Organic What?!?

The sign translates “Organic Book Store (Books on Paper)”

This was in the bookstore window in Rinteln, Germany. “Bio-” in German is the same as “organic” in US English. Biokartoffeln, for example, means organic potatoes. “Organisch-” is reserved for things like organic chemistry and other industrial and chemical meanings, which is as it should be (IMHO).

After all the hue-and-cry about paper books being so much better than e-books and e-books are just going to disappear like the fad they are, I just had to take a photo of the cartoon. I don’t know if it was a poster or if it was clipped from a magazine or newspaper.

It was a bit more subtle than the following:

“Who loves* books buys [them] in the bookstore.” The sign was outside an old-n-used book store and was on a sandwich-board, about a meter tall by sixty centimeters wide.

*For those of us who learned German a “few” years ago, using the verb lieben to mean “love of books” is a bit jarring. You were only supposed to use Ich liebe to refer to an individual or G-d. Otherwise you said “Das/Der/Die gefält mich sehr.” Saying “Ich liebe Eis!” [I romantic love ice-cream] got you either giggles or seriously concerned sideways glances.

Edited to add: Good morning, Instapunderati! Thanks for stopping by.

Wandering Around Ein Feste Burg

One of the places we used as a “home base” this past June was Bad Pyrmont. It is a town with fascinating geology, in the Weser River Valley, tucked away in some hills. It has limestone around it, and a great deal of natural faulting, probably related to the Rhine Graben, or rift-valley, not too far away. Because of the faulting, there are a number of mineral springs that bubble up, and some sinkholes of interest, and a CO2 cave where people used to go and “dry bathe” in CO2 up to their chins. In 1556-1562, it became a princely seat, and a Baroque hunting lodge was added in 1706, and then a spa developed. Goethe and a few other minor German cultural figures spent time there, as did Peter the Great of Russia, and today it is a very nice, quiet, city with good historical guides, lovely parks, and several spa hotels. And a water-castle.

Show Museum or Teaching Museum?

You probably can tell without my saying much that I am a sucker for museums. Art museum, science museum, history museum, folk-life museum, botanical garden, I’ll probably at least poke my head in to see if it looks promising. I’ve been very, very fortunate to be able to visit, and re-visit, many of the great art and history museums north of the Alps, like the Kunsthistorischesmuseum [Art History Museum] in Vienna three times, the Gamäldegalarie [painting gallery] in Berlin twice, and a few others, like the Louvre (twice over two days. Don’t bother with the southern art section, IMHO).

Where’s That in the Bible?

One of the fascinating little churches I poked my nose into on this past trip was St. Thomas in Tribsee. Although it is now Protestant (Lutheran), like every other church in the region, it began as Catholic and during the Reformation, the parishioners saved some of the artwork, including a fascinating altarpiece. The church was affiliated with a Cistercian Monastery. It was Cistercians who first moved into the area and developed farming and livestock-raising. You are in the swampy part of Germany, and the Cistercians looked for empty wilderness to move into. They found lots of it up in this area, between Hamburg and Rostock.

Focus on the central panels.

Huh?

Roses – Imported and Domestic

The roses were near peak when I was in Germany.

This was growing in a street near the Elbe river. Author’s finger for scale.

We saw amazing roses all over the place.  Like this specimen from Bad Pyrmont, on a fence by houses behind the church above the spa district.

The World’s Marketplace: Bruges

Walk the streets of Bruges, Belgium just at dawn, when all is quiet and no cars, bikes, and tour busses rumble over cobblestone streets. Admire the shops, study the Renaissance buildings and houses, watch the waters of the canals lapping the old channel walls, and imagine what the city was like when all the trade of Northern Europe and much of Northern Italy passed through the great market square. Because for two hundred years and more, Bruges was one of Christendom’s great markets, a place of trade and art and politics, where anything was for sale and where artists created works that move the spirit to this day, where women managed businesses and their own spiritual lives, sometimes at the same time.

Twelve Gates to the City…

Edited to Add: Howdy and welcome, Instapunderati! Thanks for stopping by.

Old-World cities had walls. That was part of what defined a city – it could defend itself. Its residents had a duty to defend it as part of their being citizens. (And I’ll note that this applied to women as well, at least in some of the Imperial Free Cities. Women who had the right to do business on their own also had duties for defense.) A city without walls wasn’t a real city, it was just a place where a lot of people lived at the mercy of any group of armed men who happened to be passing by.

Wismar and its walls during the Hanse years.