The park behind our house in 2010. Unfortunately it seems this year Christmas is going to be wet and ugly. 

A few pictures from a short trip to the town of Bamberg, an UNESCO world heritage site. Bamberg is one of the loveliest town I know. Not only has it a great cathedral, medieval and Renaissance architecture galore, tons of restaurants (some of them tourist traps) and nice shops, it also offers a great variety of small cafes where you can sit outside and watch the world go by (one of my favourite pastimes).

The building at the top is a bakery now. The building with the green shutters is the “Schlenkerla”, a restaurant first mentioned in 1405.

We bought those “Hörnla” (Franconian dialect for “Hörnchen” (“small horn”, i.e. croissant) in a bakery that sells them since 1427.

The river here is the Regnitz. There is a row of lovely houses right at the river’s edge. People have their patios bordering the water and even have boats looking like gondolas in front so they can hop into their boat and go on the river.

At the top a store selling Bamberg lace in a small street with specialty shops. A few doors down is “Hemmingway’s Bodega”. As you can see, the owner either has noticed the small spelling mistake and crossed it out (or it was a joke to begin with or his own name is Hemmingway and he was sick of being asked what the second “m” was about). When you look inside you see a b/w image of Che Guevara in the back.

Have you been to any interesting places recently?

Credits: Blog photo templates from Pugly Pixel.

It is more than appropriate to post a couple of pictures of Paris during our Paris in July event. Just so we can all see what we are missing while we are sitting at home blogging about it…

 

 

From Notre Dame. You can see the Eiffel Tower in the distance.

From Notre Dame again. I love those grotesques. In the background on the hill you can see Sacré-Coeur.

April 23, 1864 on Shakespeare’s 300th birthday the German Shakespeare society was founded. It is one of the oldest still active literary societies worldwide. In 1904, to celebrate its 40th anniversary, the society ordered a memorial which was done by sculptor Otto Lessing.

Shakespeare is sitting in front of an artificial ruin, at his feet is a skull wearing a fool’s cap.

Unfortunately at the time I was there I was not aware that Shakespeare’s face is showing two different emotions. From the right he is supposed to look serious and pensive, from the left smiling and cheerful. Missed that! You can see the two sides of his face here (smiling & serious).

The statue is the only statue of Shakespeare in Germany (some sources say in Europe, but I’m not sure that is so).

Goethe lived in this house until 1782 when he moved into the house at Frauenplan in Weimar because the garden house became too small and not appropriate for his status. It remained his favourite, though, and he often worked there.

Today it is a museum. It belongs, together with Goethe’s house, to Classical Weimar which is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

A few pictures from a weekend trip to Weimar in Thuringia, Germany. Weimar has a vast cultural heritage. It was the home of two leading characters of the Weimar Classicism, the birthplace of the first German republic, the Weimar republic, and also the founding place of the Bauhaus school.

Goethe-and-Schiller-Monument in front of the German National Theatre Weimar.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe lived in this house from 1788 to 1789 and then again from 1792 until his death in 1832.

It belongs, together with Goethe’s garden house, to Classical Weimar which is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Friedrich von Schiller bought this house in 1802 and lived in it until his death in 1805.

Since quite a few people were impressed with the pictures of our library café, I felt it was necessary to bring you all back down to earth with this post. The café might be lovely and the courtyard the nicest bookish hangout you can imagine, however, the library itself sucks.

It is a large library, it serves a city of about 500.000 people and has various branches all over the city with one main library in the center. It also has so-called "book buses" that visit schools on a regular schedule to enable pupils to get books even if their parents don’t take them to the library.

The main library is being renovated at the moment so part of it had to be moved to various nearby buildings, but the transition seems to have gone smoothly and it does not seem to be some improvised arrangement, but it looks as if everything works fine (the renovation will be going on for another year or two, I think).

So, what is not so great about this bookish place?

• The opening times. The library opens at 11am and closes at 6pm, except for Wednesdays when it doesn’t open at all. Saturdays it is open for 3 hours and Sunday – that goes without saying, because it is the Day of the Lord and we are in God fearing Bavaria – it is closed again. Oh, hold on, wait a minute, on Thursdays it’s open one hour longer, until 7pm. That’s when all the people who have to work for a living might make it there to rush through it.
• The staff is not really that helpful and/or friendly. There are some people who could actually work in the free economy and succeed, but all in all they are as friendly as Rosa Klebb.
• It offers no events to speak of. When it does they take place in some suburb branch.
• The few English books on offer are about two decades old. I am aware it is a German library but you would think that nowadays they would make sure that they are a tiny bit multilingual.
• The late fees are outrageous.
• They charged me late fees for one of the boys even though they accumulated because the book bus returned to his school only after the due date.  Is that my fault?
• At the moment there are two buildings and, of course, various departments, each with their own return desk. If you have three books, let’s say a children’s book, a novel and a non fiction book you have to go to three different return desks in two buildings to return three books.
• They have about four different cashiers (to pay the late fee), but invariably if you want to pay at a desk they will say “You can pay just about anywhere but not with me.”
• Their website is boring, bleak and uninformative, apart from the standard info like opening times etc. If you don’t know the library and think, “I’m going to check out their website to see whether it is worth joining” you will undoubtedly decide against becoming a member.

So you think a nice café compensates for that? I don’t.

Our library is being renovated at the moment, however, one part of it is left alone. It used to be an old cloister and the library cafe is situated on the ground floor with view to an inner courtyard.

They serve homemade cakes, snacks and drinks and also offer a large variety of international daily newspapers. A great place to sit, relax and read…

 

 

 

 

Does your library have a café? What does it look like?

Korn & Berg is Germany’s oldest book store . The shop which was at the same time a printing shop as well as a publishing house was opened in 1531 by Johann Ott who became a Nürnberg citizen that year.

The shop today specializes in regional literature and university books. 

 

 

 

Korn & Berg have also published a very nice video showing the sights of Nürnberg.

If you don’t know Bookshelf Porn yet and love books, you should definitely have a look at it. Eye candy en masse!