In our ongoing efforts to stay terribly behind on the travel blog, I started writing this on the train to Scotland and finished it in the Youth Hostel in Kirkwall on Orkney, about a trip that happened… Going on a month ago, now.  startled Woo — the slipperiness of time…

So this all ended up a bit long (because I’m uncontrollably verbose), so I’m cutting it into three parts.  Here’s part 1:
On a rather spur-of-the-moment decision, we headed to Germany at the end of May.  There were two big reasons to go: to briefly visit Susan’s third cousin, Karin, and her family in Wiesbaden, and to hang out with musicians and SF fans at the DFDF filk convention in Bad Salzdetfurth, outside of Hannover.  And we were taking some time on the tail end to explore a bit further, in the hopes of maybe checking another country off our list while we still had the chance.  The Netherlands came to mind.

Now…  Those of you who know the geography of Northern Europe might just recognize that these three locations are not particularly close together.  Yeah, well, we know.  This was compounded by the fact that the best plane tickets we could get were round-trip through Hannover, which is close only to DFDF.  But what the heck — the view from the train is pretty.  ;-)

Absurd amounts of backtracking

Flying into Hannover, we had reservations on a noon train to Wiesbaden.  Unusually, the plane was early, so we had time to kill. We kicked around Hannover’s downtown a bit, running across this large church at the market square (the Market Church, strangely enough).  I know that iconography changes over time and means different things to different people, but we couldn’t help thinking that it had a bit of an identity crisis…

Church steeple in Hannover. Note the inverted pentacle and Star of David.

On to Wiesbaden.  We got there in early afternoon and weren’t scheduled to meet Karin until the next morning.  So we took the afternoon to explore it.  We didn’t really take any pix of oldtown Wiesbaden, but it was a pretty area — very 19th century.

One of the centerpieces is the Kaiser-Friedrich-Therme (baths). Wiesbaden is, of course, built on hot springs (thus the “bad” in the name), and had Roman baths there once upon a time.  There weren’t formal baths there again until the early 20th century, when the town was developed as a bit of a tourist resort, as I understand. Capitalism is alive and well there today, and the elaborate bath/day spa is happy to exchange hot water for your euros.

The hot water was truly delightful, and extremely relaxing after a lot of travel stress.  The interesting thing, to us as Americans though, is that this spa goes for the whole Roman attitude, down to the communal nude bathing.  That’s right — no clothes allowed anywhere in any of the pools.  This is such a blatant violation of all of the American nudity taboos that it took us a while to really process.  We found that it was hard to “just not think about it”, which would be some sort of ideal, I suppose, but we found that there does seem to be a common behavioral standard that simultaneously acknowledges the need for privacy and the utter lack of any possibility of privacy.  There’s a sort-of casual glance-near-someone look that says, “Yes, I acknowledge your presence and I won’t bump into you, but, no, really, I’m not staring, I promise!”

The other thing we observed from the nude bathing experience was that we might all have less body-form angst if there were more public nudity.  It does set the mind at ease a bit to know that you’re not the only one who doesn’t have the body of a Hollywood star.

Back to our hotel for the evening.  One fun bit of multicultural travel experience: the fellow running the desk that evening spoke about six words of English, which is about three times our German, so there was a bit of a language barrier.  However, it turns out that he spoke French and Susan and I both studied French in High School.  Our now-ancient memories of French conjugations creaked rustily into motion and we were able to achieve a low level of mutual understanding.  I was even able to ask for a city map (Avez vous un plan de la cité?) and be understood on the first try.  We felt unjustifiably tickled, and our years of HS language classes were vindicated.  Woo.

The next morning, Susan’s cousin Karin met us and we went for a spin around the town with her and her son, Lenard.  (Karin’s husband, Ulrich, wasn’t feeling well and didn’t join us.)  We rode the funicular:

View from the water-powered funicular in Weisbaden.

And toured the Russian Orthodox church:

Russian Orthodox church in Wiesbaden.

(Apparently, this is the seat of Russian Orthodoxy for all of Germany.  There was an elaborate story to explain why this was so, but I have forgotten most of the details.)

Karin et al. were lovely hosts and we had a delightful time with them.  Ulrich felt better by the evening, so we got to see him a bit before we hit the sack, and we all had a fascinating conversation.  We were sorry that we had such a brief time there, but it was good to see them again nonetheless.

Susan with her cousin, Karin, and Karin's son, Lennard. Lennard is the blond one.

Next up: on to DFDF!