Last Week in Hannover

It's our last week here. I've got lots to do, but I also want to take time to enjoy our last week here. We had some neighbors from the Leibnizhaus over for dinner last night and got to hear about their trip to Ireland, Scotland, and England. We're so grateful for the many people we've gotten to know in these 5 months, and we hope we'll keep in touch.

Yesterday when I was fretting about my interview, I decided to take a break and ride out to see the Stadtpark (city park). I ride by it often on the way to and from choir practice in Kleefeld, but I'm either in a hurry to get there or coming back at 9:30 p.m. when it's closed. I also wanted to take some pictures of stuff I pass on my ride every Monday night. So here's my ride. There is a big crossroads at Agidientorplatz with a complicated traffic system. I like these windsocks on the traffic island in the middle.

Aegidientorplatz Windsocks

Man & Dog Statue in front of the Vet School

Dancing Seeds

 

Panzerdivision 1956 (Panzer=tank) in front of military building

 

Bike path in front of Stadtpark: My bike is the first one with the white seat.

 

The copper dome of the Congress Center- and Concert Hall is distinctive. The city park was not spectacular, but pleasant. One thing I liked was that there were lots of movable lawn chairs, and people scattered around reading, drawing, sunbathing, talking. Lots of fountains. There was a Japanese garden and a garden behind a hedge that turned out to be for nude sunbathing.

Congress Center from Stadtpark

I've seen several of these large chess sets, but this is the first time I've seen people seriously playing chess with one. There were 2 large ones and 4 groups of men playing at tables nearby.

Playing Chess, Stadtpark

I always like riding through the arches of this old gate. The bike path is just some arrows and dotted lines on the ground.

Bike path through old gate in front of the Music, Theatre, & Media Academy

I've passed this strange building many times and always wondered what it was. Someone told me that it was a synagogue. Yesterday I took my bike around to the back and found out it is a lecture hall for the doctors' organization. 

Mystery Building

Chandelier hanging over the street in front of the Künstlerhaus (Artist House)

City Opera House

This is a memorial on the square by the opera house to the Jews of Hannover. It has 1,935 names beside the camps to which each was deported and the day of their deaths. A pretty tower is framed in the background. Apparently, there was a lot of controversy about this memorial, erected in 1994.

Memorial for the Jews of Hannover, Opernplatz

 

Counting Trees & Making Bike Detours

I was unlocking my bike after church and noticed these numbers on the trees. H. told me that the Forstamt (Forrest Office) numbers all the trees in Hannover after the trunks reach a certain thickness. He also told me that when the church had a backhoe here, the Forstamt gave them a big fine for disturbing the roots, but the firm they hired to inspect didn't do it right, and this tree was actually fine. The church protested, and the Forstamt apologized and refunded the fine. H. said that people are quick to cut down trees before the trunks reach the specified thickness (if there is any chance the tree might need to be removed) to prevent it entering the Forstamt's inventory. So the city office that created the wonderful Eilenriede urban forest, the green lungs of Hannover, has become a petty bureaucracy.

Tree # 036

There is a lot of construction in town, but, instead of ignoring bicycles and pedestrians, Hannover makes detours especially for bikes. Sometimes they even provide a temporary asphalt ramp if the detour involves crossing a curb. I remember when Claremont redid some sidewalks in the Village, the city made detours for the cars, but pedestrians and bikes just had to fend for themselves. I would love to see American cities become this bike-friendly. Here's one detour we encountered Sunday morning.

Bike Detour

The Pleasures of Sharing an Ordinary Sunday: Biking through the forest to church and along the canal

Last Sunday we had the pleasure of biking with Ross and Sarah to church. Generous friends had lent us bikes so the kids could experience Hannover the way we have: along the bike paths. First we biked along the Schiffsgraben, with this view of one of the modern skyscrapers at the Aegidientor. This skyscraper is all glass and steel, at funny angles, with a ground floor fountain and a glass tube walkway between one side and another. Very fun.

Modern Skyscraper on Aegidientorplatz

We go past my favorite kinetic sculpture. This is the one I would like to have in my front garden.

Free Flow Statue

Then past the Musikhochschule and the zoo on a nice cool foresty ride through the Eilenriede, the urban forest, the lungs of Hannover.

