Ulm

For Palm Sunday we went to mass at the Augsburg cathedral. Rather than carrying palms, people had little bouquets of pussy willows and boxwood that they brought along to be splashed with holy water. I hadn't been to a German-language Mass in a long time and came to the conclusion that I still can't really understand anything. Understanding readings from the Bible in a thousand year old echo-y cathedral is way beyond my skill level.

Then it was off to Ulm. Tto you Minnesotans out there, Neu Ulm is also a city, right next to Ulm. We liked Ulm. I am not sure why, other than it seemed to be a historical city that you could live in. Like a lot of places in Germany, it was partly destroyed by bombings in World War II, but some old buildings have been restored. And, unlike a lot of places in Germany, Ulm managed to avoid making its newer architecture ugly. The old buildings housed modern shops but still hung on to their character (in Celle, near Hannover, there is a Claire's Boutique in a half-timbered house from the 1600s). The businesses had decorated statues of birds flying off of a lot of the buildings. This one was my favorite, outside a travel agency:

I later learned that Ulm is Albert Einstein's birthplace. But Ulm's big claim to fame is that it has the tallest church steeple IN THE WORLD. The Protestants decided to stick it to the Catholics and made the steeple on the Ulm Munster church just a bit higher than the one at the Cologne cathedral. We went in but decided not to climb up.

Ulm Munster

Ulm is on the Danube river and on a warmer day I could definitely sit on a bench to watch the water flow on to Budapest. The unique thing we did in Ulm (by this point, Medieval churches are pretty routine), was going to the Museum of Bread Culture. The whole museum is about bread - how grain is farmed, ground into flour, mixed, baked, and eaten. It explained the history of the milling and baking guilds in Germany, who used the pretzel as their trademark. There's also a section on hunger and famines throughout history. I like this sort of thoughtfulness about food. Mostly because I like food, but it also because Germany takes a lot of pride in its bread. There's a bakery on most city blocks, with more varieties of rolls and slices and cakes than you can name. It would be like having a pizza museum in Chicago, or a barbecue museum in Kansas City, or a beer museum in New Ulm.