Why Dessau isn't a Disneyland

Why doesn't Dessau push its Bauhaus heritage a little more?

For a few glorious years in the 1920s, it was here that some of the most influential work was done at the famed Bauhaus school. Its workshops pushed out texile, interior, and industrial design brilliance. Artists like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy were lured into teaching positions. Even the city joined the Bauhaus-ing craze and commissioned a work office and a housing estate.

Yet, they only finished a museum to Bauhaus' influentia output last year. The Masters' Houses are five homes inspired by Bauhaus' design concepts. They look lovely on the outside -- gleaming white concrete blocks in a stand of pine ona quiet residential street -- but, they're underfurnished on the inside. They designed furniture, after all!

The exception to this underappreciation is the original Bauhaus building. Long since re-purposed for tourists, it houses contemporary art exhibition spaces, a Bauhaus store, and a canteen in the basement. You can even spend the night in one of the old student dorm rooms.

Why isn't more of the city optimized for taking toursitic advantage of its Bauhaus awesome-ness?

First, it might only be design and architecrure nerds interested in making the pilgrimage to Dessau. That's not a big demographic, so the town might be as optimized for Bauhaus tourism as it can get.

That reality check aside, let's remember Bauhaus was a design school at the local university, and Dessau is still a university town. In fact, it feels like a calm, rich university town that's comfortably cashing in on some of its Bauhaus fame.

But, that's not the only side of Dessau.

The city is modernizing its old, dreary East Bloc pre-fabricated apartment buildings, or Plattenbau's, but the DDR's clumsy fingerprints are all over this town, from the ramshackle sidewalks to questionable city planning that puts a playground beside a highway.

This is a blue-collared town, and it feels like it. Just a few blocks down from the Bauhaus building is a magnesium smelter. The folks you meet here aren't just university professors and design nerds. They're workers and 9-to5-ers. Guys in coveralls drinking a beer at their local kiosks or taking their kids to a playground beside the highway before supper. Or both. My kind of people.

A good Discovery Walk reveals a lot more of Dessau. The beautiful nature parks. The winding bike paths along the Elbe river. The old, princely palaces. The friendly folks. The tasty local beers. Bauhaus isn't the only star in town.

And some Bauhaus architectural landmarks aren't treated like fancy architectural landmarks. They're still used for their original purpose. The work office is still a work office. I was chased out by a security guard when I poked my head inside. The Kornhaus is still a lovely restaurant on the banks of the Elbe, perfect for a lunch and a cold Weizenbier. 

Wasn't that the spirit of Bauhaus? Architecture and design made for the people. Accessible for everyone.

It's refreshing that Dessau hasn't Disney-nified its Bauhaus heritage or put tourism before its own residents. It's a better place to visit when Dessau itself is able to shine. 

One of Dessau's many beautiful nature parks.

Quest for a German Drivers' License

Patiently posing in front of our rental

I meet a Canadian at the rental car desk. While he filled out my reservation, we exchanged stories about ending up in Germany. His hometown was up the road from mine, Kitchener-Waterloo. Like many folks from there, he's of German descent, so it wasn't too hard for him to get a work visa and come over during a gap year that turned into a few years.

While we talked about life in Germany as a Canadian, he asked me about my address. Like every time I rent a car in Germany, there was a pause as I reminded myself to provide my Canadian address instead of my German one. He understood right away.

As a permanent resident, German authorities would prefer if I got a German drivers' license. When I rent a car I let them believe I'm visiting from Canada. It's not illegal, since my license is valid, but I should have a German drivers' license if I live in Germany. My new Canadian acquaintance had recently done this, and understood the patience and strength it takes to drive through that part of the German Kafka-cracy.

If Germany decides your country is on its level of driving excellence, you simply exchange your foreign license for a German license. Of course, you need the right papers.

A First Aid Course in German

German drivers must pull over to help someone in distress, rather than the traditional North American Let's-Slow-Down-And-Rubber-Neck as you pass by. This means, you need a first aid certificate.

