Tübingen – Donau

Day 21

We got on an express bus to connect with the train that went to our final ‘away’ destination, but it stopped just outside of town because of a malfunction? It was pretty weird, especially with how the bus driver chose to deal with it – by pulling into a gas station and yelling at other bus drivers, trying to get their attention so they would… stop and help him? somehow? Anyway, eventually he got back on with someone else who just made him drive the rest of the way, idk. Then we took a tiny little train (almost a glorified tram rather than a train) that ended in the village of Neuffen. You look up, and you see the castle.

We got to the edge of the parkland that surrounded the mountain (there’s a playground that includes a small zipline, I tried it out wheeeee), and from there climbed pretty much straight up for a ways, then had a little snack on a bench surrounded by wildflowers. Then we went into the forest, and proceeded to get lost of course. It was my fault as usual, I saw a path that looked much more interesting than the path we were on. And we certainly saw some very nice trees and rocks. The higher we got, the more we expected to see the castle – but apparently it’s not close enough to the edge of the slope to be visible through the trees like that. We had lunch on a bench when we finally made it to the top; Tharash had bought a pretzel.

The castle is in kind of a half-preserved-but-still-mostly-ruined state. It has so many big shapes and structures, and it just keeps going up. Y’know what’s weird is actually my paranoia settled down a bit here; I reasoned that if it hasn’t fallen down yet despite being 1000 years old, it’ll last a few more days. So I could better enjoy going into cavernous storerooms and climbing towers. The stone was very cold in the shade, I can definitely imagine the storerooms being very effective as a fridge for dairy and meat. They also have lovely acoustics.

There are even a few trees growing on top of certain towers, which boggles my mind a bit. We saw some birds of prey in the distance. From the very highest tower, I took a 300° panorama. There’s such a view of the valleys on one side, and the hills on the other, it feels like being on top of the world. And I imagine how that felt to the people who originally lived there, who didn’t have things like skyscrapers or planes (not that those give the same feeling anyway…).

There’s a little café in one building that’s been restored enough for functions, and so we got some tea and cake with the view from the terrace. I couldn’t quite catch for myself the vibe of being a medieval person, but oh well, it was very tasty. I had mandarin orange cheesecake and Tharash had apple pie.

Hohenneuffen
– Aesthetic: 8/10 – excellent partially restored preserved ruin.
– Fortifications: 10/10 – with the steep paths, the multiple gates, the drawbridge/arch, the multiple layers of being able to aim down at attackers, not to mention the defensive terraforming of later centuries, it looks pretty formidable.
– Historicity: 7/10 – I kind of wish a little more of it was restored so you felt more what it was like to live there, but it’s very fun to explore all the different routes around the castle.
– Location: 9/10 – commands the most amazing view, you can see it and be seen by it for miles
Total castle rating: 8.5/10

Our walk back down was incredibly uneventful because we actually followed the path. Back at our dorm, we cooked dinner – a baked dish involving eggs and vegetables. We made a new friend named Sam, who works at the university (doing a doctorate?); he’s from America but he and his wife came for degrees in Germany. We traded Discord info but haven’t spoken since lol. So goes Discord acquaintances.

Day 22

We slept in a bit, and then went into the old town to look for any last souvenirs we wanted. Tharash had been hoping to find a specific folk-metal CD by a German band, but unfortunately this small-ish town was not the place to find large CD shops. We walked by the BDSM Spiderman again, and we went to some of the souvenir stores by the markets. There were tons of things I could have bought for my family; one thing I got for my dad was the tinest bottle of Tübingen whisky. I also got a couple of little ammonite fossils; apparently they’re so common in the area that you can just buy them, cut in half and polished.

We went for a bit of a walk on the island in the middle of the river, and saw how the trees there are basically all strapped together to keep them from falling over. Medical issues? Anyway I really needed a bathroom after that, and there was a public washroom just below the church with the organ, but only one stall had toilet paper left. D: We then went to an organ lunch concert in the church, which was free. It was probably by a student, as their pieces did not have a lot of pedal, and it was a bit weak. Still, I got to hear the organ again! And it’s good practice for whoever it was.

We had lunch on the island, and then went back to the church to climb the bell tower. You have to go through the rafters to get to the tower. I think we saw our residence but I’m not totally sure which building it was exactly.

