Don't forget about Faschings!

I flew into Frankfurt in the early hours of Sunday morning after a passable flight (I had no idea so many Germans went on holidays to Thailand at this time of the year). Luckily, customs and immigration was quick and in less than an hour I was standing in the queue at the DB Reisecentrum waiting to get my Bahncard. These are an awesome invention of the Germans. I got the 25 card which gives you 25 % off all train travel in Germany and a single ticket in all the cities when you get off a long distance train and 25% off all tickets into other countries as long as the trip starts in Germany. It only costs 57 euros (so is worth it if you are planning on spending more than 210 euros on train travel) and is valid for discount tickets as well as full price ones. You just need to have a passport photo and some identification and they will give you a temporary card while they process the permanent one. The temporary card last 2 months so is pretty good for while you are travelling. So after getting that, I had to rush through the station to get the direct train to Ulm (there wasn’t another for a couple of hours) and just managed to get on as they were blowing the whistles and closing the doors. Just a hint for people who haven’t travelled in Germany before, the trains are always on time so it’s worth setting your watch to the time in the stations so you don’t miss your connections.

There was lots of snow coming down to Ulm and it was snowing when I arrived. There was quite a bit of fresh snow in the streets so it must have snowed most of the night. I headed from the station straight to my hotel which was on Munsterplatz. It’s very easy to find as you can see the Munster tower (the highest in Germany) from pretty much the entire town. I dropped off my bags and put on some warmer clothes (t-shirt and a polar fleece just wasn’t enough in the snow) before heading out to see what was around town.

The Munster is enormous and is in the middle of the old town. It fills most of the square really. There is a cute little chapel next to the Munster which was originally a little prayer chapel (the Munster doesn’t have private side chapels like many other cathedrals) and is now a Russian Orthodox church. Unfortunately it’s currently closed due to renovations. They are working on the outside of the Munster as well at the moment (though I suspect some of the scaffolding is almost permanent). I’m not sure how much they are getting done in the snow though. There are lots of interesting buildings in the side streets off the square so I headed out into them.

The Rathaus (town hall) is a fabulous little painted building which was built in the 14^th century but redone in the 16^th. It has a series of paintings on the outside which seem to have a mostly biblical theme but some must also be historical from the region. The writing is a little hard to decipher (being written in ye olde text and as a poem doesn’t help) but I recognise some of the stories like Isaac sacrificing his son.

I’ve noticed a few things that Ulm seems to have a lot off. Bakeries are one of them. You would never be short of bread here that is for sure. And there is no excuse for not having your haircut either because hairdressers seem to be second to only bakers here. There are also lots of birds with sticks in their mouths. It seems to be a symbol of the city as there is even one on the top of the Munster. They are quite large and are painted with various patterns (usually something appropriate to the building that they are on). My favourite has to be the one on a jewelers which as a ring in its mouth instead of a stick and appears to be covered in silver lame.

I then wandered through the streets of Ulm towards the river. The Schorhaus is one of the old buildings in a nice little square (though I think that it would be nicer in the summer) and has an exhibition of the history of Ulm in it. It wasn’t open on Sunday though so I didn’t get to go and see it. Heading down the hill from there you come to the Fischerviertel (Fisherman’s quarter) which is built over a couple of rivers that are joining to the Donau. There are lots of cute little historic houses that are slowly sinking into the river by the looks of it. It’s a popular area for restaurants and B&Bs but there are a reasonable number of normal houses down there as well. It must be really strange to literally be living on top of the river (and quite noisy as well).

By this time the tourist info centre was finally open (not that much else in town was though, Ulm is not a Sunday kind of place) so I headed in to get some maps and find out what there was to do here. Now Ulm mustn’t see much in the way of non-German tourists because I couldn’t find a single brochure that wasn’t in German and there was only one book in English. I did manage to get a map though that marked most of the major sights. Nothing was up in the centre though to warn tourists about Faschings Dienstag which would have been nice but more about that later.

I headed up to the station to get a bus out to Wiblingen where there is an old convent with some fantastic Baroque rooms. The buses leave from outside the train station (in the middle of the street where the trams go from) and there are at least 4 an hour even on a Sunday.