The course I found was in a hotel basement, where they also threw in an eye test, which is also needed for a license exchange. The course was in German, so it was a first aid lesson, an eye test, and a German lesson all rolled into one. Good deal. The only other non-German speaker was an IT worker from India. He was also taking a driving course because Germany doesn't look as favourably on Indian licenses as my Canadian license and wouldn't exchange it. He had to earn his German drivers license from scratch, so this was one stop on a longer journey for him. The two of us muddled through the German details of the course together and followed along with the demonstrations.

I apologize in advance if I pull over to help you on a German roadside.

The 1st Government Appointment

Like my other bureaucratic adventure in Germany, the rule of thumb for a foreigner is that you won't get it done in one appointment. There is always some paper you're missing. I find this frustrating, but friends who grew up in East Bloc communist dictatorships find this comfortingly familiar.

Of course, I forgot about this rule. I strutted into the office. I spoke my crappy German and proudly laid out my documents. The man looked it over and asked me for a driver history. Why? I have all my papers! Nope, I did not. I had gotten my Canadian drivers' license renewed after I arrived in Germany, which suggests to the German Powers-That-Be that I only recently earned my drivers' license. I needed a driving history from my home province to prove that I've been driving for 20 years.

Oh, and the translation of my Canadian drivers license wasn't acceptable either. It must be translated by someone certified by the government. The only place for that is the ADAC, Germany's version of CAA, which  shares the building with the government's transport office that I was in. How convenient!

Playing the Waiting Game

To get a complete driving history I wrote a letter asking for my drivers' license history, not the history of all my vehicular brushes with death or maiming. I signed the letter and mailed it, like my forefathers. It's a bureaucracy, so they don't accept Visa. I wrote a cheque, also like my forefathers and I waited… And waited…

Over a month later, I received my reply. My request required a different kind of request because I was in foreign country, so the amount in the cheque was not sufficient. Could I send another cheque? I wrote another polite, formal letter. Signed another cheque. Did my walk of shame to the post office, and then I waited again for the Ontario government to open my letter, walk to the bank, cash my cheque, chat idly with the bank teller about the weather, then return to the office to write my official drivers' with ink and quill.

The Waiting Game Continues…

Months later, the drivers' history finally arrived. I went to the ADAC with all my papers and said it my crappy German, "Frau! I would like a translation, please." She copied all the important driving papers and I got a receipt.

Like so many times, I'm my own worst enemy. I was so accustomed to waiting months for important papers that I didn't read the German fine print on my receipt. I waited two months and started muttering about the awful ADAC. I had a mind to call and vent, so I dug up my receipt looking for some contact information and discovered the pick-up date for my drivers' license translation was a month ago. Yep! I'm a genius.

I picked up my papers and marched into the drivers' license government office. Triumphantly laying out all my papers. Speaking my still-crappy German. When I laid out my first aid stuff, the lady waved it away. She did carefully examine my drivers' history, so that wait was worth it. When everything was signed and stamped, I was told the drivers' license would arrive in two weeks. And wouldn't you know it, it arrived in two weeks. The rusty cogs of German bureaucracy certainly get moving when you have all your papers.

See you on the Autobahn!

Visiting Eltz Castle

If you don't have access to a car, it isn't easy to reach Eltz Castle. There's no train access, since it's a castle up in the hills. Bus service is intermittent because it's partway between Koblenz and Trier – which means it's not near anywhere. For a normal plebs like us, visiting the castle at Eltz was a distant goal. Until the Hungarian family arrived in a car for a visit and were easily convinced to take on a road trip to Eltz Castle.

It's a two-and-a-half drive from the Dorf to the entrance of gravel parking lot on the Eltz estate where you pay the old man a couple of euros to park. If you roll past him, as we saw a Dutch family do, he will shake his fist at you until you return to his booth and pay him.

Then you walk into a nature reserve and hike a half kilometer along a forest trail that goes around a hill, edging a deep ravine. Eventually, you turn an outcropping of basalt and there's the castle, standing on a rocky crag in a valley.

