Author: John Bassett

We were so delighted by the Smådalarö Gård that we would happily have spent another day here. But we knew that we needed to be off to the islands, so after a pleasant in the restaurant overlooking the inlet, we packed our bags off and carried them over to the reception desk. As part of our tour, the hotel had agreed to take our baggage to the ferry dock at Dalarö, about five kilometers down the road. We were supposed to cycle there, and board the ferry there with our bikes and bags. It sounded like a nice way to start the morning.Unfortunately, the morning was gray and almost a little cold. I did not need to check the weather app on my iPhone to know that it was going to rain. Still, I hoped the rain would not start until we reached the ferry. John particularly hates riding in the rain.

When we pulled our bikes off the bike rack, we noticed that everybody else had already left. Still, as we knew we had more than enough time to make it there, that is, until I noticed that my front tire needed air. I fumbled around in my panniers until I found the pump that Carmen had provided each of us. It did almost nothing. And then John spotted a big thumbtack in my front wheel. We pulled it out, and at that point the tire was completely flat. I began to panic. I have watch tires changed many times, but I have never needed to do it myself. In Los Angeles, you are never very far from a bike repair shop. I decided to try to do it.Flipping the bike over attracted the attention of the hotel staff. They came out to see if they could help, and quickly figured out that if we did replace the tire we would probably miss the boat. So they offered to have one of the guys who worked in the kitchen drive the bike down to the boat while the other person rode the good bike. And at this point the mist and drizzle had turned into a steady light rain. I told John I would ride him bike there and he could take the car down with mine. He agreed. I told that woman from the hotel that John did not like the rain. “Wrong country,” she wryly replied.

I did not much enjoy the ride. Not only was it wet, but trying to go as fast as I could I was miserable on the hills. My glasses were wet and there were points when I was not exactly sure what was twenty feet down the road from me. Fortunately, the traffic was pretty light. I made it on board with about ten minutes to spare.On the ferry, our fellow guests were more than helpful. A couple of them were pretty good with bike repair. They tried to change the tire, but discovered that the spare tire we had been given did not work with my wheel as the valve was too large. I noticed how narrow the wheel looked compared to the wide bike tire. We also had a patch kit, and so my two English friends, John, a doctor from Manchester and Stephen, an IT guy from Reading, cleaned it, prepped it, patched it, inflated it, and mounted it back on the bike.

We had a two hour ferry ride to our first island, Ornö. John wandered around a bit, and I mostly stayed inside and tried to do some writing. John discovered that the upper level on the boat was empty and told me to come up there with them. I wrote a bit more and watched the gray sea and the gray sky. We passed dozens of tiny granite islands, some barren, others with a few trees on them. The ferry stopped at three or four larger islands along the way, and each time a handful of passengers got off and another handful of passengers got on. I reflected that few of the people on this boat were tourists. Most were island people who were working or shopping elsewhere. They and the crew tolerated us tourists, but in the end this was their boat. And this reminded me of the similar ferry services in Washington state and British Columbia.

The ferry stops at a place called Ornö Kyrka. It is an appropriate name because there is not much there except for the church building. There is a small cafe there in a building which also houses a grocery stores and the town library. As part of our package, lunch at the cafe was included. It was still sprinkling, so we were all happy to eat lunch while we waited for the rain to subside. It was pleasant sitting there with some of our fellow travelers. It was much easier chatting with them than with the passengers on the Viking ship. I suppose that the fact that we all like to cycle meant that we probably also had other things in common and perhaps even a similar outlook on the world.

It was still raining when lunch was over. We had two possible travel routes today. One went south on Ornö towards a nature preserve and a lake. The other went north and west towards a farm and a local handicrafts store. The first route seemed closer to the coast so probably a bit flatter, so John and I went that way.

The road was good, and only a few cars passed us as we rode. We passed a number of houses and barns. I noticed that all the buildings looked almost identical. All were made of wood, all had tile roofs, all were painted a brownish red with white trim. I wondered if there was some kind of rule here, or if everybody simply agreed that it looked more harmonious with the landscape that way.

After a couple miles, we found a turn off to the nature preserve. We rode down a dirt road for about a mile. John had noticed a number of platforms in the woods yesterday and we noticed even more today. I decided that they must be something like duck blinds. He decided to climb up one.

I went up as well and we stayed there for a few peaceful minutes. John wanted to stay a little longer — I think he was feeling the effects of the Dramamine that he took before the boat trip — and I decided to push on a little further. I rode about another mile down the road before the road vanished altogether. I then wandered down a path and enjoyed the peace and quiet for about 20 minutes.

I decided I would go back and see how John was doing. To my surprise, he was not there. I continued on to the main road. He was not there, either. So I gave him a call. Apparently he had found the route around the lake that I had somehow missed. I figured at this point our chances of meeting up were not that good, so I decided to head back towards the ferry.

As I came into Ornö Kyrka, I noticed that that the church was open.

I went inside. I was struck by the picture of Christ stilling the storm above the altar, and I wondered if this had once been mostly a fishing settlement.

I also wandered out into the churchyard and looked over the gravestones. A few were new, but most were old. I played with the filter on the iPhone camera to try to catch the feeling better.

Yet it was well-manicured, and showed signs that local people must lovingly clean the graves.

I suppose this island once had a far larger population than it does today. Right by the place where I had parked my bike, I noticed a sign in Swedish that was clearly encouraging young people to join the confirmation program. Although I could not make out much of it, I did figure out that one of the incentives was a trip to Barcelona to watch a football game there. And I remembered vaguely some years ago seeing a Scandinavian youth group touring some place in Europe and that this trip had something to do with confirmation. I wondered how deep the commitment to the church was if the main reason for signing up was to take a trip to Spain.

I grew anxious as it grew later, and I decided to try to go down the road to see if I ran into John. Sure enough, after I had been on my bike for about ten minutes, I saw him. I rather expected him to be a little annoyed with me for having left him, but it appeared that he had had a wonderful time. “I like this island a lot,” he said. “If it were sunny I’d probably be pushing for us to move here.” He showed me some of the pictures he had taken on his trip.

I took him by the church. He noticed the model of the ship in the corner. Somehow I had missed that.

We had coffee and ice cream at the cafe while we waited for the ferry to arrive.

It pulled up just about exactly on schedule.