Bike path through the Eilenriede

After church, which ends with talking over coffee, tea, and cookies, we headed along a shady row of trees past the church where I play recorder, through a Kleingärten Kolonie (small garden plots in a community garden),

Kleingärten Kolonie

and along the canal. We wanted take the kids to lunch on this barge restaurant and we had a nice time eating Flammkuchen (German thin cracker bread with different toppings, e.g. cheese, onions, and ham) and watching the boats go past. My favorite boat of the day was this canal boat from England. There were two of these canal boats in a row. Rich yelled across to ask how they'd gotten them over the Channel, since they are not fit for ocean waves. They said on a truck. Anyway, maybe that's a good name for us, wandering snails, traveling slowly carting our home with us. Maybe we'll do a canal boat trip sometime. It looks like our cup of tea.

The "Wandering Snail"

We rode back through List, the Hannover equivalent of Silver Lake, a trendy part of town. We backtracked to show the kids the Lister Turm, where Rich went to an astronomy lecture and I went to a folk dance ball. It was originally a watchtower, but now it's a community center on the edge of the Eilenriede.

Lister Turm

Later in the afternoon, Rich and Sarah took the elevator that follows the curve of the dome to the top of the Neues Rathaus (new town hall, 100 years old this summer) with wonderful views at the top.

Lion, steps of Neues Rathaus

Stair inside Neues Rathaus

View from the top looking down at the Maschteich

View of the Maschteich, Maschsee, & Soccer Stadium

View of Leineschloss, Leibnizhaus, Leine River

 

 

 

 

 



Arithmeum: Arithmetic Museum

Jan suggested that we might like the Arithmeum, a museum we never would have found on our own. A collection of devices to add, subtract, multiply, and divide from abacuses and Incan quipu to adding machines and slide rules + art + chairs. Right up our alley. We took more pictures here than in the Roman Museum in Köln.

Sign for Arithmetic Museum

Visitors were invited to sit on the chairs and to try out all the calculating machines with the blue symbol shown below, which made it a lot more interesting than if we just could look at them.

Roman Abacus

Wilhelm Schickard built a calculating machine for Kepler in 1624. There was a copy to fiddle with.

Rich & Ross figuring out how Schickard's calculating machine works

Baroque Calculating Machine 

String Chair - One of the most comfortable of the chairs in the museum

Rich liked this Japanese abacus combined with a pocket calculator. 

Combined Calculator + Abacus

Anyone else old enough to remember these adding machines we had as kids before our first slide rules? With the metal stylus to push the numbers up and down? No batteries needed. 

Metal Stylus Hand Adding Machines

Anyway, we highly recommend this museum to anyone who likes math and art and happens to be in Bonn. Reminded me of the Museum of Figuring in Los Angeles.

Here's a good chair for someone who is working on knot theory.

Chair with knot





Köln: Roman & Germanic Museum, Roman Water Organ Demonstration

Thursday we rented a car, the first time we've driven ourselves anywhere since New Zealand. Rental cars in Europe are shockingly expensive and driving on the autobahn is no fun. Some Americans think that having no speed limit would be freeing, but actually there is a slow lane for trucks and a fast lane for BMWs and the rational majority need to slam on the brakes and endure tailgaters while repeatedly venturing out into the fast lane to pass the trucks. We rented a car because there was no train early enough to get Ross's friend A.K. to his morning flight back to Los Angeles, but we used the opportunity to go see an old friend in Bonn. We made friends with Jan back in our Marburg days 30 years ago, but lost track of him after the birth of his daughter as we both moved around during various academic postings. I googled his name back in May and found him on the first hit; his home page at the University of Vermont biology department showed conservation studies on small mammals in Ghana. When I sent an email, he immediately replied that he had moved back to Germany in September to work at a natural history museum in Bonn.

The upshot was that we dropped A.K. at 7:30 and were to meet Jan at his museum at 4:00, so we had hours to kill with only a short drive. So we decided to explore Köln, since we'd only ever been in the cathedral. We walked around the downtown, which is broken up by a big dig project for a new subway line. I liked the candy-colored houses next to this old stone Romanesque church.

Groß St. Martin Church seen from Rhein River waterfront

Here's a fun balustrade on a railing at the St. Maria Im Kapitol church.

Snake eating a rat carving on railing

 

We spent the bulk of our time in the Roman-Germanic Museum where we happened upon a press conference for the opening of an exhibit on Roman music. I was eager to hear the water organ played, but had to keep checking back till the 45-minute lecture was finally over. I should have known that, for anyone to take her seriously, she needed to give a long lecture first. Ross thinks we can't count this short demonstration in our concert list. By the way, if anyone reading this knows an easy way to turn the video, please let me know, but I gave up and will post it sideways and you can turn your screens. This is called crowd sourcing, when old folks enlist young folks to help them with technology.

