Mannheim, Germany

30.08.2008

Mannheim, Germany

As our flights tomorrow for Venice are early, Marianne decided it’d be better to stay at her apartment at school, which is in Mannheim. Mannheim’s a little city (probably on the same scale as Wiesbaden) that’s closer to Frankfurt, and there’s more to do than in her little hometown of Erbach. We got in Friday afternoon and were fairly tired from taking trains that morning (we needed 3 to get here), so we went out for a late lunch and laid low for the afternoon. Friday night though, we went out with a bunch of her friends (8 of us in total) and went bowling. It was a lot of fun! Most of them spoke English, but not too well for some of them, so most of the conversation was in German. I’ve come to really enjoy listening to a language I don’t understand, though. Firstly, there’s no frustration of thinking “ooh, I should be able to understand this but I can’t” the way I am with French and I’m sure I’ll be with Italian for a while. Secondly, it’s really fun to just watch body language and listen to all the changes in intonation! So I’m not very conversational, but still intently listening and paying attention, which is a new sensation.

Bowling was fun, and, well…bowling. I did alright (mid 70’s both games), which is fine with me. It was fun laughing at the music which, like at the clubs, was random American music, often remixed to techno.

Today Jeff and I both slept in, which we haven’t been able to do in quite a while. Once we were up and ready to go, the three of us (Marianne, Jeff, and I [MJ is already at his school in some other portion of Germany]) set off to explore the city. Marianne’s apartment is directly above an Architecture book store, so of course we had to stop in. Many of the books were in German, but a good portion were also in English. We spent quite a while perusing the selections. I fell in love with an El Croquis on Herzog & De Muron, but no way was I shelling out 70 € for it. Jeff did buy a beautiful book entitled Details in Contemporary Architecture. It’s got just the right balance of text, pictures, and architectural plans, sections, and details, which is great. (We later spent a while leafing through the whole book and both agreed that it was money well spent.)

Marianne then took us to a Bio Centre, which is basically a mini-mall with all environmentally friendly stores. My kind of place! They had a café, a restaurant, a grocery store, a hair salon, and a bank (we joked about the bills being printed on recycled paper). We walked to the building where she has music classes (she’s studying both math and music), but didn’t go into any rooms inside. We also went to the palace in town (I love that European towns can have palaces and it’s not unusual), which she said was definitely the biggest Baroque palace in Germany, and she thinks maybe even in Europe, at 400 meters long. It’s now owned by the university and used for classes (apparently Mozart studied there once upon a time). We walked around the grounds for a bit, then made our way over to a church (also a place Mozart went to, apparently). It was fairly nondescript from the outside, although the patterned stone soffits caught our eyes. The inside, though, was stellar. Exactly the kind of stuff I hate because it’s so over the top, but when it’s that old you can’t help but love it. It was ornamented and painted and gilded and just so dense with decoration. The altar had this huge altar piece that was huge and ridiculously gold and just fabulous. Lots of green and pink in the details on pilasters and such, which may or may not have been mimicking the original, I’m not sure.

We walked by the water tower, which is the biggest tourist attraction in town. It’s pretty much a large stone cylinder with decorations and staircases, surrounded by nice landscaping and a fountain. On our way back to her apartment we stopped off at the grocery store for dinner supplies. Jeff and I were very confused by the fact that there were two grocery stores in the same building that even used the same entrance. You practically had to get through one to get to the other, so I saw no reason to go to both, but Marianne said that one is better for some things than the other, and vice versa. We actually ended up going to both because the first didn’t have spinach, and I’m a good vegetarian and crave my veggies (oh my goodness Germans eat so much bread!). Apparently “blatt” means leaf in German, so we ended up buying frozen “blatt spinat”. I of course insisted on this brand and later took a picture with it. Once back at her apartment we pretty much just laid low. Jeff and I both have work to do in Rhino on our studio’s site model, and I’m trying very hard to be diligent about keeping up with writing about this trip. Anyway, we’re now waking up in less than four hours to catch a train for our flights, and I still need to repack my suitcase, so this entry is totally over.

PICTURES: interior of the church, the water tower and park