Our luggage had been all neatly placed by the ferry dock. We all dutifully boarded and put our bikes on board and we felt the boat pulling away. Everybody panicked because all our bags were still on the dock! The crew seemed vaguely annoyed, but they went back so that we could pick it all up and take it with us.The second ferry ride of the day was glorious. The rain had stopped a while earlier and the clouds had cleared away. John and I went up to the top deck. We delighted in the sight of all the dozens of little islands we passed. I would happily have stayed there for a couple hours, but this was just a short boat ride. We pulled up at Utö where we will spend two nights.

Compared to Ornö, Utö seemed like arriving in Mykonos. There was a lively scene on the dock and I could see several small cafes and a cluster of houses and hotels. I knew that this was the most popular of the islands, but somehow I had already been spoiled by the elegant isolation of our previous destination. A woman met us there with a Volvo station wagon. The hotel was just by the dock, but they were there to help us with our luggage. We learned that we were in a cabin, not in the hotel itself. I was not happy about that.I changed my mind, however, when we opened the door. We have two small bedrooms, a comfortable bathroom, and a living area with a kitchen. It has a door which opens onto a grassy area with a picnic table. I think this is pretty much designed for a family, but they were not completely sure of what to do with two men so they gave us the larger accommodation with two beds. I am sure not hearing me snoring will help John sleep better!

In the evening we walked around the village of Gruvbryggan.

It definitely has a seaside holiday resort town feel. There were kids everywhere playing all kinds of games. There was a bar with a karaoke contest going on. There was a small grocery store which also sold sandwiches and gelato. We stopped to read some of the interpretive material around the town. Most of it was in Swedish, of course, but on most there was a little English summary. We learned that this had been a major center for iron ore mining in the nineteenth century. Mining appeared to stop around 1900, and the miners’ cottages became artists’ studios. Shortly after the artists arrive, it became a fashionable resort for the Stockholm intelligentsia. August Strindberg and Greta Garbo came here frequently. In recent years it has just been a Swedish family resort.

We had cheeseburgers — the choices were quite limited — at an unpretentious cafe. We watched the kids play some kind of miniature golf while their parents drank beer. As the evening began to darken — it is still quite light at ten in the evening — we wandered about some more.

Tomorrow we explore this island on bikes.

In the morning, John and I packed up the mess we always seem to make in the room and went down to breakfast. The breakfast room in the Hellstens Malmgård was probably the cold storage cellar of the manor house. It has an old brick vaulted ceilings, and there are still a couple hooks in the ceiling which must once have held slabs of meat. The room does not, however, have any windows and John found it claustrophobic after a while. We saw another guest there wearing cycling gear and figured that he was one of the two who would be on the tour with us.

At nine o’clock we went out with our luggage, as we had been instructed, and found a minivan from Stockholm Taxi waiting for us. Our two fellow travelers introduce themselves. Stephen, the man we had seen having breakfast, was from Reading, England. John was from Melbourne, Australia, though, he noted, originally from Perth. We talked with them for about a half hour as the taxi took us to Tyresö where we were to meet up with Carmen from Nordic Trek. The taxi driver complained about the terrible Stockholm traffic though to me the delays were barely noticeable.

We were met in the parking lot of the Tyresö Castle with a van pulling about a dozen bikes and a Volvo station wagon with another couple bikes attached to it. About a dozen more people including a couple children emerged. I was surprised and not altogether happy. One of the things I have liked on the previous bike trips was that they just were time for John and I to have fun riding together. I was not keen on going in a group here. It was pretty easy to spot Carmen, our local contact from Nordic Track. Not only was she clearly in charge of all the equipment, but she looked Spanish. All of us were given our assigned bikes and she handed out some well-worn panniers to us.

She also made sure each group had first aid and bicycle repair stuff. She offered us helmets; somewhat to my surprise John did not take one. When all the equipment was distributed, she called us around and went over the five day schedule with us. She was clearly proud of the elaborate notes that she had prepared, the ones that had driven me crazy the night before. I must have rolled my eyes once or twice because John jabbed me in the side.

Carmen talked for close to an hour. By the time she was finished, I decided I really rather liked her. It was eleven o’clock when we started our trip. We are still on the mainland today, though we are about as far out of Stockholm as you can get. Our route today will take us from Tyresö down through the Tyresta National Park to Dalarö. We will spend the night near Dalarö at a hotel in Smådalarö. I doubt I will ever be able to even come close to pronouncing these names correctly. This will be about 20 miles, and it should be probably the hardest day of bike riding of the trip. This is the full map of our journeys.

If we had had more time, I would have enjoyed looking more at Tyresö Palace.

It was built as fortification for Stockholm in the seventeenth century, and then converted into a stately home in the late nineteenth century. But we didn’t have much time here as we were already running late according to our schedule. We rode around the grounds for a few minutes, and then I started the Garmin GPS to see if it would get us to our destination.

I felt more comfortable with it guiding me than a map and some notes, no matter how detailed. We shared the road at first with a fair amount of traffic. The terrain was hillier than I expected. I certainly missed my e-bike when I had to climb some steady hills. The mountain bike I had been given was adequate. I have to be honest that I had hoped for something better. After a couple miles, we lost track of all of our fellow riders. The scenery, particularly at first, was stunning beautiful.

As we went deeper into the forest it became a bit more monotonous: granite outcroppings covered with lichen, spruce and fir forests flecked by white birch. As we entered the national park, cars came by only intermittently. There were a couple places where we were supposed to put our bikes down and go hiking, but none of these sounded all that interesting and John is not much for hiking. We pushed on riding our bikes. About two o’clock we stopped to eat some of the snacks we had purchased the night before. The GPS generally did a great job of guiding us. But we did reach a point when I figured out that I might have missed the turn off that we should have taken on Carmen’s map. We debated going back to take this back road, or pushing ahead to ride on the main highway. We decided in favor of the latter course. I think we probably did the best thing here; talking to others later on I learned that the back route was pretty rough in spots. But the highway was also not the easiest either. The cars came by at almost German speeds, and some drivers were clearly annoyed by cyclists. Fortunately, after a couple tough miles, the Garmin pointed us to a side road that paralleled the main highway until we came into Dalarö.

It is hard to imagine a Swedish town more charming than Dalarö. It is close enough to Stockholm that it can serve as a suburb, but it is mostly a summer getaway. There is a small church here.

A plaque in front of the building indicates that it was the only part of the town spared when the Russians burned the town during the Great Northern War of the early eighteenth century. For some time, Dalarö was the place where ships coming into Stockholm had to pay customs. Later, it became the haunt of the wealthy and intellectuals. Unfortunately, it suffered a serious fire in the late nineteenth century and only a couple buildings from its heyday survive.