It's then that you appreciate the difficulty to reaching this place. As a veteran of Neuschwanstein Castle, I was half-expecting crowds of people, sausage vendors, pretzel pushers, and kiosks serving frosty glasses of Weissbier. There's none of that tourist nonsense near Eltz castle. It's just a castle surrounded by nature.

Bringing Up a Baby in Germany

Four years ago, I was my way to the Dusseldorf airport from a job interview and started chatting with my cab driver. He had three kids and, in response to my impressed look, he laughed and said, "It's up to us, the Arabs and the Canadians to make the babies here, because the Germans aren't making them!"

So, my son was born earlier this month in a German hospital to a Hungarian mother and a Canadian father, and I did my small part to fulfill Germany's economic goal of replacing the ranks of its aging population with a beautiful hybrid baby boy. And what an international love child! He'll get his mother's command of the Hungarian language and his father's Canadian English, along with a German education, starting out in a Kindergarten.

The country he will grow up in is as international as he is, though it's still different from my own settler state of a homeland. My mother, born in Canada to Dutch immigrants, still remembers attending the ceremony where her parents, brother, and sister were made Canadian citizens.

Those ceremonies are still celebrated by soon-to-be citizens and Canadians like me, who grew accustomed to seeing short clips of these ceremonies on the local evening news – back when people used to get their news from the TV.

You won't find that in Germany, or elsewhere in Europe. There's no Ministry of Multiculturalism and Germany doesn't bill itself as a Promised Land. It's the World's Workshop and it needs skilled workers. This is a transactional relationship, which is why there are so many foreigners in Germany and why so many of them come and go. It's not that they can't hack it – although many will give you an earful about the food, weather, language, or bureaucracy – it's just the way it goes in the European Union. People move where the opportunities are and their host countries accept them, with little pomp or ceremony. My Syrian cab driver wasn't far off, Germany is still a country that relies on its guest workers, even for their babies.

But those Syrian cab drivers, Hungarian designers, and Canadian copywriters who stay have found something beyond the pragmatic benefits for living and working in Germany. Sure, we contribute to, and enjoy the benefits of, a functioning social welfare system. And that system may care little about whether we stick around, but there are times where we have met informal multicultural ministers in Germany. Like the patient government workers who hear our faltering German and reply slowly, clearly, and respectfully for our German-novice ears. Or the helpful colleagues and friends who've offered advice or included us in some local custom, which often involves beer and/or raw meat.

When you stick with it, good things come to you here. It often takes the barest of minimums, like using your lousy German or keeping an open mind. Then, gradually, you lay down some roots. You feel less like a guest worker and the whole thing doesn't feel like a transactional relationship.

As the years go by, as the character of Germany evolves with those of us who stay and make a life here, I'm excited to see what my son will encounter. He will never have experienced this awkward guest worker phase that we endure. He'll be a local kid born in Germany with foreigner parents, like many other kids he'll meet at school. What will his generation bring to their Germany?

Not Beating the Heat Wave

I think this heat wave is beginning to affect the Germans. The other day, on a crowded, stuffy bus, a man threw up between his legs at his seat and tried to act natural about it. It didn't work. I left the bus to escape its fresh barf smell and witnessed a homeless man jump in front of a hose, which a storeowner was using to water a tree along the sidewalk. The storeowner seemed, surprisingly, nonplussed.

It's the third or fourth week of the heat wave that's scorching northern Europe and it's starting to show. Businessmen in suits melt into their seats on the train, kindergarten teachers chase their young charges in slow motion, and city workers lean a little more heavily on their shovels.

This is a country that is not only completely unused to this heat, but completely unprepared for it. In Southern Ontario, I would've retreated to an air conditioned room with blackout curtains and stayed until September. Here, few have the luxury of air conditioning. Many apartments have wide windows that are great for letting the air flow through it, but not so good for summer heat waves were the temperature doesn't drift below 25 degrees some nights.

