A Visit to Hamburg - First Impressions

The first thing I saw on my way to our hotel where I was supposed to meet up with C was the Michaelis Bridge which I had to cross on the way from the subway station  to the hotel in Neustadt.

Michaelis Bridge is famous for its love padlocks. Whether this custom originated in Italy or Serbia is not quite known; in any case there is a growing number of love locks with the name of the sweethearts on them. Today you can buy a lock at a locksmith who will engrave the names, dates, hearts etc. onto the lock, the lock is then affixed to the bridge and the key thrown into the river as a symbol for everlasting love.  

Otherwise the people of Hamburg, residents and tourists alike, enjoy sitting near the river-side for a cup of coffee or a nice meal.

Since I had some time left till C would arrive, I went to see the city hall which was rebuilt in the 19th century after the last one was destroyed by a fire. Dominant is the 112 m high tower:

Along the Renaissance-like façade 20 German kings and emperors, from Charlemagne to Franz II, are standing in niches. This is supposed to be Frederick I Barbarossa:

Justice is sitting on the side where the Senate of Hamburg is located. Obviously she is a bit biased, since she is not blindfolded which ought to symbolise the lack of prejudice demanded by justice (I'm not quite serious here, Justitia or Justice were depicted very differently through times, and I actually don't know the reason why they decided to depict her seeing).

In the market square in front of the city hall is a nice bronze model of the inner city:

When I caught up with C we decided to visit at least the most famous church in Hamburg: the Protestant church of St. Michaelis, affectionately called 'Michel' in German.

Although I didn't like the overall topic of this church, I thought a bit of ancestor worship can't hurt:

 It is at least a bit atmospheric:

The church was obsessed with depictions of the archangel Michel defeating God's adversary (which is not overly surprising since the church is devoted to St. Michael). You can see this scene on an offertory box, ...

at the main door, ...

and outside the church:

And the poor devil never even got a proper trial. To brighten up things I'll show you one of C's brilliant night photos, even though I haven't been at the harbour at night time:

Next time we have a vegan breakfast, getting political and explore the harbour.

A visit to Hamburg - the Helmsmuseum in Harburg

Sorry, there will be some archaeology in this entry, too :(

No sooner did I come back from Heilbronn than I left again for Hamburg. There was a lot on my to-do list, from museums to talks to vegan food. So I started the very evening after I settled in small hotel in the suburb of Hamburg, called Harburg where the archaeological museum is situated. The hotel is called 'Hotel zur Altstadt' which means something like 'Historic Town Hotel'.

and it was true, Harburg had a nice historic flair. Some of the houses near the hotel were built of clinker-brick and half-timber :

They also have a nice town hall from the 19th century:

And since I was lucky with the weather I could enjoy some early spring crocuses:

and some art in the town hall area (don't ask me about it's meaning):

But what I really wanted was to visit the museum and hear a talk by Lutz Kindler about Neanderthals in the cave of Balver which lies in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Being an archaeozoologist, he studied the faunal material from this cave and I think the most impressive part was that he demonstrated that a large part of the animals were not used for meat but had rather cut marks similar to bones of animals used by North American Indians to get the skin for clothing etc.

The next day I had a closer look at the museum and since some readers think archaeology is boring (!) I will rather show you something about the quite unusual manner of exhibiting those artefacts. The first thing was that the museum didn't have a chronological order but rather arranged things topological or thematically if you so want. Something I never quite liked. My introductionary seminar in archaeology was handled this way and at the time being I just had no idea about a more detailed chronology; so I thought it quite hard to compare mammoth huts and Iron Age houses. But well, each to his own.

The first floor was a very dark room with objects thrown between rocks on the floor. If you wanted to read the labels you had to crawl on the floor, preferably use your reading glasses and try to decode the numbers on the objects with the help of a booklet they gave you at the entrance. With the help of your glasses you could then read in the booklet about the object. I wish I had brought a torch!

The second floor had a modern concrete-and-wasted-space atmosphere:

In the midst of plastic ... 

... and pigs made from spam cans ...

... you could actually find some archaeological objects ... for example in the fridge ...

... together with spam cans of course. Neither the dry bones nor the spam can, however, have to be in the fridge stringently. Both can be safely kept at room temperature. Just in case you want to put a mandible in the fridge and there is no room left for your salad anymore.

The way to present the objects is, to say, at least unique:

Did I like it? No. Maybe I'm to old for this sh** (that was a movie quote, I'm never too old for a nice coprolite).

The special exhibition about the Hamburgian Ice Age was hosted in the near theatre and a bit more conventional. I'm not gonna show you Federmesser tools or burins, just some furry animals:

I especially loved this cave bear because it looked more like a wookie than a bear :)

http://binarybonsai.com/blog/george-lucas-stole-chewbacca-but-its-okay

Please join me again when I will explore Hamburg in more detail (without any archaeology that is).

Heilbronn - Museum im Deutschhof

You have probably guessed it right, the building you have seen in the last post is the Museum im Deutschhof and is the archaeological and historical museum of the Heilbronn area. This is the view from the back side and the actual Deutschhof:

I don't want to bore you with loads of archaeology, although it is a really nice museum and you can see some fine artefacts there. This, for example, is not a modern sculpture but rather a fossilised tree:

I also quite liked the silver coins which were mostly replicas of Roman coins; produced in the 5th century and reworked to pendants. They looked quite nice, don't you think?