We wandered about a bit. We stopped at the grocery store to buy some ibuprofen and some diet coke. John also picked up some pricy but extraordinarily flavorful strawberries from a man in a stall near the bus shelter.

We decided to push on to our hotel. It was about five kilometers further down the road, and Carmen had warned us that this stretch was probably the most difficult. She was right. I really, really missed my e-bike on a few of these hills. A couple times I just gave up and walked the bike. The scenery was once again dramatic, but I was so busy at times feeling sorry for myself that I paid little attention. It all seemed worth while, however, when we caught sight of our hotel.

The Smådalarö Gård is a charming hotel situated on a sheltered inlet.

The oldest section of the hotel is an large early eighteenth century home. It has been updated considerably, of course, but it retains a certain elegance from that earlier time. 

We checked in, and carried our bags up to our room on the second floor. John went off to explore the grounds, and he found a comfortable spot down by the water. We relaxed after our long bike trip. In the evening we had a fine meal at the restaurant overlooking the water.

John was definitely feeling better this morning, and that made me feel much better, too. We talked about plans for the day, and we decided that we would do different spiritual things on this Sunday morning. He found an English-speaking meeting and we figured out the location using Google maps. I decided that after having been AWOL for the last couple Sundays, I wanted to go to Mass today. I looked for an English service, but nothing was either close or at a workable time. So I noticed Saint Eric’s, the Catholic cathedral in Stockholm, had a Swedish-Latin Mass at 9:45, just about the same time as John’s meeting. I can follow Mass in Latin, and the readings would be the same ones everywhere else in the world today, so I decided to check it out.

I also decided that I would try to figure out the Stockholm subway system. The ticket machine was a bit stubborn, but after endless pressing the screen I somehow made it spit out a ticket. At that point, I just had to figure out which train to take and what side of the platform would take me in the right direction. I am usually pretty good at public transportation, but the problem here is that all the Swedish names sort of look and sound alike to me. So, I was forced to do what I hate to do most in the world — ask directions! People, of course, were quite helpful. It was only three short stops away. Leaving the subway, I walked a two or three blocks and found the church.

Like England, Sweden has a national Protestant church that retained many of the features of pre-Reformation Christianity. The church has archbishops and bishops and is divided into dioceses; the priests wear chasubles and there are crucifixes on the altars; the principal Sunday service in Swedish churches is still known as “High Mass.” Yet the Church of Sweden, like the Church of England, has lost its hold on the people of the nation, and only a tiny percentage of Swedes attend its services on Sunday mornings. In contrast, the Roman Catholic Church in Sweden is growing. Much of this is the result of immigration to Sweden from historically Catholic countries like Italy or Poland. But the Catholic church has also been making converts from native Swedes as well. Pope Francis recently gave a red hat to the Archbishop of Stockholm, the first time in history that a Swede has been a member of the College of Cardinals. All of this also made me interested in checking out Saint Eric’s.

The building is not an architectural jewel. It is divided into to sections, one small and dating from the nineteenth century, the other somewhat larger, and dating from the nineteen sixties.

It is an odd arrangement both artistically and liturgically. The church was not full, but it was not embarrassingly empty, either. As expected, most of the service was in Swedish. I used my phone to follow the readings and prayers in English. The ordinary of the Mass, that is the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo, the Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei, were sung in Latin with organ and cantor. This is probably the best part of it for me. Musicologists have argued for some time now that plainsong was originally quite rhythmic and even percussive. Yet in most places in the United State it is sung, when it is sung at all, just as they did in the nineteenth century in France, slowly, evenly, tediously. Not so at Saint Eric’s. The chant was lively and at times almost danceable. Would that somebody could offer their music director a job in Los Angeles!

After Mass, I took the subway home. As expected, John was still at his meeting. I finished packing and cleaned up the room. At noon, I checked out of the hotel and put our luggage in storage. John and I texted back and forth and decided that we would meet somewhat around one o’clock. I had about an hour and I walked down the waterfront towards Gamla Stan, the old historic center of Stockholm.

John and I had been here about fifteen years ago. We were on a Baltic cruise, and we stopped for one day in Stockholm. I think that may have been a Sunday as well. We left the ship quite early that day, and we were charmed by the empty streets of the old city. We returned later in the day when it was flooded with tourists and were less charmed. I had more or less the same reaction today. Every once and a while, as I walked through Gamla Stan, I found a reasonably empty picturesque street. But most of the time the streets were jammed with tourists and the shops were filled with cheap tourist junk. It was still not quite as bad as Prague where the historic center of the city had been turned into a kind of open-pit tourist mine. But it was close.

John was doing his own exploring on his way back from the meeting. 

By this time it was raining and John had not yet shown up at the place I had suggested for our meeting. He finally called me and I figure out he was nowhere close. He was frustrated trying to find me, so he suggested I try to find him instead. That was also frustrating. He told me that he was at H&M. When I made it to the central shopping area I found an intersection with an H&M on each of the three corners. Cheap clothes are almost as ubiquitous in the world as tourists. After a couple more calls, we finally met up. I was relieved!

But not all the clothes were cheap. At his meeting this morning, John talked to a guy from San Diego who is living here. When he told him our plans to cycle the archipelago, the guy asked him if he had brought along some seriously warm and waterproof clothes. John indicated what he had on. “You’ll need warmer stuff than that,” he was warned. And he was told to check out a couple REI-like places in Stockholm. We found one of them, a place called Intersport. Like a lot of things in Sweden, having a name in English, or something that passes as English, is hip even if it does not make much sense. What exactly would “intersport” mean anyhow? But it sounds good, I guess. John found a jacket he really liked. At over 3000 kroner (a little over 300 dollars) I told him that he really needed to like it a lot. He said he did. We bought it.

We decided to have a late lunch. After John’s bad experience with meatballs on the ferry, we thought it would be great to go to a place with really good Swedish meatballs. According to Conde Nast, the honors here go to a place called “Meatballs for the People.” Once again, a vaguely hip English name which ultimately makes no sense. What else are the meatballs for? Horses? Oh well, whatever…. It was about two kilometers away, so we decided to take a cab. Getting around Stockholm is not cheap. A metro ride costs about 45 kroner or about 5 dollars. A simple taxi ride like this ended up costing over 20 dollars. And when we arrived at “Meatballs for the People” we found it was closed! Not just closed for Sunday — unlike Germany, shops and restaurants in Sweden are all open on Sunday — but closed rather permanently. I checked on TripAdvisor for the best nearby restaurant and found a recommendation for Nytoget 6, a trendy bistro which takes its name from its address.