There has been a convent (or I think we’d call it an abbey) on the site since the late 11^th century but the current building is from the 18^th century. It’s impressively big and not quite what I’d expected. It’s just out in the suburbs with houses around it. You walk down a little side street and there it is. The building is so large that at the moment it is housing a section of the university of Ulm’s health sciences department, housing staff and students and has a home for the elderly in one half of it. And it also has the museum and library that I had gone to see. The museum only opens on afternoons on the weekend in the off season so I was lucky to get to see it.

The museum section is only in German and covers the history of the abbey and the building as it currently stands. It had a large baroque garden originally (which now seems to have been replaced with a carpark unfortunately) and quite a bit of land surrounding it. It also has a very large church in the middle of the building which seems a bit excessive (as in you could fit the entire population of the suburb into the church at once).

The building was taken from the church not long after it was completed (something about changes in the rules after the war with Napoleon and the church lost lots of its land) and since then has been various things including a palace, an army barracks, a hospital  and general storage. It was only after WWII that it became part of the university and museum.

This makes it even more incredible that the library has survived in such good condition. It was built out of wood and stucco which as been painted to make it look like marble. From a distance it looks really quite realistic. Oddly enough it was actually more expensive to do it this way than make the room out of real marble at the time. The original books and scrolls were pilfered by others over the years but the library is not home to a lot of older books from the Ulm library’s collection and you are actually allowed to borrow some of them. The room is really quite over the top for a library and despite having seen a lot of OTT places in my travels this one still took my breath away when I first walked in. The ceiling is incredible and was painted by the one man in less than 12 months which is quite impressive. It has nine scenes on it with various allegorical themes as well as biblical stories.

On the way back into town I had to stop at the train station to get a ticket to Heidelberg as you can get ICE tickets heaps cheaper if you book three days in advance (you just have to specify an exact train that you are going to catch). I was starting to sag a lot as I had been up for a lot of hours in a row and hadn’t had that much sleep on the plane so I had a quick dinner in one of the few places that I could find that was open on a Sunday at 5pm. I then headed back to the hotel and was asleep in less than an hour (despite trying to stay awake).

Monday is also a bit of a sleepy day in Ulm as all the museums are closed as are some of the other attractions so there isn’t a huge amount to do. The Munster is open every day though so it was here that I started. The tower is meant to be good but is only open to 70m at the moment because of the snow and ice in the tower so I didn’t bother paying the 4 euros to go up it. The church itself is free though they do like a donation for the upkeep of the building. It’s late gothic in style though has some surprisingly modern stained glass windows and some more baroque looking decorations in places. They have lots of large painted wooden memorial plaques on the walls which are brightly coloured and often have quite strange carvings on them if you look closely. They are hung in the walls around the side aisles. Much of the stone work in this area seems to have been painted at some stage but is now very faded and there are statues and carvings missing in some places.

The original gothic wooden choir is stunning and carved out of dark wood. It’s quite dark in that section of the church as there are no windows above it and the windows in front are dark glass. The choir is carved with lots of heads and funny little animals and gargoyle looking things. The original gothic altar is still in place as well though looks to have been repainted in a more modern (by that I mean something around the renaissance not surrealist) style at some stage. At the opposite end of the church under the organ is a large metal statue of the Archangel Michael which looks far more modern than the rest of the statues. It looks slightly out of place but is a lovely piece in its own right. Definitely imposing too, it would discourage the people in the back row from misbehaving that’s for sure.

The ceiling over the main entrance is also worth walking in to look at. It is a gothic style arched ceiling but in the middle there is a large hole. If you stand under the hole and look up the ceiling of the next level is also painted and the patterns match up really nicely. It also appears to have a hole in it which is currently boarded up but presumably opens into the tower. I assume that they are put there for the ropes from the bells or something similar.

After the church, I headed over the bridge to go and see Neu Ulm which is the modern half of the city. It was mostly built in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries though there are some more recent additions as well. There are two large churches on that side of the river but only one of them is open on a regular basis and that is St John the Baptist. It was built in the early 20^th century and the style reminds me a lot of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. It’s a very stark white stone church on the inside with very little decoration and a stunning ceiling. I then walked through the centre of New Ulm to the next bridge across the river which has some great views back to the Altstadt. I can see why the Munster is visible from everywhere. Not only is it very tall but it is actually on the top of a hill as well. I continued into Ulm and looked at the Einstein fountain which is strangely placed out the front of some government buildings (I think the department of justice). It all seemed a little odd. I continued on from there to St Georges which is another church that was built at about the turn of the 20^th century. It seems much of the area around there was built at the same time as there are streets full of lovely Art Nouveau style buildings and all the graves in the graveyard next to the church are from the late 19^th century. There is also St Pauls on the far side of the graveyard but I didn’t get to look inside because it’s also closed on Mondays. It’s very imposing from the outside. I guess the Protestants didn’t want to be outdone by the Catholics.