They also showed the production of threads from different fibres that were used in Neolithic times, here philyra (Tilia bast fibre):

A quite spectacular object was the reproduction of a salt furnus in which brine was evaporated in so-called briquetage (special pots for salt production). Salt was a very precious exchange good in the Iron Age and in Heilbronn there was a salt spring which was extensively used to produce the 'white gold'.

The definite highlight however, is the exhibition of the Thalheim massacre. In 1983, a mass grave of the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK) was found in Thalheim near Heilbronn. 34 bodies of men, women, and children were killed and discarded an a simple mass grave, 7000 years ago.

The victims had traumas caused by blows with blunt instruments like one of these axes or adzes:

which then looked like this (the skull is a reproduction; the original one is in the Landesmuseum in Stuttgart):

they even made a life like reconstruction of one of the victims:

And children visiting the museum, can happily play with the not so happy inhabitants of the small settlement from Thalheim:

The City of Heilbronn

The city of Heilbronn is famous for two things: its wine and Käthchen. Käthchen is the eponymous main character from a play written by Heinrich von Kleist: Das Kätchen von Heilbronn (Little Kate of Heilbronn). I didn't try the wine, being sceptical of any German wine (I like my wine Italian, dark, and extremely quaffable). But I met Käthchen or at least what the artist Dieter Läpple in 1965 thought she might look like (although I have some doubts that any overly rich Count would fall for this innocent looking child except if he was a pedophile):

And I can tell you this much: in the end Little Kate gets the Count she is stalking.

Heilbronn lies beautifully at the River Neckar

and has some nice buildings, too. For example the church of Kilian:

although originally built in the 11th century, most of what you can see today (if you have the chance to glimpse through the construction fence) is from the 15th and 16th century. They also have a beautiful city hall with a really nice astronomical clock:

There are statues and various art works throughout the city. I especially liked the 'Closed Gate' by Michael Schoenholtz from 1989, not so much because it looks like an open gate at best to me, but because it reminds me a bit of Stonehenge:

Of course, Heilbronn also has modern shopping centres

and interesting fountains. This one at the marketplace was dedicated to Robert Mayer. Mayer and in England Joule, had both at roughly the same time the idea that heat and work are equivalent which was the founding idea for the First Law of Thermodynamics.

In 1942 when Mayer proposed his idea, the first law of thermodynamics looked like this:

"Wo Bewegung entsteht, Wärme vergeht,

wo Bewegung verschwindet, Wärme sich findet,..."

Today we have to use differential equations; ahhh life was so simple then. Anyways, Mayer also calculated the mechanical equivalent of heat, the calorie, yes, the same thing we secretely count when we go for an ice cream. So the idea to incorporate this into the fountain was quite nice. On one side a boy holds a weight, the kilo, and on the opposite side a girl holds a torch, representing heat (Latin: calor).

 

But none of this was the reason for my being in the city of Heilbronn. I rather came to go here:

Now I leave you with your thoughts what kind of building this might be, because it is late and I'll go to bed now. So if you want to know, you have to come back. See you tomorrow :)

Astronaut Food and Cauliflower Cream on Chili Pasta

Yesterday I went to a lecture about astronaut food at the observatory in Mannheim. The first part of the lecture given by Volker Damann from ESA (European Space Agency) was quite off topic since he talked about general health problems and emergency medicine abord the ISS. The second half was a bit more promising and given by Prof. Martina Heer who worked at the DLR (DeutschesZentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) and is especially involved in research about bone loss. Mildly interesting but nothing I haven't already heard in Prof. Hausmann's excellent lecture on Astrobiology at Uni Heidelberg.

Yup, the most important man in an astronaut's life is still the psychiatrist; although nowadays this is called behavioural adaptation to make it a bit more appealing for our space travellers.

A funny thing happened though during the discussion session, when a young girl asked whether there were any vegetarian astronauts and how they would be catered for.

A couple of seats behind me an elderly gentleman couldn't hold back "This is a joke, isn't it? They don't have to take 'vegetarians', there are enough normal people for the job." Which made me think whether that young girl and I are not normal in one way or the other. Plus, I'm convinced that vegetarians would actually fare better in an astronaut's job.

Apart from cookie crumbs which, because of the absence of gravity, end up in the astronauts' eyes, the main health issues during a space trip are kidney stones, cardiovascular problems, bone and muscular loss, and psychological problems. In most areas a vegetarian would cope equal or even better. Kidney stones are less common in vegetarians, cardiovascular diseases are less severe (after all we have much less uptake in bad cholesterol), and even bone loss is not different to non-vegetarian groups or even better (non milk drinking societies hardly show osteoporosis in contrast to developed and milk-lobbied countries). Higher input in fibres reduces testosterone excesses, the main reason for aggression, one of the major problems when you are living together for an extensive time span in very restricted space. To sum up, it would be much better and cheaper to recruit vegetarians for astronauts.

And to remind you that vegetarian food can be delicious for normal and not so normal people I give you Jane's recipe from her blog Nord Vegan: Cauliflower Cream on Chili Noodles

This is a superb recipe. The pasta 'sauce' is made from raw cauliflower and cashew nuts, put in a food processor and briefly heated up together with pan fried snow peas and kidneybeans.

I used her recipe nearly unchanged. All I did was adding some extra spiciness to the cauliflower cream (dried chiliflakes and black pepper) and used chili spaghetti for the pasta.