It was a good choice. We looked over the menu and discovered that “Meatballs for the People” was on its menu. We took the last outdoor table and a handsome young waiter who spoke perfect English took our order. We asked for the meatballs, of course.

While we waited, he delivered our bread. I have noticed in a couple restaurants here that bread comes in bags. I suppose the idea is that not only will the bags keep the bread fresher, but since they cannot reuse the bread for other customers, you can take it home with you in the bag. The Swedes can be remarkably practical people. The meatballs were astonishingly good, and they came in on a bed of very creamy mashed potatoes covered with the richest-tasting gravy you can imagine.

All I could think was, “Dorothy, we’re not in IKEA any more!” As we were leaving John asked the waiter about the other restaurant. “Oh, it is still open,” he said. “And we make their meatballs in our kitchen.”

Returning to the hotel, we took our luggage from the baggage room and found a taxi. We are starting the very last part of our trip, a bicycle journey around the Stockholm archipelago. As part of this package, we had a hotel set up for the first evening. Our taxi took us a couple kilometers from the center of town to the Malmgard district. The hotel we are staying at tonight is a converted eighteenth century house, allegedly Queen Christina’s hunting lodge. At that time, this part of Stockholm was still very much countryside. The place is not easy to find as it at the end of a street behind trees and a wall. I was looking forward to staying here, perhaps imagining I might see Garbo wandering about in her Queen Christina garb, but it was actually a little disappointing. The closest we came to that was the 100 kronor note!

The rooms were never large, and adding an en-suite bath to them reduced them to tiny. The common areas are adequate, but not particularly inviting. Neither John nor I wanted to stay in our room, so we decided to take a walk.

The weather was lovely when we left. We had read that there was a good walk around the waterfront with views of Gamla Stan, the old city.

We saw some very charming older homes, and indeed after we walked through a little park we did indeed have a great view of Stockholm.

We walked through a complex of rather forbidding nineteenth century buildings. I could not tell if this had been a factory, a prison, or some kind of military facility. It was none of those things now. Part of the building was being used as the school of the Royal Swedish Ballet; I am sure that the other parts are used for similarly high-minded pursuits.

By the time we reached the bridge to Gamla Stan we noticed some dark clouds. We probably should have turned and gone back to the hotel, but we pressed on as it was such a pretty time of day to take pictures. After we crossed the bridge, it started to rain quite steadily. We went over to the City Hall, one of Stockholm’s most famous buildings.

All the Scandinavian cities built city halls in the early twentieth century. This was the time when the “goo goo’s” — Progressive advocates of “good government” — were running America, and as Scandinavian countries seem to have an almost genetic predisposition to a goo-goo frame of mind, I suppose they were doing the same here. The Stockholm building is clearly inspired by the Doge’s palace in Venice with a tower, pointed windows, and a colonnade opening up to the water. We spent about a half hour there until the rain had subsided to a mere drizzle. We walked towards the train terminal. On our way we saw this building. We are not sure if it is part of the hotel behind it or a separate building. 

I suggested that we take a cab home and John hardly fought the idea.

Tomorrow we will meet up with our tour. We know that there are two other people on the tour, Stephen and John, staying here tonight. We have not yet met them, but we are supposed all take a cab tomorrow to meet up with Carmen, the local tour operator, and to start our first ride.

This will not go down as one of the better days of the trip. In fact, I’ll probably go so far as to say that it may just have been the worst. The night train to Malmö was certainly a big disappointment instead of being the somewhat charming and romantic trip I had hoped for over the plains of northern Germany and across the Baltic Sea. Admittedly, it was not as horrible as it could have been. But like many Americans, I tend to assume that things European are better than what we have at home. And perhaps one of the best things about travel is to disabuse yourself of this naïve idea. While the European systems seem to be admirably prompt,  unlike Amtrak, they are not necessarily better in other ways. In fact, as a rider, Amtrak is in many ways better than much of the European railways system. 

When I woke up this morning, we were still in the ship although the ship had apparently finished its crossing. The conductor came on the intercom to announce that we would be leaving after all the cars and trucks had pulled out. I think this also made it possible to time the last leg of the journey quite precisely. Indeed, we pulled into the railway station in Malmö just almost on the minute. 

We had only about a half hour before we took the second train to Stockholm. I booked this train before we left, though I had no luck trying to get a first-class ticket for it on the Snälltåget website. After our bleak experience with the previous train, I suddenly became apprehensive about this one. I went into the station to talk to someone at the ticket office. It was closed and would not open until nine in the morning — this was a Saturday, not a work day.  Just outside my assigned car I came across two women who appeared to be conductors. I asked about upgrading my ticket. One looked at the other, and they spoke briefly in Swedish. “No,” I was told, “it cannot be done.”

John and I found our seats. It was bleak, indeed. We were in a car almost identical to our sleeping car. However, the middle bunk had been removed. On the bottom bunks, functioning as seats, were six numbers, three on each side facing each other. There was only one other person in the compartment at that point, a young British guy. I was resigned to my fate at this point, but John was more determined. He went to the first-class compartment and found a table with a couple empty seats on each side. First class was somewhat better than second class, but hardly particularly nice. It had the same shabbiness that we had noticed on the other Swedish train cars. I reflected that the regular seats on Amtrak were far more comfortable and spacious than first class was on Snälltåget. We waited until the conductor came by. We asked her about upgrading. She admitted that she could sell us an upgrade, but she could not guarantee that we would have a seat. But she was gracious enough to simply tell us to stay there while we could. Obviously, if somebody boarded later with tickets for those seats we would have to leave. 

We managed to stay there for almost three hours. The train made a couple stops and each time the car became a little more full. Finally, about halfway to Stockholm, a family with a couple young children appeared and they indeed had tickets to the seats we were using. We went to the dining car. Both of us bought some food. I purchased an almost edible sandwich. John purchased some soup and another sandwich. We ate as slowly as we could so we could keep out seats in the dining room car. People stood about with their food waiting for a table to open up. We sipped and nibbled. 

But finally we had to go back to the miserable second class car. By this time, all the other seats were taken. The British guy stared into his phone with earphones on. I pulled out my Kindle and tried to read. John stayed for a while, and then left. Not long afterwards, I heard the sound of someone vomiting down the hallway of the car. I knew it had to be John. He is extremely prone to motion sickness. He looked miserable and ordered me to go back into my compartment while he stayed as close as he could to the bathroom. I thought we had about an hour until we made it to Stockholm, and I hoped that we could just get him into the hotel there and into bed. 