The trains, trams, and buses are no better. Most have small windows, designed to let a little air in, but are sealed shut to keep the spring-winter-autumn chill out. In this weather, they've been mobile saunas, 

Offices are not spared either. At Ogilvy, we used shutters to keep the sun out and windows to let the breeze in to avoid using the air conditioning, which was used so seldom that it was always set to Arctic and people would run to the thermostat and shut off the vent above their work station. When enough people did this, the air conditioning was pretty much turned off and we'd switch to shutters and windows again.

My office in Aachen also lacks air conditioning, so we're also relying on windows for a cool breeze, or at least a warm breeze, and shutters, which for some reason open suddenly for no reason other than to blind the workers inside with searing, hot sunlight. The heat in the office can be so debilitating that many of my colleagues avoid coming into the office and work from home, where they can at least stay cool and, if they're like me, work in basketball shorts and an undershirt.

When I do work from home, our apartment turns into a cool bunker. The shutters – first floor apartments in Germany have shutters over the windows, in case of burglars, peepers, and zombies – are shut and a fan is strategically set up.

Usually the German summer is a benign thing and the Germans partake in summer activities with typical efficiency. They patiently line up at ice cream shops, many stretching around the corner. On sunnier days, locals dash for the public parks, peeling off layers, while the rest of us are getting our shorts and miniskirts from storage. By the end of May, most of Germany is walking about, bronzed from laying in public parks under the sun, and happily eating their ice cream.

This summer is different. In the heat wave's first week, I'd see people who thought they could handle an afternoon of tanning in the park. They looked like they fell asleep in a brick kiln – bright red, visibly thirsty, stumbling to the shade. They still haven't quite discovered the North American cooling tactic: the movie theatre. We've watched a couple flicks and haven't had to fight a crowd to get good seats.

They have, however, gone running to the local lakes and pools. On Sunday, we went to a pool/strand in the Dorf's north end. Getting there was like crossing a desert. The grass is scorched brown and I was sure I saw a sun-bleached buffalo skull. Waiting on the platform to change trains was like looking through the haze in the Badlands. The train seemed like a mirage.

At the pool/strand, people laid towels on the burnt, brown grass or flocked to the shade under the trees and tents. But the water, with no clouds in the sky, was blue and cool. It was perfect, and you couldn't appreciate how great a swim that like that is unless you're coping with a heat wave in a country that is still learning how to handle heat waves.

The Badlands of the Dorf

A Day Over in Hanover

Whenever we got lost in Hanover,
we looked for the "Witch Church' to orient ourselves.

Cities in Northern Germany are studies in contradictions.

Bremen is a blue-collared, working class city, where beer brewers and factory workers rub shoulders with students and artists. That strange mixture gives you a city that's grounded and unpretentious, yet still artistic and surprising. My kind of city.

Hamburg is a sprawl of sailors, refugees, drifters, musicians, bankers, ship owners, and old money at the mouth of the Elbe River. It's a city of work ethic and debauchery, with a worldliness that accepts everything and anything, because there are better things to do than judge someone for who they are or what they do – like make money or party.

To the south of these fine towns is Hanover, a mid-sized city that's a little tougher to pin down.

Every region in Germany speaks German a little different, from the rocks-in-your-mouth dialect in Cologne to the Bavarians' take on the language, which the rest of Germany unjustifiably snickers at. I've been told the German that Hanoverians speak is as close as you can get to the original High German. I'm no expert, but the German I heard in Hanover was definitely clearer and easier to understand for the slow-learning, novice German-speaker.

Hanover is a city that wears its white collar stiffly, but unlike other German cities, Hanover is not a city of bankers or chemists or engineers. It's a city of culture. There are theatres everywhere, an opera house with a packed schedule, and enough museums and art galleries to please every artistic inclination.

And yet, our only full day in the city was a Monday, so every museum in the city was closed. The Sprengel and its collection of 20th centuries masterpieces was off limits. The Kestnergesellschaft was a no go. The edgy, ultra-modern KUBUS was not edgy enough to be not closed for the day.

And since this is February, the Botanical Gardens and the gardens around the Schloss Herrenhaus would have been a dreary, cold walks. The giant forest in the middle of the city would have been nice, but barren. 