Then we took the bus to the university botanical garden, which was huge. Everything was carefully labelled, of course, but there were so many plants from all over the world, including many from Japan and Canada which stood out to me. Also interesting was the pharmaceuticals corner where they had plants that were used in medicines, y’know before we figured out how to extract the useful chemicals out of the plants. There was a massive tropical greenhouse with multiple staircases to upper levels and look-outs. There were ponds, and a big old catfish. There were a lot of plants that provide spices for our spice cupboards, but it wasn’t the flowering or fruiting season so we didn’t see the edible parts for most of them.

There was, oddly enough, a display of beans in a hallway – it seems there are varieties all over the world, and they had a collection of a dozen or so of as many types as they could get. There was also a cactus garden, and man they look pretty funny. For some reason there was a very small aquarium room with shiny little fish? Then the garden was closing soon so we left, and we hadn’t even seen half of it yet haha.

We returned to our residence to rest, we were pretty tired. We had maybe pushed a bit too hard at the garden, underestimated how big it would be. We got in touch with Khem, who suggested four different places for dinner, but each of us preferred a different two of the places, so Khem suggested burgers. So we got burgers. I had a Mediterranean burger, which came with a tiny side salad with honey mustard dressing that was very good. Then we went to get ice creams. I got a scoop of cookie-flavoured ice cream, but Tharash decided to get something fancy. Unfortunately I forget what exactly.

Day 23

Okay I didn’t make notes for the travel back home, because I wasn’t expecting to take six+ months to write it out. But we took the train back to Stuttgart, which is in the middle of building a new hauptbahnhof, and that got us on a high-speed train to Cologne. They showed the top speed on the screen that shows the next station, and I think we got over 350km/h, iirc. In Cologne, I went to use the washroom, which cost a euro but that’s fine (I think they have contactless payment, which is much more convenient than needing to have a euro coin). Tharash went to get a snack, and got a tomato strudel! Then we made it in to Amsterdam, and then to Diemen, and we relaxed there for the evening.

In the morning, Tharash took me to Schiphol, because his train back home goes through Schiphol so it wasn’t out of his way in the slightest. I was super impressed by the security at Schiphol, it was so smooth and efficient – like you know the bins that you put your stuff in to go through the x-ray machine? After you use them, they go in a slot that takes them to a hidden conveyor belt that deposits them back at the beginning! No one has to gather them up and carry them over to the start, no one at the start is ever waiting for a bin, it’s fantastic! Why is that not standard everywhere??? Also they don’t ask you to take your liquids/gels and laptops out of your bag, although they might ask your shoes off if they’re bigger than sneakers/slip-ons. The real pain came at the passport scan stations, it’s more or less automated but it’s still rather slow and they only have like six booths.

But eventually I made it into the airport and made a beeline for the Tony’s Chocolonely store, where I bought several flavours, a couple of which I hadn’t seen at the import store near my house at home. After that, I think my plane went through Toronto, and I had a long and dull wait there. I walked around several times, and I found something that looked like stroopwafels with maple syrup instead of regular stroopwafel syrup – I’d been wondering if that was possible, so I felt vindicated. Eventually I got on my last plane, but I’m annoyed at the crew – they called zone 1, zone 2, zone 3… and then instead of calling zone 4, or “all zones”, they did their “final call, everyone should be on the plane now” and then had the audacity to be annoyed at me for freaking out a little. And I wasn’t the only person caught out by that.

At least the running sunset was beautiful, as we chased it west. When night fell, it was very difficult to see what was below the plane. I could see the lights of towns and cities, but I couldn’t tell when we were over Vancouver, for instance. Anyway, it was good to be home.

One thing I didn’t show until now were the collector’s coins that I bought from several different locations.

Most of these came out of special vending machines. The Heidelberg machine was broken so I bought it from the shop stall that owned the machine. The Aachen, Cochem, and Heidelberg are all from the same set, they all have “National Tokens – Deutsche Münzkollektion 2023” on the back along with an image of the outline of Germany with the Brandenburg Gate inset in it. Bruges has on the back “National Tokens – Belgian Heritage 2023” with an outline of Belgium with the letter B set in it. It’s also silvery compared to the gold colour of the German ones. The Tübingen and Hohenneuffen ones are obviously pressed pennies, because I couldn’t find more matching ones but the designs looked cool anyway.

And I’m going to do it all again in nine hours tomorrow. Whoo!

EDIT: and now I’m back and have to write more blog posts!!!!