Things got worse. They train stopped and everybody started to pack up. We were not in Stockholm. I asked the British guy what was up. “We have to stop here,” he said, “and they’re putting us on busses for the rest of the way.” He had no idea why, but apparently he had been told that this would happen when he purchased his ticket. I found John and told him. He was clearly not a good candidate for a bus ride. After we pulled the luggage off the train, I asked the conductor about taxis. She said that they might be able to call us a taxi from the station.

John was not ready to leave yet. Although it was lightly sprinkling, he laid down on a bench outside the station. I suppose the fresh air helped. We were obviously in some small town that might be a kind of outlying suburb for Stockholm. Still, Google Maps told me that it was at least a half hour from there by car to our hotel — the one I had picked because it was right by the Stockholm train station. When John was feeling better I tried Uber. It took about another half hour for the Uber to finally arrive. 

We had an interesting conversation with the driver. I figured from his name that he was Turkish, but he apparently had been living in Sweden for quite a while. He told us that Sweden had successfully forced Uber to function more or less as a taxi service. They had to all had to have taxi licenses and had to charge the same rate as regular taxis. I knew it was going to be an expensive ride. And it was — about 770 kronor, or a little over 80 dollars. 
The Hotel Terminus was better than I expected from the reviews on Booking. We had a spacious corner room with views of Central Station and a bit of the harbor. John had taken a dramamine after he became sick, and he slept for a couple hours. I edited some photos from Berlin and checked out things to do in Stockholm.

In the evening it was still quite light. John woke up feeling hungry. I found a place near the Opera House that was supposed to have great meatballs. We wandered over there along the waterfront. It was drizzling on and off. When we found the restaurant, we learned that they had no available tables for a while. Disappointed, we pushed on. We came across a strange “Hard Rock” festival in a nearby park. It appeared to be local groups, mostly young, doing covers of classic American heavy metal songs. It was loud, but the singers were having problems with both the words and the pitches. Still, the audience seemed appreciative enough. 

We found a place called “Fridays” at the end of the park. It was clearly a rip-off of the American TGI Fridays chain. We decided to eat there because John was in the mood for a hamburger and sort of wanted to listen to the “Hard Rock” concert. The menu proudly announced that just about everything was made with “Jack Daniels sauce.” I wondered if any of these Stockholm folk knew that this was the food beloved of the folks who voted for Trump — someone, I am sure, they all despised. 

I am sure tomorrow will be a better day. 

This was our last day in Berlin. At breakfast, we sat with Victor and Lisa, our friends from Chichester. They told us about visiting her niece who lives here in Berlin. We told them about our adventures riding bicycles and going to the symphony. We did not bond with many people on the Viking cruise although they all seemed rather nice. Perhaps we should have tried harder. Or maybe we did not have much in common with most of them after all. I am not sure.

I had made arrangements before we left for a guided tour of the Pergamon and Neue Museums. The Pergamon was one of the few places in Berlin that I absolutely had to see. John and I hopped on our bikes and headed towards the center. My success with the Garmin bike GPS has been a bit uneven. Sometimes I have managed to get it to guide to me exactly where I want us to go. At other times, such as this morning, it seemed to do the opposite. After a few minutes of the little thing trying to send me in what I absolutely knew was the wrong direction I gave us and just used my phone. It is a wonder I did not kill myself or at least destroy the phone riding with only one hand on the streets of downtown Berlin.

We somehow made it, and I had little difficulty identifying our guide and our group standing under the colonnade by the Neue Museum. Our guide was a British guy named Nick. He was by profession an archeologist though the current situation in Syria had made doing work there a little difficult at the moment. He had been living in Berlin for over 20 years and was married to a German woman. He was clearly very smart and I liked him right away, although, as John pointed out, “arrogant does not even begin to describe him.” The group was manageably small, about ten people in all, I think. The rest of our group came from Australia, the United Kingdom, and there was an Indian doctor from somewhere in New Jersey. Nick talked pretty much nonstop, so we did not get to know much about any of them.

I booked this through Viatour, and they bill many of their many of their tours as “skip-the-line.” Tickets are prepurchased and there is usually some arrangement with the museum or attraction for priority entrance. When I saw the long line waiting for admission to the Pergamon, I was quite happy we had splurged on this! Nick seemed to relish all of this. “Use your elbows. Just push past them!” Not very British, but certainly effective.

We stopped in front of a large map of the Middle East to get some background. Nick through out an lot of information including dates really quickly. 

If I did not already have a reasonably good idea of who the Akkadians, the Assyrians, the Hittites, and the Babylonians already were, I am not sure any of it would have made sense. Standing in place is hard for John, so he wandered around a bit during this lengthy background briefing. But it was soon time to look at the crown jewel of this collection, the Ishtar Gate from Babylon. Nick explained that most of the city of Babylon was made of mud brick and was probably a rather dull brown color. So when Nubuchadnezzar decided to build a grand ceremonial entrance to the city, using glazed tiles was an tremendous innovation. It is impressive today; it must have been unbelievably impressive in its time.

When the Germans arrived to do archeological work in Babylon in the late nineteenth century, the British, the Americans, and the French had all been there for a while. They were apparently mostly interested in finding things that were mentioned in the Old Testament, so they had not bothered to excavate a largish tell that did not seem to be located anywhere near the Biblical sites. It was the good fortune of the Germans that this proved to be the site of the Ishtar gate.

As we currently see it, the gate is extensively reconstructed. There were tens of thousand of fragments of tiles and it they were not all located in situ. But there were enough to get an idea of what the gate must have originally looked like, and the Germans, reconstructing the gate inside this museum, made new tiles to supplement what was missing. Today curators would not do this; they would, instead, simply add an artist’s depiction of what the site probably looked like to the interpretive material. But that would not even begin to have the impact that the “restored” gate has, and I am grateful that modern standards did not prevail back then.

We went on to see the other massive gate that the museum holds, the gate to the city of Miletus. Located south of Ephesus, Miletus was a Greek colony that had been rebuilt by the Romans. As part of the rebuilding, the Romans create an elaborate gate for the principal entrance to the city. Once again, thanks to the fact that the Ottoman Empire was desperate for European cash, the Germans bought it, disassembled it, and put it back together in Berlin. It’s impressive, but not as impressive as the Ishtar Gate.