But this is turning into a blog post about what we didn't do, let's get down to what we did do.

We wandered around Hanover's lovely old town. We ate pizza at an amazing Italian place – by the way, the best Italian food I've eaten has been at Italian-owned restaurants in Germany, not tourist traps in Italy. We froze walking around the old city hall and the local man-made lake. We warmed up over kaffee and kuchen. We even did a little window shopping.

Clearly visiting on a Museum Monday in February meant what we didn't get a complete sense of the city's culture or its big cityforest. So a return trip with better weather on any day other than a Monday might in order. Even with 36 hours in the city, Hanover showed it's depth, we just need to time it better.

The Ruins of Xanten

Xanten's temple.

To see what remains of the Romans in this corner of Europe, you take a train to Duisberg. There, you change trains and ride northwest, in the direction of the Netherlands.

You leave the Rhineland, and enter the Lower Rhine. As you ride to your destination — that train's last stop — the land flattens out, towns spread out with more cows grazing between them, the houses look more Dutch than German, and there are more signs selling raw herring.

After a nearly two-hour train ride, you're in Xanten, Germany.

The Roman ruins are in a fenced park just outside the small, old town. The fence runs along where the Roman city's walls once stood. There is a glass-and-steel museum, built over the remains of the Roman bathhouse. There's a temple, an amphitheatre, a rebuilt gate.

We arrived on a day when the park's staff had erected dozens of tents to house craftspeople making Roman-style leather and metalwork, carving stone blocks, and braiding hair in the Roman style. Kids were everywhere, trying the activities out.

Kids or not, it's a great afternoon out, especially on a sunny day.

"Are you not entertained?!?"

We've come across Roman ruins in Pecs, Hungary; Sofia, Bulgaria; Istria in Croatia; Trier, Germany; and, yes, Rome.

Considering the amount of ruins that can be visited across Europe, Rome's leftovers can seem as commonplace as McDonald's — for number of locations and their architectural consistency. I've seen two city gates now, a few temples, the colosseum, a few smaller colosseums, ampitheatres, a bathhouse, and various rocks, bricks, stones, column stubs, and ancient foundations.

It's not that I get tired of seeing it in so many places. It's the opposite: I'm in awe that I see them all over the place.

We can all appreciate the Romans' ability to build incredible feats of engineering without modern technology, but their ability to build these feats in so many places, and that so many have survived, is astonishing.

It takes hard work to achieve that kind of ancient standardization.

Much of the stone in Xanten was shipped in from quarries to the south. The town layout was in a grid pattern, with exact 90 degree angles. Xanten's gate was built to similar specifications of the gate in Trier. And it was linked with the rest of the Roman Empire by the roads that led to Rome, the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

One of the great things about living in Europe is how close you live to history. Sometimes, you discover a slice of people's lives from a long time ago or bask in the glory of some medieval ruler. In rare cases, you're able to wrap your head around the scope of an ancient empire. 

The museum and the bathhouse exhibit, built to the bathhouse's specifications but with different materials.

Contemporary Art Snaps

Yesterday I was finishing up what was promising to be a fairly decent blog, and then Blogger decided to tell me I saved my draft and then didn't save the draft. An entire day's work was gone and I was left with the rough and raw first draft, which can feel worse than a blank page.

So, as I rewrite the post, hoping I will recreate yesterday's magic, I decided to post a more visual blog today.

Last month, I wrote about the contemporary collection at Düsseldorf's K21. This wasn't the first time I've seen contemporary art and I occasionally snap photos of stuff that I like, that tickles my funny bone, or that I just find peculiar.

Here's a selection of those snaps:

 

The basement of London's Tate Modern used to be
fuel tanks for the power plant. Now they store creations like
these little guys.   

The Vatican Museum is famous for its Renaissance collection, however its modern and contemporary collections also have some gems, like this one. 

An installation of cardboard boxes strewn across a courtyard in Venice
 during the city's international art festival.

