Castle Beautiful

Ooo beautiful structure... this was really exciting and beautiful.... architecture.... ooo... . 

Gothic Turret

Fun steps up, beautiful stained glass.... off to a movie now though.... so i'll continue the story later.... 

A Real Castle!

Crossing the bridge was to get over to the Prague Castle, a landmark visible all across the town... spent some time wandering the suroundings, excellent coffee in the sun, meant to meet friends at a set of stairs i thought were the main ones from the map, but missed them when they were at the other end of the huge complex... ran up and down the steps a bunch of time working off the dumplings, but went in and got to experience it - lots of heavy turrets, a street of fifteenth century almost doll-houses.... 5'6 doorways, just all miniture authentic, armour museum hallway to run through creepily, old churches, present-day soldiers still marching around in formations like back in the day.... 

Prague Day Solo

Woke up as I usually do, with an obscene amount of energy to start the day. It usually serves me pretty well, especially in Paris the days start out sunny and cloud over by 9 or 10. A little afraid of this, I set out without waking everyone up (it was before 7), leaving a note I hoped would allow us to meet. Unfortunatly it wasn't clear enough, but I had a pretty great time wandering by myself too. Walk down to the river, just happened to chance by Gehry's Tom and Ginger building, a cool post-modern building (whoa did i just say that?) but it fit in really well among the decorated flat houses along the river. impressive. The walk was really fun, in the sun and spring it was easy to see this had been the Bohemian playground of rich europeans - highly decorative buildings, Gothic and Baroque and Rococo... walking by myself along the very high river, barely anyone keeping me company on the streets. Crossing the Karlsbridge in the morning was a far different experience then later, beautiful morning light and mist and not crowded at all.... nice pictures with the streetlights still on 

Prague Evening 1

Got in pretty late, easy trip to the hostel, quite a lot of confusion getting new currency and then trying to break the rediculously large bills coming out of the atm.... hard to take out more then 1000 units of currency, even when you know it's only $40.... we went on a walk with our hostel roommates, college boys from Stuttgart, they promised to show us a fairly cool restaurant, they were totally lost too though.... we stopped at a place for really delicious food mmm. we were told dumplings and pork were the specialties, and they were.... mmm.... dumplings were breadish, and sliced as such, with lots of gravy and greasy-good meat. Served with Budwiser! don't gasp at the sacriledge, it was real Czech Budvar, not american water-berr, and i had the Budvar Dark... almost black, a little molassesy and absolutely great. the german Weissbier was good with a lot of things, but this meal called for thicker stuff. Fun wander past tinker-bell palace and through Wenceslas Square (whores and western commercialism) back to the hostel and a good night. 

Travels through Soviet Lands

Haha.... really running joke for me was that we were in Russia.... the Czech Republic was communist until more recently then anywhere else i've been, and it still showed it a little. Def. in their trains and train stations - rocking the 70s colors when it wasn't army-drab. Train all afternoon through pretty beautiful scenery, transfer at Cheb across the border, got a chance to walk around a little in the town, then on a very dirty-windowed train for more sunset, passing some pretty drab towns and housing tracts, grey roofs rather then red (had to do with the stone rather then politics, but same effect), but still pretty country. 

Nuremburg Fri 7 Apr 2006

woo several times trying to write this foiled by not knowing how to spell nurnburg and then getting distracted while looking it up. anyway. friday morning we drove across more lovely german territory to get to the 'most german city in the world' chosen to be the head of Nazi Germany. We spent a while audio-touring through a pretty good exhibit (i don't care if people would sound like chipmunks, there needs to be a way to speed talking up to as fast as i can read, otherwise there's no point), then a tour of the parade grounds... pretty incredible the juxtaposition of the old war videos and the actual sites of the rallys - very scary, everyone there was so normal.... hmm have you looked at our president lately? coughanyway.... kober gave us some more insight gathered from hanging out with old germans in dinkelsbuhl and readings i think, pretty cool. very stressful ticket-buying in the train station (i ended up buying for 3 others) and 4 of us ran to catch the train to Prague for the weekend. Pic is from the steps on the front pedestal of the nuremburg field. 

Further into the past

We were driven a fair distance across lovely fields to the open-air Franconian building museum, or some other hard to translate name - they packed up historical buildings in pieces and accurately reconstructed them on the site of this museum, very cool and the oldest were from 1340.... a fair bit of age, couldn't imagine living in some of the old huts - and even not that old, pigbladder windows and blackened timbers.

