This is Ulm, with the world’s tallest church steeple rising like a fata morgana from a sea of mediocre post-war architecture. The church was built starting in 1377 but wasn’t completed until 1890. According to Guinness World Records, it has the world’s tallest church steeple, measuring 161.53 meters from the Read More …
This inconspicuous monument in a pedestrian zone in the center of Ulm is supposed to symbolize the apartment building where the physicist Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879. The building was quite new at the time of Einstein’s birth, since it had been constructed only eight years earlier, Read More …
This attractive district is located between the Ulm Minster and the Danube River. It has narrow streets and historic half-timbered houses, as well as hotels, restaurants, cafés and galleries. This statue of two men and three pigs is at the Pig Market, known officially as the Schweinemarkt and unofficially as Read More …
In April 2011, I took an InterCityExpress (ICE) train from Frankfurt to Nürnberg and changed there for an ALEX train to Prague, leaving Nürnberg at 14:05 and arriving Prague at 18:54. ALEX is a private railroad company that belongs to Netintera, which in turn is now (since December 2020) a Read More …
Czech and German nationalists used to get all sentimental about this river, and some still do, for instance the obnoxious Sudeten-German refugees in Bavaria, now in their third or fourth generation of exile and still suffering volubly while driving to refugee conventions in their fat BMWs. (I am distantly related Read More …
The National Theater (Národní divadlo) has a great location right on the Vltava (Moldau) River in the center of Prague at the end of the Legií most (Legion Bridge), just one bridge upstream from the Charles Bridge. This theater was called the National Theater even before there was a nation to Read More …
The State Opera in Prague (Státní Opera Praha) has the most dreadful location of any opera house I can think of. The front entrance is cut off from the city by a high-speed four-lane motorway called Wilsonova with no pedestrian crossing, just a dark narrow tunnel that looks like the Read More …
This is an historic theater that was inaugurated in 1783 with a performance of the play Emilia Galotti (in German) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781). But the truly historic thing happened here just five years later in 1787 when the world’s greatest composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) conducted the world premiere Read More …
If only I understood a bit of Czech, I would have gone to a play at this lovely old theater which was just a couple blocks from my hotel in the Prague district of Vinohradech. I would love to have seen their staging of Friedrich Schiller’s play Marie Stuartovna (Mary Read More …
Frankfurt Skyline Countdown # 19 This 142-meter building on Frankfurt’s Platz der Republik is now called the City-Haus or City-Hochhaus. I’ve always found it to be a pleasant place with a nice fountain at the front. You could even walk or cycle through a passageway at Read More …