I visited Kosice, Slovakia while it was an EU Cultural Capital, which meant lots of art exhibitions,
including this inflatable missile launcher.

Krakow"s MOCAK is next door to Oskar Schindler's factory. Naturally, those times loom large enough to parody them.

A disturbing rendering of Dozsa Gyorgy's execution in the Hungarian National Gallery.

  

Ghent is a real artsy town,
so SMAK (Flemish acronym for Museum of Contemporary Art) is worth a visit.  

A whale skeleton made from patio chairs in Ottawa's National Gallery.

Camels grazing in the National Gallery at Ottawa.

Nice German Places You Wouldn’t Want to Visit 1000 Years Ago

Some day someone will perfect time travel, opening an extreme time travel tourism industry for the German medieval ages. War, famine, plagues, massacres, bad food, awful hygiene, and religious fanaticism will appear on our social media feeds. If the past gets 3G coverage.

While we wait for time travel scientists to get it together and discover how to bend time and space so we can take selfies with Charlemagne, we must settle on seeing what’s left of medieval Germany right here.

North Rhine-Westphalia, the state I live in, is a fine place to discover German’s violent and, with the benefit of hindsight, exciting medieval roots. 

Münster I

This calm city, named for that Addams-esque TV family, is an easy-going university town today with street-side cafes and bike lanes leading every which way along its tree-lined avenues.

During the Reformation, it was a little less academic and a lot more anarchic. Anabaptists revolted against the Catholic-Protestant government and took control of the city. They were early Amish, Quakers, and Mennonites – although these guys were more violent and dogmatic than their kinder, friendlier, barn-building ancestors.

They renamed the town New Jerusalem and established a proto-communist state, abolishing private property and rebaptising its people.

This angered both the Catholics and the Protestants, so in a rare show of cooperation, they gathered an army and laid siege to the town.

Nerves frayed in the city. People were going hungry. There was talk of surrender. After the Anabaptist leader was killed in battle, his successor made polygamy legal and rushed to marry Münster’s prettiest women before telling the townspeople.

The town fell and was promptly looted and pillaged. The generals tortured and executed the leaders, and, deciding that wasn’t bloody enough, stuffed the bodies into cages hanging from a church tower. The cages are still there. Münster is macabre too, man.

Look a little closer...

There are the Anabaptist death cages.

Kaiserspfalz of Kaiserswerth

Sitting upon a throne, waited upon by servants, receiving supplicants, passing down judgements and wisdom, this was the stuff of kings, not the Holy Roman Emperor.

The Holy Roman Empire, was, to paraphrase a smarter person, neither holy nor roman nor an empire. It was a collection of hundreds of small states run by princes, counts, bishops, kings, and dukes who elected an emperor with just enough power not to annoy any of the princes, counts, bishops, kings, or dukes.

Think of it as a feudal European Union. Its borders included modern day Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Northern Italy, and parts of Poland, France, Belgium and Holland.

Emperors mostly ruled from horseback. They traveled all over the realm, dealing with complaints, but mostly putting down rebellions. 

To make things easier, the emperor and his imperial posse stayed in a network of castles, called Kaiserspflazes. It was safer, and he could count on good food and clean bedsheets, and he knew where the secret passages were. 

The castle at Kaiserswerth used to be on an island in the Rhine, so it was an important defensive fortification and an imperial crash pad.

What's left of the imperial crash pad at Kaiserswerth.

Münster II

Most medieval towns’ story would end after a bloody suppression of a revolt, but Münster would bounce back because the whole Catholic-Protestant mess was still unresolved. 

The Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire made peace. If your prince was of a certain religion you had to convert or leave, this applied to Catholics, Calvinists and Anabaptists – but not Lutherans, who could stay and still be Lutheran.

The new Catholic Holy Roman Emperor tried to make everyone in the empire Catholic, which angered the Protestants. The Protestants of Bohemia (part of today’s Czech Republic) stormed Prague Castle, and threw the Catholic leaders out a window – who survived, due to divine intervention, or the short fall, depending on who you asked. 