Functioning watermill and kitchen, some pieces looked familiar.... furniture and wall finishes and all nice and a beautiful warm day. 

Little Town Life...

Pretty mellow, we found a place to eat good Franconian lunches for cheap and ate there a majority of our lunches.... lots of walking around slowly, patronized the gelato shop often, and the bakeries... Time spent in studio, sitting on the deep windowsill in the thick wall. Met the mayor, he decieded dinklesbuhl was not ready for our project.... haha. was rather uncomforatable, political to begin with, then not being translated into our language... One really fun thing was being invited out to a family's hunting lounge for a bratwurst and saurkraut supper - amazing-good, and fun to see that way of life - old grandpa Hans :) with a fun deep voice and accent and stories about the history of the town back to world war 2.... they were the Godebauers, more with them later... 

DKB

This is a picture of a good quarter of the old town... so it was small. Fun path around to wake up early and skate or walk around, which i did. Tour of the town with Kober the first morning, tours of his friend's architecture in the area another morning, tour of a brush-making factory as well - that was very cool, good brushes are made still by hand, the crunchieness of the new bristles is that of human spit... crazy. we recieved eighty dollar brushes for visiting... yay!a little scared to try it out, i don't clean my brushes very well on the road. 

Dinkelsbuhl

Small town Germany is probably over-idealized in Dinkelsbuhl - through random events of history it was really successful and rich in the 1500-1600s and then not enough money left to tear down houses afterwords so it was very preserved in that little-rich town style. the core city had about 1000 people, suburbs outside but the preserved historical core generates most of the money... very charming, really, steet roofs and heavy timber construction, winding cobblestone streets and shutters for the windows... cute cute cute in the sunshine. a little opressive in the clouds.... the weather was generally pretty good for us though. moody, really fast clouds for the first few days. Hard to not summarize a lot.... 

Stuttgart- to DKB eek!

Tony, Tom, Guillermo, and I ran into Sara in the train station, and we walked the main street to kill a few hours.... huge pedestrian street with beautiful trees, they are everywhere in Europe, especially in old bombed-out cities... incredibly dirty, but we discovered later it was really rare and the garbage collectors were on strike while we were there. cool buildings, fun supper outside! on a museum patio overlooking a large square/park people were just hanging out in. tom's banana beer became the unreplicable highlight of the meal.... beer on the train to ellwangen a messy idea on our part... very german.... but arrival in the dark to small-town dinkelsbuhl was pretty dark and scary.... 

Sun 2 Apr 2006 Stuttgart

warning - all architectural references basically in this post (a warning for brandon) A much cloudier day in Stuttgart made for unpretty pictures at an amazing architecture site - the Wiessenhoff developement - worker housing from the 20's by all sorts of big names - an (ugly as hell Best-Western looking oops did i say that cause it maybe would have been revolutionary back then) apartment complex by Mr. Mies, 2 Corbusier houses, Oud, architecture history pics coming to life one right after the other, very nicely restored. Tres cool. Didn't get to go in any, they neglect to mention the summer-only admittance anywhere, pout.

To the Staatsgalerie, a really post-modern building housing some decent collections, Egon Schiele paintings! for the first time in real life, very energetic. not necessarily pretty, at all, he really lets his psychosis pour out, but very intense. a cityscape really grabbed me, would be fun to see more non-people paintings by him. the people get hard to look at. a picture of the building had been hanging in my english classroom in concordia, random little connections. really an eighties building, colors and themes, beautiful stone though and fun use of GREEN! flooring that bent the light in fun ways. 

Sunday Morning Church

We didn't actually make the service, but a cool project Brock had lectured on in third year was also in Munich and we decided to take a peak before Stuttgart. It was beautiful, double skin with screenprinted glass that worked! wood box inside that filtered the light to the simple metal screen back wall perfectly. very plain and simple and special.... and i didn't bring my camera... i'll get the few i took with other people's cameras and post them later. this is another of olympic park i wanted to get up, for a little while anyway. 

Munchen Evening

After all the sightseeing, we settled down for a traditional supper, good enough, horrible service though... kind of a german thing? really the french waitstaff has never been worse the brusque... so that was wierd. Back to the hostel for a bit of a break, then out to find one last bit of architecture, Coop Himmelblau's art institute... wierd to see in the dark, hard to grasp. Passing up the recommended student bar full of 30 somethings nearby, we had gelato and then found a cool white plastered vaults and blue neon basement - reminded me a lot of the ritzy bar jet in chicago - for drinks and happy kuchen... a good night. pic is tom and guillermo sitting in the olympic stadium.