen them. They knew where to look, so Gritta lined them up in her spotting scope, and once she'd shown me where, I could also see them through my binoculars.

At the right is a shot Gritta took of Leon, David, and me at one of the ports, spotting scope on its tripod in the foreground.

Through the spotting scope, the view was spectacular. Male bustards, like male turkeys, puff and fluff themselves up and spread their tails until they don't even look like birds any more, strutting back and forth in front of the females, trying to impress them. We watched two groups of six, each including several displaying males, but the females seemed to remain indifferent. The distance was far too great for photography, but to see what they look like, just Google "great bustard" for photos taken by people better equipped than I am.

All the while, swallows and swifts, seeing their chance to nest in that snug wooden cave at last, keep zooming in through the open ports, right past our ears, then zooming back out again as soon as they realized people were present.

Through the spotting scope, we also picked up a lapwing (like a kildeer with a pointed crest). We heard a cuckoo in the woods. Leon had an app on his phone that told us we were hearing corn buntings, European goldfinches, and a whinchat. Gritta heard an an oriole in nearby pine woods but couldn't spot it.

Next, we drove on to the town of Merseburg, the extreme limit of the old Holy Roman Empire, where we had a lovely lunch at an Italian restaurant called Die Sonne (The Sun) on the market square.

In addition to the dine-in food, they must do a brisk business in take-out pizza, as demonstrated by the large red brick ovens at the far end of the counter and the stack of waiting pizza boxes on top, each prominently labeled "Hot and Tasty"!

Here are David and Gritta, as we wait for our food.

At at the right, Leon. Too bad about all the glare from the windows.

Leon went straight for the lasagna.

I chose linguine with seafood, cherry tomatoes, and lobster sauce. The sauce turned the pasta a pretty color before it all soaked in, and yes, I did find seafood, mostly shrimp and squid, as well as more tomatoes under all the linguine.

David, predictably, ordered the fresh ravioli of cheese and spinach, topped with a saffron-Gorgonzola sauce (listed as a specialty of the house).

And Gritta chose seafood risotto. All excellent.

In the car and over lunch, we talked about future travel plans, and we mentioned that even Viking ocean ships seemed too large for our taste. Leon and Gritta recommended "Hurtigruten ships," the ships that take mail into and out of all the Scandinavian fjords. They're still mail ships, but they now take about 300 passengers—still a lot, but half the size of a Viking ocean ship.

For dessert, David and I split a panna cotta with red fruit sauce.

At the right here is the 13th-century Stadtkirche St. Maximi, which we walked past coming and going.

At the left here, three members of our party peer down the Staupenbrunnen, the historic well in the market square.

On our stroll to the cathedral, we paused to enjoy the view from a bridge over the local river, the Saale. Beautiful in both directions.

I don't know what this building is—probably just a private house—but I was struck not just with its handsome façade but with the contrast of its rectilinear shape with the graceful curves built into its wrought-iron fence.

The green plaque on the building at the right labels it as the European Romanesque Center of the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. That's the university formed when the university at Wittenberg merged with that at Halle. The city of Halle is less than 10 miles north of Merseburg. Other plaques in the photo designate the doorway itself as a historic landmark of some kind and mention that the naturalist Ernst Haeckel lived in Merseburg and earned his high-school diploma in this building.

At the left here is the portal through which we entered the courtyard of the Merseburg castle, another four-sided castle, of which the Cathedral of St. John and St. Lawrence forms one side.

This façade is that of the castle as viewed from the courtyard with our backs to the cathedral.

I'm afraid my notes on the cathedral are pretty sketchy—an excellent audioguide was provided, and I found it hard to juggle that, my camera, and my note recorder, so the recorder got short shrift. The photos will mostly have to speak for themselves.

At the left here is the view down the nave, and at the right a closer view of the apse and altar.

Facing back the other way, here's the view of the organ.

And upward, here's the net-vaulted ceiling.

This excellent cut-away model, shown here in two views, gave an excellent overall view of the building's shape and internal structure.