He pointed out the figure of Orpheus on the floor tile.

He went on and on about how all these stories of Greek gods dying and rising again were obviously the inspiration for the New Testament. I thought this line of reasoning with its obvious post hoc, propter hoc fallacies had disappeared after The Golden Bough had been so thoroughly discredited a century ago, but apparently it must still be a staple in British schools. Nick also talked about how all these Roman structure had once been brightly painted. I thought about mentioning the Getty Villa but decided against it as the art and archeology people seem to have strong feelings about the Getty Museum. I suspected that Nick’s politics was probably to the left of the Labour party, so he probably would much care for the the richest museum on earth.

We saw a few other things in the Pergamon and then Nick took us over to the Neue Museum. This is the museum that displays all the antiquities that are not in the Pergamon, and also art and ethnographic artifacts related to German origins. We saw a lot of stuff here and in no particular order. We spent some time looking at this wonderful Hellenistic statue.

We appreciated it more than the school group did. The bust of Nefertiti is probably the most prized item in the collection here, so much so that they are incredibly vigilante in pouncing on any tourist who dares to pull out a phone or a camera. We did get to take pictures of this Middle Kingdom monument.

Probably the item that interested me the most was this ancient cone-shaped item. Archeologists think it may have been worn as a hat, but this is not certain. What they can determine is that it displays the 19 year cycle of the sun and the moon. This item, which dates perhaps to the second millennium before Christ, shows that people at that time had keenly observed the solar and lunar cycles and were even able to use these to predict possible dates for eclipses.

While all the objects we saw in the Neue Museum were interesting, I think we were even more fascinated by the building itself. When the museum was built in the late nineteenth century to house this collection, the walls were decorated with frescoes that depicted scenes from the ancient world. I must have been gloriously tacky. But the museum was nearly gutted during the war. For decades, only the hollow shell of the building remained. When the decision to rebuild the museum was made, they decided not to reconstruct the old building. Instead, they built a new building in and around the old one. This is not quite like leaving a burned out shell like they did at the Kaiser Wilhelm Church. Instead, the near and the old are joined together so that the new museum seems to display the fragments of the old one as if they were archeological items in their own right. It is an absolutely stunning piece of architecture. Sadly, I was so impressed I forgot to take any pictures of it. 

After three hours of looking and listening our tour was over. We had seen a lot, but there was still much more we could see. Our ticket was good for all day to all the museums. John was feeling pretty exhausted by this time, however, and he wanted to go back to the hotel. He encouraged me to stay, and I decided to take a look at the Altes Museum. The “old” museum is indeed an older building than the “new museum,” though probably not all that much older. All of these museum were built in the aftermath of what the Prussians called “German unification” and what other areas of Germany thought us as the Prussian conquest. The Germans wanted to show the world that not only were they just as powerful as the British but that they were just as cultured. Having big museums done in a grandly classical style was part of that.

The collection inside this wonderful building is not that great. There are a few pieces by some prominent painters, but most of it is undistinguished paintings and sculptures done by artists that you have probably never heard of unless you happened to be writing a thesis on pre-World War I German art. The better stuff — mostly NOT by German artists — is at the front after you enter. There is a lovely gallery devoted to the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen. 

And there was a statue called “The Bronze Age” by Rodin. I wondered if he thought about the fact that it would turn green with age. Right now I think it suggests Martians more than Greeks….

Mostly the Pergamon is a gallery of oil paintings. I could barely pay any attention at all to the landscapes and still lifes. Most of them looked like something that somebody brought to Antiques Roadshow. I do have a soft spot for those big nineteenth century narrative canvases. Here is Prospero and Ariel.

After our time as Sanssouci, I did appreciate a bit more all the painting about Frederick the Great. This was the best of them. Old Fritz is given a concert for his guests. 

And I just loved all the German imperialist stuff like Kaiser Wilhelm

and Otto von Bismarck. 

Not to mention this canvas showing Prussian soldiers billeted with a Parisian family after the French lost the war in 1870. Thank that, you effete Frenchies!

There was one small room with the slightly weird stuff in it. I am surprised I have never seen this one before. It is called like “My Sin” or some other name one might give an overpriced perfume. 

After about a half hour, I was ready to go back. I had a little more luck this time programming the GPS, although I had done this ride two or three times by this time and probably could have made it on memory alone. John had taken a nap and a bath, and he was ready to get packed up. We checked the room over several times as we have a tendency to leave something behind in just about every hotel room. We settled our bill at the desk, and caught a cab to the train station.

The Berlin train station is just what you would expect from this city. It is clean, efficient, modern, and safe. It would be hard to imagine anything more different than our experience in Split. And we had high hopes that our experience of Snälltåget, the Swedish national railroad, would be opposite of our experience on the Croatian railroads. We were somewhat disappointed.

Our sleeping compartment was exactly the same as it had been on the Zagreb night train. There were six bunks in the room, three on each side. The middle bunk could be flipped up to create a seating area. The car was hot, though it was not quite as stifling as the earlier sleeping car. The Swedish one looked like it had been built in the seventies, and it needed some repair work. Still, it somewhat cleaner than the one in Croatia. And we did have bed linens provided for us. There were comforters created from some kind of petroleum byproduct, and a duvet cover for each. Pillows were slightly nicer than the Croatian ones, and the pillow cases matched the duvet covers. As John observed, the linens were exactly what you would expect from the country than invented Ikea.

I made beds for us. With the windows opened, the car cooled down quickly. Most of the lights worked. I tried to read; John napped. Periodically we would look out the window. The train was out of Berlin quickly, and we saw vast wheat fields punctuated with woodlands. I was surprised by how empty the land seemed. I always think of Europe as a crowded continent, but there are many places where the population is clearly small and probably getting smaller. The were points when I thought that nothing here looked different than it had when Napoleon had marched his troops across this land two centuries ago.

The train went about as far as Rostok, I think. I was not watching the map on my phone. At that point, the entire train, about six cars, was loaded onto an enormous ferry. Most of our train trip, I discovered, would actually be on a boat. I have taken many car ferries before in Europe, but I have never seen one before that carried an entire train.

We were both quite hungry by this point, so we left the train and went to find something to eat on the ship. The whole place looked exactly like I remembered these ferries from years ago. People were trying to sleep in uncomfortable chairs with lights bright enough to elicit a confession. Children were crying and running about. Just about everyone who was awake and old enough to drink was drinking. We found the cafe. The hot table food did not look particularly good, but we were too famished to be snobbish about this. I had a soggy pork cutlet that was supposed to be snitzel. John had the Swedish meatballs, and decided that the Ikea version was far better.