This started a war. The emperor fought the Bohemians with the help of the Catholic Bavarians. It was a stalemate until the Saxons joined the Catholics, who started winning the war. 

To even things out for the Protestants, Sweden joined the war against the Catholics.

The Swedes and all the Protestant Germans were now winning, so Catholic Spanish joined the war to bail out the emperor (who was related to the king of Spain) and also fight the Dutch, who they've been fighting before this war.

Now the Catholics were winning, but Catholic France was not comfortable with being surrounded by two rivals (Holy Roman Empire and Spain), even though they were all Catholic. So they joined the Protestant side.

This went on for 30 years, which is what the war was called, because originality was killed in the war along with millions of people. They ran out of energy and signed a few treaties, known as the Peace of Westphalia, ending the 30 Years War and, the equally original 80 Years War.

This treaty changed how states interact with each other. They had to respect other states’ sovereignty, especially over territory, politics, and religion. It also recognized Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists were all given legal rights – not Anabaptists, sadly they would be considered heretics, which is really unfair since most of them were pacifists.

This was also the first major international political conference, which changed how states make and keep peace. We wouldn’t have the UN or EU without the Peace of Westphalia, which was signed in Münster.

Munster's city hall, where they signed my favourite
peace treaty: The Peace of Westphalia

Walkin' in Aachen

This city is tucked in a far corner of Germany, close to France and Belgium. It isn’t big, maybe 200,000 or so people, but back in the day when kings were kings with beards and swords, it was Charlemagne’s capital city. He lived here when he wasn’t putting down rebellions, which was mostly what he did.

There isn’t a lot left from those days. Years of kings and other important people who try to outdo the previous generation have torn down and rebuilt the city until it was decimated in the war.

One of the old survivors is the Palatine Chapel. It isn’t the biggest church around – Cologne’s Dom and all those fancy French gothic cathedral are much bigger – but damn is it lovely in its simplicity.

It’s based on a Byzantine design – because it was built in the 800s – so it’s circular, not the usual rectangular or cross shape, and its interior covered with mosaics. It has a vaulted dome, a short tower, and a bell tower. 

It’s ancient. It’s understated. It’s one of the nicest churches I’ve visited in Europe (when you travel in Europe, you poke your head into a lot of old churches).

The Palatine Chapel of Aachen.

The vaulted, mosaic-ed dome inside the Palatine Chapel.

That gold box is Charlemagne's tomb.

The Success of Dorf's Failed Terror Plot

Dusseldorf's Altstadt, during Christmas.

Dusseldorf has made headlines around the world for terror plot.

Four men were arrested on terrorist charges. Half planned to blow themselves up in Dusseldorf's Altstadt, while the other two would shot people in the ensuing confusion. The Altstadt is the centre of the Dorf's nightlife, so it could have been messy if it happened.

What we know is a Syrian man was arrested in France in March and confessed about the attack and his three accomplices, who were arrested after weeks of surveillance.

Kata expressed concern that the Islamic State was coming for Germany after the Paris and Brussels attacks. I shrugged it off; they have to find the Dorf before they can attack it.

Well, they found the Dorf.

It's called a failed plot, but it was successful. Some are thinking twice before going to the Altstadt. Others simply react like they would have been present if it happened – as if the attack would have occurred when they were in the Altstadt for their weekly shopping trip or night out.

But, that's why it's called terrorism: You fear for yourself so much you ignore the outsized odds of even witnessing an attack.

The plot's other success is a slower burn. At least two of the suspects came to Germany along the Migrant Route through Turkey and Greece and recent reports about sleeper cells in refugee camps only add fuel to the fire.

Germany is not France or Belgium, where immigrants are systemically ignored into powerty and extremism. Even before the so-called refugee crisis, Germany had one of Europe's most robust programs for registering migrants and providing them social welfare and language courses.

But that was a different time. 

We're a little more cynical now. We defend liberal ideals and Christian values but refuse to uphold them. We build fences. We elect nationalists. We cut deals with dictators to keep people in need away.