Reconstruction of Roman Water Organ

 

 



I always thought of the Germanic tribes (e.g. Ostragoths, Vandals) as the barbarian hordes that swooped down and rousted the civilized Romans from Germany, but this museum was full of intricate jewelry and artifacts from these tribes. Check out this belt buckle. 

Bremerhaven

Tuesday A.K. decided he wanted to go to the Emigration Museum in Bremerhaven. Smooth train ride up and bus to the waterfront. The souvenir I'd really like to take back with me is the German rail system.

German Emigration Museum

I'd seen a German travel magazine spread on the modern buildings on the waterfront with the caption "a new Dubai." We took this glass walkway over the street and ship basin from a parking house/shopping center through the lobby of the climate house to the waterfront.

Glass walkway across to the waterfront and Klimahaus 

The boys were disappointed with the museum, but I liked it. We got by-now-trite pseudo-identities to follow. The woman I followed through the emigration section immigrated to New Orleans and up the Mississippi River by boat to the Red River to finally settle in Nacogdoches, Texas. The woman I followed through the immigration section immigrated from Turkey to Germany in the 70s. I thought they did a good job linking emigration with the ups and downs of German politics, unemployment, food supply, and wages. A.K. got Carl Laemmle of Laemmle theaters; he immigrated to Chicago in 1884 and sponsored 300 Jews escaping the Nazis before he died in Los Angeles in 1939.

 

We took a boat trip around the harbor. Huge ships and vast parking lots full of new cars waiting to be shipped out. We also got to see them building one of the massive new wind energy platforms. They are supposed to be 7 stories high and convert the output from the offshore windmills to high voltage electricity to send ashore through huge cables. North Sea wind energy is slated to  partially compensate for nuclear energy when they shut the nuclear plants down. Actually hot in the sun, so I was thankful for the wind generated by the boat moving through the water on an otherwise windless day.

Tour boat approaching swing bridge, Bremerhaven ship harbor 

Wind Energy Platform under construction

If Rich had been with us, we would have spent much more time wandering up and down the docks looking at old boats.

Wooden Boats

German Uboot 

No pretty doors that day, but I did find these round doilies someone had crocheted to fit the portholes.

Porthole Doilies

 



 



 

Hameln: Rats

Saturday we took the train to Hameln for the day. The town is known for the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, which the city milks in every way to draw the tourist crowd. Ironic that, while the Pied Piper got rid of the rats, rats are displayed all over, even to rat-shaped bread and rat-decorated tiles in the city square.

Rat-shaped Marzipan Pastries 

Nevertheless, it's a nice town to wander around looking at old half-timbered houses from the Weser Renaissance. So many wonderful architectural details.

Dragon & Griffin Carving 

We first stopped to watch the glockenspiel on the side of the  Hoschzeitshaus (Marriage House) in the main square. The bells ring and then the doors open for the pied piper figure leading the rats and then the children away when the townsfolk refused to pay him. Maybe our bill collectors aren't so bad after all.

St. Nicolai Church & Hochzeitshaus 

In Germany couples get  officially married in a city office. They can choose to have a church wedding also, but sometimes that's a different day. The office in Hannover is close by and we often see families waiting outside. One tradition here is that the couple need to saw through a log together, I think to symbolize that married couples need to work together and be persistent. We're lucky that we just have to feed each other a bite of cake.

Family & friends waiting in front of the door of the of the marriage office for the married couple to come out and saw through the logs  

We took a very pleasant boat ride on the Weser River, just 1 hour upstream and back, looking at kayakers, rowers, the cyclists on the bike path along the river, and the hills and fields.

View of Hameln from Weser River Boat

Stained Glass Window of R2D2 in St. Bonifatius Church

 

We keep seeing bocce ball (boules, lawn bowling) all over, from New Zealand to Salzburg. One universal is that there is always a discussion after each throw.

People arguing in German about bocce ball in the city park 

 

The kids have been enjoying the great German playgrounds. This interactive fountain is in the middle of the market square. I remember the kids playing with it when we came through here from Bielefeld. 

Fountain on Marktplatz





There were so many pretty doors that it's hard to pick just one to post.

Pretty Door

 

We had a nice day, marred only by buying the wrong sort of ticket from the ticket machine at the train station and hunger while trying to agree on a place to eat.