Travel Guide

Travel Guide: Bamberg

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Bamberg is located in a region of Bayern (Bavaria) called Franken (Franconia), and the regional slang and cuisine are Fränkisch rather than Bayrisch. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Fränkisch slang really is slang – the people generally spoke Hoch Deutsch (High German) and I could understand the accent. (This was hardly the case when I visited Munich, for example, where Bayrisch is really the local language. And rest assured, I have equal problems when people speak Thüringisch from here in Thuringia. An ongoing pattern when I learn a new German slang word is to clarify whether the word is Hoch Deutsch or Thüringisch; the distinction is important for my sometime-in-the-future German language test.)

These stark regional differences make travelling even a couple hours away feel much farther, and it’s a lot of fun to hear difference forms of language, taste local beers, and experience local culture. We spent two nights in Bamberg and were delighted by what we found. The population is just a little larger than that of Weimar, but the town sprawls across seven hills. We spent our time in the old town and new old town on the opposite side of the river, going everywhere by foot, and we were pleased to see really excellent bicycle infrastructure everywhere. There were bike lanes and bike parking areas on every road, as well as pay parking in areas that would be free by us. And it definitely seemed like the population got the message! The number of people on bikes was correspondingly greater than I have seen in other German cities.

One element that makes Bamberg really special is its location where the Regnitz and Main rivers meet. There are canals that have been built to link the rivers and bridges to carry pedestrian, bicycle, and car traffic, so you’re never far from the water.

It didn’t take long to assess the wealth of this city, extending back hundreds of years. Each of Bamberg’s seven hills has a church, and Bamberg is host to a cathedral and monastery.

The old Rathaus, or town hall, is the highly decorated signal that one has entered the old town, and we photographed it at various times of day from different angles to play with the light.

We essentially stumbled into the courtyard of the old palace . . .

. . . just after a look at the city from the garden of the new.

As always, we climbed to the highest point, this time at the monastery that towered above everything, and looked down. The red rooftops all over Germany never fail to put me right back into a child’s storybook.

Another aspect of Bamberg that I really liked were the tiny alleyways that twisted into each other, occasionally broken up by the large squares that characterize many European cities. The buildings were ornate and detailed, another sign that this was a city that controlled trade and therefore amassed wealth.

Bamberg is known for its beer and Frankisch beer is distinct in multiple ways. Rauchbier, or smoked beer, is really only found there (it can stay, as far as I’m concerned) and the beer styles are somehow crisper in both colour and taste. Each pub is a brewer of its own beer and some have been operating since the 1400s. We visited the beer museum up at the monastery to learn more, and this is clearly a history that runs deep.

Additionally, a local tradition is the Stehbier, or standing beer. You walk into a brewery/pub/bar/restaurant and order a beer (or wine) to go. You pay the deposit on your glass and walk out into the street. The atmosphere was festive, though the environment was clearly entirely normal for the locals. By us, people bring bottles of beer and wine to the park. In Bamberg, you stand in the streets closed to cars. After all, taking part in the local culture is an essental part of travelling.

After two nights in a medieval town full of breweries, bookshops (I really couldn’t help myself), good food, and cheerful people, we drove about 20 minutes outside of town to climb in the famed Frankenjura. There are many reasons why this is one of the most popular climbing areas in the world, and climbing on the limestone there was a new experience. We’ll be back – after all, there’s climbing and beer.

On My Mind

Voice Memos

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I hadn’t meant to spend the night reading, but that’s what I did, reading punctuated with a phone call and then another phone call, reading punctuated with the smiles I could hear in the voices over the line. I hope they heard mine, too.

I guess I’ve settled in. I’m in the process of, as they say, settling down. And it’s a far cry from the voice memos I listened through recently, the reminders of a searching soul. Maybe it’s the years of memorizing and performing monologues that comes through when I need to stand outside myself to look at myself. Maybe it’s the need to say aloud, quietly and under the cover of darkness, what I would scream into broad daylight if I were braver.

But maybe that’s defeatist.

Maybe I record my thoughts only late at night because the day brings the active work to forget them. Maybe it’s because at night, when the mind is tired, I let down my guard and speak to what’s buried somewhere in there. There’s hope during the day, hope demonstrated by the fact that the voice memos are time-stamped very, very late.

