Loomings: Myself, our world, its people: Heidelberg, Eberbach, et cetera (Part 1)

Wednesday noon I took the ICE from Berlin Hauptbahnhof to Mannheim, and then a local train to Heidelberg. Unbelievably (at least at that time, although I knew later that this was quite normal), the ICE was 20 minutes late, and I missed my original connection at Mannheim.

Unbelievably, for the first leg of my ICE trip I shared a compartment with a baroque violist who was just returning to Hannover from a tour in London. We talked quite a lot about the baroque performance scene right now, and how groups like L'Arpeggiata are "corrupting" the HIP (historically-informed performance) concept with actual "hip" and populist elements.

After he got off at Braunschweig, the latter part of my journey was shared with two businessmen and an old grandmother, and it was only then did I start to feel just how bad my German is. Oh well, I still have time to learn.

My first night in Heidelberg was spent drinking with Gesa and a bunch of her friends from Heidelberg's Sinology department, after a brief tour of the department office and library and some falafels. I have absolutely no idea exactly how much I drunk — it was at least two beers, three shots of some kind of 44% herbal liqueur (out of these small bottles looking like single serving Tabasco, and we had to beat on the tables with them upside down before we threw the caps away and drank the whole goddamn thing in one mouthful — Tim said it was like 高粱 but I think it was a hundred times worse), maybe a half liter of red wine and about three or four cigarettes. I wasn't really stone drunk, but I was crazy enough to do this in the bathroom:

That's Tim coming in on the left and going like 啥洨. Naturally a massive hangover the next morning...

The next day Gesa and I followed her father to one of his field trips with his students to some Roman-era ruins in the Eberbach area. But we got off the train one station too late, and since the next train back was an hour later, we had to walk half an hour back. Nevertheless it was very pleasant, and even though it was hot, it was nothing like the sticky humidity of Taiwan at this season.

The fields all along the way were filled with rapeseed plants. After about half an hour we arrived at Neckarburken, where the ruins of a Roman bath house (I think) were located. Prof. Stupperich of course spoke to his students in German, and although I could grasp quite a bit of it, I still couldn't catch the whole gist.

That footbridge is, of course, Roman. We also visited a museum dedicated to the ruins of a military barracks and a fortress, located strangely halfway up a hill and not on the top.

What is great with having an archaeology professor as a tour guide, is that you get to know the stories behind the buildings, how they were built, and what is actually "authentic" and what is only made to seem like it. A few snapshots from the villages we passed on our way back to Eberbach:

This is a particularly large house; typical of its time, the bottom is made from stone, to withstand floods, while the top is made of wood. Sometimes if the family was exceptionally rich, more than one story would be made out of stone.

The church in one of the village centers. This is the Protestant end (where both Lutheran and Calvinist denominations worship), but the church is split in the middle, with a wall dividing the Protestant and Catholic congregations. According to Prof. Stupperich, many churches in this area were divided in this manner upon orders from the local prince.