Adventures in Deutschland: OktoberTrip: Part II

Mainz, 21 Oct.

Jetlagged Bill patiently awaited for our heroine to roll out of bed at the crack of noon...minus ~ 3 hours. After freshening up with a breakfast of Houstonian chives, our fabulous duo skipped into the market by the Dom (see "Weekend in the rain: Part II" from 3 Sept.) before skipping into the Gutenberg museum. What a fun day with the namesakes of both of the universities I reside at during my Ph.D.!

One of the best pictures of the Dom I've seen - by Bill

The Gutenberg Museum is another one that will cost you only 3€ to get in but will keep you occupied for as much of the day you have left until the museum closes. On the ground level, we watched a printing demonstration, and observed versions presses and typewriters marking the last few centuries. The progress of printing technology continued onto the 1st floor. Imagine needing a machine the size of your bed (yes, your bed in Houston, not my meter wide one here) requiring seemingly Herculean strength (relative to my linguini arms at least) to print each page. Dozens of well preserved documents were on display on this floor, many of them embellished by hand. The next level featured newspapers, some biographical material on Gutenberg from where you could tunnel into the room of Gutenberg Bibles, printed but embellished by hand. What would happen if you flipped through those pages? Good thing they're encased!

On the same floor, you can traverse a 'skywalk' to a wing of East Asian printing history. Remember how complicated the European printing press seemed? Now imagine carving out the individual printing blocks for all the words in a language where the words are not assembled by alphabet. Here, you found collections thousands of Chinese blocks, well organized by the number of strokes in each character (much like modern Chinese dictionaries), as well as Korean and Japanese collections. Another floor up, and you could learn about printing in Egypt, another wing featured newspapers. We probably skipped another floor beyond that and probably saw half of the museum in depth during our stay of almost 3 hours. I present a few photos taken before I was redflagged for photos.

Lithography stone, for the first kind of lithography!

Tiny books!

Tiny printing presses to print tiny books

We strolled into Altstadt for zwiebeln kuchen (onion cake) and Federweiser (new wine), the combination for this time of year in this part of the country. Federweiser is fresh, young wine - sweet, meant to be drunk upon being produced, and is only available for about 2 months every year.

Zwiebel Kuchen and Federweiser, in an awesome wine shop with neat wood furniture

After lunch, we wandered into the neighoborhood, through a tunnel, up a hill, pretended to be lost, then I said "look down". Römisches Theater! Photo credits to Bill, from inside the fence.

Another theme of this trip was renovations - half of the landmarks we saw were surrounded by fences or partially obscured by scaffolding. Our hero hoisted our blogger onto the rail, to get her just high enough to reach over the fence for some pictures. Her camera jumped to escape! Bill to the rescue! Of course he got those great shots of the theater while he was in there.

Römisches Theater is near Zitadel (see "Moonrise from my apartment"), and apparently there's some territory to explore behind it.

Hmmm...where does this trail go?

Dead ends into a football 'field'

Pet the fuzzy wall

Another famous Mainz landmark is St. Stephan's Cathedral. The outside is understated, could be any modest Cathedral in the part of Germany. Go inside, the Chagall windows create a perfect airy and aquatic atmosphere that calms the mind, opening the paths to quiet and peaceful meditation. Our jet-lagged hero almost took a power nap here.

Our physicist could not visit his favorite physical chemist without seeing her lab, Irene's 'baby', the white light laser. For the full student experience, we squeezed into the bus from Hauptbahnhoff up to Uni, popped in, made some impressions, confirmed dinner plans with Irene, Robert, Andrew, and Janak, and finished mapping the week's journey.

Not from this trip, but a good representative photo

Time to go to Eisgrub! Eisgrub is Mainz's premier brewery, with the freshest and most flavorful beers I've had in Germany. Go with a group, you can buy towers with a tap at the bottom that hold either 3 liters or 5 liters. The 5 liter towers were already occupied, the 6 of us settled for 3, it was better that way, we could try a different beer every time we refreshed it.

Schweineshaxe - a whole roasted ham hock, or pork knuckle - a Bayernisch (Bavarian) specialty. Bavaria to Germany is like Texas to the USA. Most stereotypes associated with the country come from that particular large and southern most state. The rest of the country thinks that state could be a separate country, and the residents of that state think so too. They eat a lot of meat and drink a lot of beer. The rest of the country indulges in their festive traditions in a mildly patronizing way.

Robert finished his haxe in about 15 min. I went through ~3/4 in about 3 times the amount of time. Bill was jet-lagged and so was his stomach. Irene is vegetarian.

Schweineshaxe - with some sauerkraut and mustard, and a tomatoes slice and a cucumber slice,- comes with bread, but don't fill yourself with those things if you want room for the haxe, said Robert, who finished his in ~15 min