We think we live in dark times, that terrorists are taking advantage of our kindness, that people with the resolve to cross stormy seas and walk hundreds of miles will do nothing but collect welfare cheques when they arrive.

Times are not bad. The suspects were rounded up. We've never been safer from war, disease, and famine. UEFA Euro 2016 is just around the corner and it's the summer. We have so little to fear in the world that we shouldn't forget that now is the perfect time for a drink in the Altsadt.

Dorfy Day Trips: German Downton Abbey

The glorious Schloss Drachenburg, aka German Downton Abbey.

Live long enough in the Northwest Rhineland (a year and a half or so) and you start itching to see if what's beyond Dusseldorf and Cologne. You get curious about the stuff further than a bike ride away. You look at maps and wonder about places with names that seem strange, but familiar. 

Then you get on the train and give it a shot. You head south and decide to see what happens when don't get off at Cologne's big cathedral. You continue down the Rhine into who knows what.


Poor Old Bonn 

Ludwig Beethoven was born in Bonn, started his musical education in its schools and at 21, he left his hometown for his era's Music City, Vienna. 

Vienna has been quietly claiming him as a local boy since the move. He wrote all his great symphonies and sonatas there. These were great years for him, and music in general. But he also went deaf in Vienna. Would that have happened in Bonn? Doubt it. 

The world mostly left Bonn alone until the city woke up one morning in 1949 to discover it was the capital of a new country. 

This wasn't a real country but West Germany, a temporary country formed from the British, French, and American occupation zones. The Soviets created their own East German country from their zone.

The West German chancellor, a hometown boy, made the decision to name Bonn the new capital. Before you start feeling proud for Bonn or start ranting about German pork barrel politics, Konrad Adenauer had his reasons.

The ultimate plan was never to keep Germany separated. Someday they would be reunited and when that day came Berlin was going to be the united Germany's capital. 

He also realized this plan might take a while to come together, so he would need a temporary capital city. Bustling, cosmopolitan Hamburg or Frankfurt (which was briefly the capital of a briefly unified German confederation in 1848) seemed like more obvious choices, but if the capital was moved there it would be difficult to move the government from such big, self-important cities.

Adenauer needed a small, humble place that no one romanticized. He needed a town close enough to a larger city like Cologne to be easy to reach, but far enough away from everything that no one would mind moving for Berlin if they had to. Poor old Bonn was that place.

Not all of the government agencies moved to Berlin. The defence ministry stuck around. As we sat by the Rhine sipping a midday drink in the sun, I realized I also would found it tough to leave this quiet, pretty place on the river.


Wagner's Strange Monument to Wagner

From Bonn's riverside, you can see the Seven Mountains. Two myths come out of these mountains. One is Snow White and her posse of seven dwarves – I'm guessing they each got a mountain. The other myth is about Siegfried and the dragon, which lived in a mountain cave.

If you're not familiar with Richard Wagner's operas or German mythology, Siegfried is a hero who killed this dragon and then bathed in the dragon's blood to become invincible.

Of course he missed a spot – mythic heroes always miss a spot with their invincibility coating – and later his wife betrayed him – yes, German mythology also respects women – by marking an ex on that spot to show another guy where to stab Siegfried while he took a bath in a river.

Some enterprising spirit saw an opportunity in this, and decided to put a strange memorial to Wagner part way up the mountain. Then, just in case that didn't pull in the big bucks, they added a reptile zoo, because of the whole dragon-reptile connection.

Although, as I write this, I'm thinking there might be an opportunity to open a Dragon's Blood Bath and Spa Resort. Oh, wait! Dibs! Patent pending.

 Wagner Land, the perfect place for the kids.

German Downton Abbey

At the top of this mountain is a castle-villa mansion thing. What is it about eccentric millionaires from the 1800s building ostentatious castles based on a mix of Gothic and Medieval. Toronto knows about this.

So, where else should we end this journey deeper into Rhineland than at Schloss Drachenburg.

There's a room for billiards, also known by its other name: Rich People Pool. 

A minimalist backyard.

Oh, hi!

A view to Bonn.

And a few upriver.