I headed back to the hotel for a couple of hours as jetlag was starting to seriously catch up with me before heading out to find somewhere decent to eat. That isn’t easy when you don’t want to spend $40 on dinner as most of the places here are either not that good or very expensive. Most of the restaurants are around the Rathaus or down in the Fischerviertel and seem to be mostly German type places. I’ve seen one Indian and a couple of Chinese but pretty much everywhere else is good old German pork and potatoes. I ended up at a pancake place (they also seem very popular here) and had a strange (but actually quite tasty) dish of turkey with pineapple, peaches and cheese served with potatoes and gravy. It didn’t look like much but it wasn’t bad (and it cost less than $40 which is always a bonus!)

Tuesday was a bit of a disaster as I had forgotten about Faschings Dienstag which is Shrove (or Pancake) Tuesday to the rest of us. It seems in Ulm it is quite a big thing as they have a festival to say hello to the Spring (I feel that it was quite ironic that it was snowing heavily for most of the day!) and therefore everything shuts. But they don’t bother putting up signs to that effect we are just meant to know that all the museums are going to be shut. I of course didn’t find this out until 11am when I was standing outside the Ulm Museum (which is meant to be very good but I’ll never find out now) waiting for it to open. A German man who was also waiting to be let in had ended up pressing one of the secretary’s buttons and had spoken to a girl who said they weren’t opening at all for the day. Thanks for the sign guys!

I did spend some time in the library before it closed early though. It has free internet which you can use indefinitely as long as there is no one else waiting to use it (then you are limited to 20 minutes though you can put your name on the list and have another go later on). It is a slow connection and I wouldn’t want to be uploading photos or anything like that but for checking email and making bookings it’s fine (or would be if google was working properly!). It does have German keyboards though which take a little while to get used to if you are a touch typer as the y and z keys are switched and there are lots of different symbol keys. I have a lot of trouble with the moved ‘ key and getting an @ which isn’t on the 2 like our keyboards. They also have free and clean toilets (something which is in short supply in Ulm)

After giving up on Google, I headed up to the tourist information office to see if anything was open for the day and if there was going to be a Faschings parade at least to make up for the total lack of anything to do for the day. I was right, only one museum was open for the day and only for 3 hours.

Unfortunately it was closing in 25 minutes so I missed out on the history of bread museum. I wandered around town for a little longer and found some more of the little birds with sticks before grabbing some lunch and heading back to the hotel to try and warm up a little.

The parade started just before 2pm in Neu Ulm and passed through the altstadt on the way to Munsterplatz. I decided to go down to near the library to see them. It seems to involve lots of people dressing up as witches and trolls and the such and covering themselves with bells and then yelling lots to frighten the winter away. They also hand out lollies to little kids, many of whom were dressed up as well. I’m not sure what you have to do to get into the parade as they seemed to be part of some sort of group. Many of them brought their kids along in carts and prams too and they had made little costumes for them too. It was really cute. It took about an hour for all the people and the bands (alas not traditional German oompahpah bands) to get past and then the people seemed to come back down to the Marktplatz to hang around and have some drinks. I was totally frozen by the end because it was snowing really heavily during the parade, so I’ve headed back to the hotel and unless it warms up considerably am not planning on leaving until the morning.

So Ulm is a nice enough little town. I don’t think that you need three days unless like me you are feeling pretty jet lagged or are here on a Monday and therefore can’t go to a lot of the sights anyway. Food is a little bit of an issue if you are on a budget but there are lots of cheap bakeries and a little supermarket on Munsterplatz where you can get things for easy lunches. The hotel was good and not badly priced and the youth hostel here in town doesn’t have a kitchen anyway (nor is it all that cheap) so isn’t a much better option. At least in the hotels you get your own room and just have to share a bathroom.

So that’s Ulm, stay tuned for Heidelberg.