We are going to get some sleep tonight with a little assistance so that we will be awake for tomorrow’s journey. We should land in Malmo at about 7:00 and we will catch another train for Stockholm around 8:00. The last leg of our grand European trip is starting.

This was our final day on the Viking Beyla. I am somewhat ambivalent about this cruise. The facilities are fine; the food is really quite good; and the crew could not be more delightful. But it is a great deal of money to spend for coming such a short distance down a fairly unimpressive waterway. There are times when a boat makes it possible to see sights in a short time that could not be seen otherwise. That is not the case with the Elbe. The land along the river is flat and open. A cycle path runs along the river for most of the distance. It would be easy to ride from Dečin to Wittenberg. There are times when a boat allows a visitor to see dramatic scenery. Other than a brief stretch of Saxon Switzerland, the land itself is not particularly interesting. 

We spent today in Wittenberg, perhaps the city most closely associated with Martin Luther. This year is considered the 500th anniversary of the Reformation as Luther proposed his 95 theses on indulgences and 1517. The dramatic image of him nailing these to the castle church door is almost certainly considered to be a later historical fiction. And while the issue of indulgences and Luther’s attack on them propelled his rise to theological and later political prominence, his later positions on justification and the Eucharist were the issues that truly broke the unity of the western church. The Reformation was a process that took place over several decades. Choosing one particular date is but always arbitrary, and this particular date is a particularly arbitrary. 

We were taken by bus to the Luther House where were met our guide, Oliver. He proved to be an excellent guide. He told us that he was a teacher of history and religion in the local schools here. He obviously had a strong background in theological study although it was not clear where he had studied or if at some point there had been some preparation for the ministry. We learned later that he had been raised as a Lutheran here in Wittenberg, but when he married his Italian wife he agreed to become a Roman Catholic.

The Luther house is the former Augustinian monastery at Wittenberg.

The members of that order who were teaching and studying at the University of Wittenberg lived there. Luther, of course, left the Augustinian order. But it remained as an Augustinian house until the Peasants’ War when most of the students and faculty of the University fled the city. When Luther returned to Wittenberg after the end of the uprising, the Elector of Saxony gave him the building as a home. People began to call it the “Lutherhaus.” 

Today the Luther House is a museum devoted to the Reformation, particularly now with the celebrations for the 500 year anniversary. Oliver took us through the building.He talked a great deal about the selling of indulgences, and showed us the chest where supposedly Johannes Tetzel collected funds while informing people that “When a coin into the coffer springs, a soul form purgatory springs. “ 

Oliver gave us good deal of history in a lecture hall on the second floor. Unfortunately, while many of the furnishings in this room are old, few if any really date to Luther’s time. Far more interesting were the Luther family personal apartment. Here we saw the room where Luther met students and discussed theology with them. The colors of the room are faded, like the from the ceiling, but still visible. 

Many of these conversations were written down and are listed in Luther’s works as his “Table Talks.” The actual table is here.

I also saw a place that looked vaguely like a walled in staircase. According to the interpretive material on the wall, this was supposedly the tower where Luther had his tower experience. It seemed like it ought to be more prominent if that were indeed the case, and Oliver did not bother to mention it, either. Instead he pointed out Luther’s death painting and how a peaceful death was considered proof of a virtuous life. So a picture of a serenely dead Luther was an important bit of Reformation propaganda.

After we were finished with the Luther House, we spent a little time in the courtyard looking at the statue of Katharina von Bora, Luther’s wife. 

She appears to have been a fairly formidable figure. We know that she apparently came from an aristocratic family in Saxony, but she was sent away to a convent for education at an early age. She joined the Cistercian order later, but after a few years left with some others to join the Reform movement. She lived with Lucas Cranach the Elder and his family and apparently had a number of marriage offers. She announced, however, that she only wished to marry Luther. Somehow, even though he was far older that she was, Luther agreed to marry her. Herr Kathe, as Luther came to call her, took an active role in Reformation affairs and was an active participant in theological discussions. Today there is naturally a great deal of interest in her as there is in just about every powerful woman in church history.

After we left the Luther House, Oliver began to be a little more critical of Luther and Lutheran theology. He discussed how Luther turned from initial interest in dialogue with Jews to full-blown hatred of Jews. Oliver did distinguish “Judenhass” or “Jew hatred” from “anti-Semitism” pointing out that the latter assumes that Jews are some kind of biological instead of theological rationale for discrimination. He was hardly endorsing Luther’s views, of course, but simply pointing out that racialism is a nineteenth century development. People before that time may have been bigoted, but there was no pseudo-scientific racialist justification for it.

We stopped by the town church in Wittenberg.

This was the place where Luther preached perhaps 2000 sermons and where the Lutheran liturgy, the so-called German Mass, may have first been celebrated. The pulpit is apparently not much changed from that time. 

There is an old triptych over the altar, and Luther may have been involved in its design. Otherwise, the church is not particularly attractive or interesting.

We had a little break at this time. We walked through a shopping center. We found a bank and an pharmacy. We looked at a bunch of Luther and Reformation tee shirts and gifts, but decided against buying any of them.

Our tour finished at the Wittenberg Castle church. We saw the place where Luther is supposed to have nailed his theses. Today that door is gone, replaced with a bronze replica of a door with the theses written on it. Luther is supposedly buried in the cast church, perhaps somewhere near the pulpit. I tried to take a picture of the spot, but could not get past the large tour groups there. The castle church itself has been seriously rebuilt a couple times, most importantly in the late nineteenth century after the Prussians had conquered Saxony and wanted to put a Prussian accent on the events of the Reformation. The tower is particularly hideous.

We returned to the church. In the evening when we went to dinner the crew sang Happy Birthday to me and gave me a cake. It was sweet. It seems like not that long ago I was depressed about turning 40. I am not sure why turning 60 seems like so much less of a big deal. Maybe I know that the end is in sight for these long and often painful years I have spent in the classroom.

We leave early tomorrow morning. I need to pack!

The boat pulled out of Dresden early in the morning. As we woke up, we saw the great churches and palaces of that city drifting past us. It took a couple hours for the boat to make it to our first destination of the day, the small city of Meissen. Although Dresden today is the important political and cultural center, in early centuries that distinction belonged to Meissen. During the fifteenth century this was the seat of the Elector of Saxony and the see city of the diocese covering lower Saxony. It faded in importance when the capital was moved to Dresden, and after the Reformation the Diocese of Meissen was dissolved after a majority its clergy and laity became Lutheran. 

