Germany ~ June 07
Arrival great. Spent hours waiting for my hosts at Frankfurt airport as their Qantas, read here JetStar, flight out Singapore was delayed 3 1/2 hours. Finally we caught the \’Ice\’ train to Regensburg, a city and town that has the whole town world heritage listed. Well, enough said about the trains here. So I pay, but wasn\’t it worth it. Quiet, very clean, facilities that worked and were practical. I intend doing more train travel. Easy way to see the sights. And fast. Wolfgang and Irmi stayed with his brother Günther overnight while I stayed at a local hotel-great breakfast too. Very healthy and lots of it.
So what next you ask? A tour around this marvellous old town. What was the most amazing sight for me was the old roman wall, 2000 yrs old, still standing, part of the wall that constituted the barrier to the marauding romans and protection for the home of the soldiers. The Danube flows through Regensburg. The Romans came to one side of the river and couldn\’t cross it to invade the Germans and so they eventually retreated albeit years later. And it\’s only about 100m wide there, if that. Quite fascinating – maybe no one swam, the river does sometimes flow fast after rain and melting snow, however.
The town became a very rich and wealthy town, lots of traders who built magnificent homes and traded while the people on the other side of the river had to pay, of course, to cross the bridge and enter the town to sell their wares. The traders and tax officials got wealthier and the settlement on the other side of the river was always the \’poorer\’. There is even a sculpture of a person looking across the river – the picture of despair and desire and maybe hope?
We had lunch at a quiet, calm, very classy restaurant – I had some sort of schnitzel and salad, good, and my hosts had typical german meal for the area.
So that\’s my first day in the country. And let me say here, that their computer keyboards are all … too many keys in the wrong place