Many years ago, during a particularly turbulent time, I found myself recording voice memos at night when I couldn’t sleep, which was often. The voice memos, most of which I saved simply as “Night”, range from around 20 seconds to nearly 8 minutes, the pitch of my voice swinging between whispers and the scratchiness of unrealized tears. Until recently, I never went back to listen, and I recently listened through only the most recent because of the significance of the dates. Sometimes I want to shake my younger self back to her senses and other times I want to wrap her in a hug. Looking at those dates reminds me how quickly something can change.

I’ve returned to that habit only sparingly, having gotten a bit of a grip on my place in the world and learned to have hard conversations instead of imagining them. What is striking is not that I almost always fall asleep from either exhaustion or relief once my words are out of my system, freeing me from mulling them over, but rather that my hesitancy of going back over these thoughts is quite like the way I don’t read over old journals, except when looking to corroborate something I think I remember. It’s not quite an aversion, but I stay relatively removed.

And I’m not sure why that’s the case. A fear, maybe, of hearing, in daylight, what I don’t want to acknowledge, or maybe embarrassment at the melodrama of lying awake. It’s interesting to notice, and I was not at all surprised when I quieted swirling thoughts recently by recording my first voice memo in a good couple years.

But then I did something differently. I wrote down the thoughts, too. And I said them out loud. And the thoughts became a conversation, and the conversation reached a conclusion, and the vortex stopped swirling. It’s different when the whole thing plays out in real time and not just in my head. It’s a whole rather than parts.

And it means that a solitary night reading is nothing more than exactly that.

On My Mind

On Regret

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We were were sitting at the base of a crag eating apple slices, chatting with another pair of climbers about things like job interviews, health insurance, and courage. After they packed up to go, I mentioned that it was lack of bravery on my part that led me to say yes to my current job. It was not at all what I had imagined for myself after years of the sights and sounds of big cities, and the idea of going someplace so small was not as prestigious as what I’d thought working in Europe could be like. I wanted a better work-life balance, a society with social ideals, and a change of perspective, but I also thought I wanted a bit of glamour.

Fast forward a couple years: It turns out I love living here and am far more comfortable with my role in a small family-like school than I was in an environment with higher stakes all around. There’s a lot more to life than big names and big cities. And Weimar, as it turns out, is known for ideas and culture. It is also home to the people I’ve become close to, who are lovely indeed.

The question surprised me when it came because I hadn’t thought of it myself: Do you regret it?

No, not at all.

We finished the apples, reorganized the rope, and tied back in. Time to move on.

But I’ve been thinking about the question, and what I’ve found most interesting is not that it was asked, but that I hadn’t asked it. That’s not to say it’s been easy moving here, and being in a bigger city would have made certain things significantly easier at the beginning. My early blog posts about the move to Weimar only scratch the surface of everything I was holding inside at that time, and some old voice memos indicate that I’d been lying awake. But regret? Even when it was hard, there was no regret. I’d made a choice, and I’d made the choice for a reason, and that was the best I could do at that time. Perhaps it wasn’t the best reason and perhaps something else would have come along had I waited patiently, but I didn’t want to wait. I wanted the certainty of knowing. I had savings from years in Singapore, I saw a climbing hall when I looked at a map, and that was good enough.

Making choices means that we’ll never know what would have happened had we made a different choice. While I can smile at the question of what my life would have become had I, at 19 or 20, learned Italian and gone to Florence for a semester as I’d planned upon entering university, I don’t need to spend any more time thinking about it. I made a different choice and that was that. It was the best I could do at the time, and the only thing I can do going forward is remain aware of what has developed since. Just because I made a choice once doesn’t mean I have to make a similar choice in a similar situation in the future. Saying yes once because I didn’t want to wait doesn’t mean I have to say yes the next time.

Learning from an experience must not mean regretting having had the experience. Unfortunately, negative experiences are excellent teachers, and I find that we need those sometimes. When everything is easy, there’s little opportunity for reflection, and it is through reflection that we grow. I don’t see that as something to regret.

Do I regret moving here? Do I regret my impatience in wanting a job? Do I regret giving up the dreams of glamour and prestige?

No.

In the end, Weimar had a climbing hall and I’ve always been one to choose the café on the corner over the hot new spot. Maybe I know myself better than I thought.

Photos, travels, musings, and ideas on education by someone trying to make the world a better and more peaceful place