The oldest parts are romanesque, but sucessive additions and modifications were early and then late gothic. The nave is more recent, and the organ is 19th century. Apparently the cathedral appeared briefly in The Monuments Men.

This gisant (recumbent tomb effigy) has suffered from the ravages of time. From the presence of the shield, I would guess at least a knight or crusader, maybe a king except for the lack of crown.

The one at the right, fenced to exclude foot traffic, is newer and has held up better. Clearly a bishop, from the staff and the shape of the hat (and a well-fed one from the shape of the face).

The "princely crypt," which we didn't get to, apparently contained many very elaborately decorated royal tombs, so none of the descriptions of the place that I could find on the internet bothers to talk about these two.

At the left here are what I would ordinarily call choir stalls, but since the church has been protestant for a long time, they're probably just pews for important people. I can't read the lettering below the images or make much of the images either. In the left-most one, God seems to be appearing in midair and blessing a guy with horns on his head (the devil? a Viking?) who is taking off his boots to bath his feet in the water. Is that a bible story I should recognize? The second shows an angel reading from a scroll to a young woman with a halo. The annunciation?

In a separate room, the St. Michaell chapel, was displayed a Cranach altarpiece, presumably originally from the main altar.

Clearly, we didn't see everything the place had to offer, but all too soon, it was time to continue our drive to Weimar.

On our way back to the car, I passed a large tree labeled "American linden." Sure enough, it was neither of the two common European lindens so abundant in Germany but the American basswood (Tilia americana), North America's only member of the linden genus Tilia.

During the drive to Weimar, I spotted a small bird of prey hovering beside the road. Gritta said it was probably a Eurasian kestrel, or "tower falcon."

We amused ourselves on the drive by searching for a good dinner restaurant on our phones. As I studied menus and consulted Gritta on terms I didn't know, I learned that "Meerrettich" is horseradish. "Rettich" is clearly cognate with "radish," and "Meer" apparently means "more"—a radishier radish.

Sülze means head cheese (cognate with "souse"?)

Tafelspitz is beef boiled until tender and stringy, served with horseradish sauce (a light-colored gravy made from a browned-flour roux and the cooking broth, spiked with horseradish).

And most important, "dazu" on a menu means "accompanied by"!

Weimar was another hour and a half down the road, still southwest from Berlin. Once we got there and found our hotel, La Casa dei Colori, where as expected no one was on hand to greet us, we had to enter codes (obtained by Gritta when she made the reservation) into little lock boxes on the hotel's outside wall to obtain our room keys.

And here, I want to take a moment, and a paragraph, to thank Leon, who throughout this trip did yeoman service, dropping the rest of us off at convenient locations, finding parking, parking the car, and hiking back and forth to it to pick us up again. Nice guy!

Once we'd had time to settle in, we reconvened on the stairs (the place didn't have much of a lobby to speak of) and set off on foot for Jagemans, the German restaurant we had chosen from our Google searches, passing restaurants featuring the food of Texas, Korea, and Viet Nam to get there. The left-hand photo shows what the walk looked like. I think the white baroque building on the corner was a ecofriendly clothing store.

Here, at the right is David's entirely predictable plate of potatoes, white asparagus, hollandaise, and schnitzel.

I jumped at the chance to order roasted blutwurst, blood sausage, which came with sauerkraut and fried slices of potato dumpling. Sadly, it was very bland, almost flavorless, not as good as what I remember from my childhood in the vicinity of a Scottish grandmother, or that I had scrambled with eggs in Spain, or even that I can buy at my local Publix supermarket. The sauerkraut was good, though.

Someone else (Leon, I think) got bratwurst with potato salad.

Nobody had room for dessert.

Afterward, I got this twilight shot of the church of Sts. Peter and Paul, the Herderkirche, also on Herderplatz.

And in front of it, here is the statue of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) himself. He was born in Poland but is strongly associated with, and died in, Weimar. He was a "romantic philosopher" and poet who believed true German culture was to be found among the common people. Every other street and structure in town is named for him.

The banner in the foreground promotes the goal of Thüringen, the region we're in, to be inclusive and open the the world.