In the early eighteenth century, however, Meissen became significant again when chemists and craftsmen working for Augustus the Strong discovered the formula for making porcelain. Augustus, hoping for a monopoly on European porcelain production, picked Meissen as the center for production of the precious commodity. The secret did not last; ten years later porcelain was being produced in other European locations. But Meissen stayed as the center of Saxon porcelain production and has been celebrated for the quality of its ceramic products for two centuries. 

Our tour of the city began with a tour of the Meissen factory. Normally I find this sort of thing really annoying as the “tour” is mostly about shoving the poor tourist into a gift shop to endure a hard sales pitch. But I had heard from others that there was not much of a push to buy the product here and that the museum attached to the factory was wonderful. Both of those things proved to be true.

We did not really enter the factory. Instead, the tour goes through several demonstration rooms. Each room has a craftsman working while taped narrator explains the different steps in the process. We watched as the porcelain clay was tossed on a wheel, formed into shapes in molds, and also shaped by hand. 

We watched pieces being painted by hand

and learned the difference between underpainting and overpainting porcelain. It is much more interesting than I expected it to be.

One of the things I found quite curious what just how porcelain shrinks every time it is fired. They showed us two versions of the same piece. As you can see, one is smaller. It did not start out that way. 

At the end of the demonstrations, we were shown the gift shop but we were also invited to visit the factory’s museum on the second and third floors. This proved to be absolutely fascinating. There were hundreds of pieces on display from all periods of porcelain production at Meissen. Most were exactly what you might expect

though some were not exactly what I think of with Meissen.

Large porcelain animals are a speciality.

John was fascinated by “Feast and Folly,” a rather salacious new piece. 

I was more interested in the partitive organ with porcelain pipes. I doubt it sounds that great. 

Leaving the factory we had to cross the street. When the German Democratic Republic came to an end, few people wanted to keep anything from that era. Except one thing … the walk lights! Everybody loves the old East German walking man.

After we finished at the factory, we were driven close to the center of the old town. Meissen escaped bombing during the Second World War and its historic core is beautifully preserved. For example, the old city gate 

leads into a large square. Here you can see the “dom”, as the Germans call cathedrals, as well as the old elector’s palace. Our guide was Gertun, and she was sweet and knowledgable. We both felt a little guilty for finding her rather dull. 

John is normally not the one who wants to go into a church, but he found the towering black cathedral intriguing, particularly as he could hear the organ playing inside. 

We learned that there was going to be an organ concert in about an hour, but we would not be in Meissen long enough for that. For a modest contribution, we were still allowed to explore the church. We not only listened to the organist practice, but had the opportunity to watch him as well. 

It’s hard to quite explain why this church is so quintessentially Lutheran. 

 The clear balance of preaching, 

baptism,

and the table of the Lord’s Supper is definitely Lutheran. But it is mostly I think that stark focus on the passion of Christ that comes close to defining the Lutheran sensibility. Unlike Catholicism, the community recedes in importance here. It is the sinful believer facing a just yet gracious God that is the essence of Lutheran spirituality. 

Theology aside, the building is an interesting bit of late Gothic architecture. It has soaring ribbed vaulting like most of these ancient buildings.

But it also has retained some of the original coloring of the stones. We think of Gothic architecture as cold and gray, but originally the structures were brightly painted. Some of that remains here. 

Less colorful and more unique to this cathedral, of course, is the use of Meissen porcelain on the altar. 

After about twenty minutes in the cathedral we decided we should rejoin our guide and our tour group. We found our way doing to the market square where we were supposed to all meet up and go back to the ship. 

We all stopped briefly to listen to the porcelain carillon in the bell tower. 

It was far less impressive than the one in Dresden.

As we ate our lunch on the bow, the boat pulled out of Meissen. I had not expected that much from this stop on the river, but it proved to be a quite memorable moment in the trip. 

After lunch, we watched the pastoral countryside as we floated down the river. This was a perfect afternoon, clear and cool. 

The animals seemed to be enjoying the day as much as we were. 

If it weren’t for the occasional car or electric power lines I would have thought I had somehow drifted into a John Constable painting.

At dinner time we docked in Torgau. I have to admit that this is the one town on this trip that I had never heard of before even though it is historically quite important. I learned some things at this stop. 

In 1945, this was the place where American and Red Army troops met up, officially closing the Eastern and Western fronts of the war. Keiran, our guide, kept referring to them as “Russians” but they were actually Ukrainian soldiers and few Ukrainians today would be willing to be identified as Russians. Germany had effectively lost the war by this point, but this completely sealed its fate. At statue marks the spot. As the East German government erected it, the hammer and sickle is more prominent than the Stars and Stripes.

The bridge where the forces met has been replaced with a new one. But a small portion of the old bridge has been left to mark the spot. 

Torgau was extensively damaged in the war but has been almost completely rebuilt. This is because it was so important during the Reformation. Torgau was a center of Saxon government, and the Elector of Saxony became a supporter Martin Luther’s cause. The importance of this alliance cannot be overstressed. Previous reformers, people like Wycliff and Hus, failed to attract powerful political patrons. Luther succeeded here, and that meant that the Reformation succeeded. But there was a cost, too. Wycliff and Hus imagined a simple Christian community detached from political power. They foreshadowed the Anabaptists more than the Lutherans or the Calvinists. Luther’s embrace of the Saxon state ensured that his movement would prosper, but also established a pattern of Protestant subservience to political authority that would continue well into the Nazi era. 

Schloss Hartenfels is the magnificent Saxon castle here. The grand entry still shows the Prince Elector’s coat of arms. 

Its central staircase is a masterpiece of North Renaissance architecture. 

There are other lovely architectural details as well such as these windows.

Less lovely from a modern point of view is the “bear moat” surrounding the castle. There are still three females brown bears kept here. They had gone to bed for the evening when we arrived. 

Keiran took us through the center of town. 

He gave us a lot of history, and John listened attentively. He had the good sense to sit down. 

Torgau has a LOT of Lutheran history. Not only was this the home of Luther’s patron, but the very first chapel designed for Lutheran worship was in the castle. But wait, as they say in those television commercials, there’s more. It was here that the first drafts of the Augsburg Confession was written. And, for real Lutheran theology buffs, it was here that the Formula of Concord, the Declaration of the Formula of Concord, and the Book of Concord were penned. 

And there is more Lutheran stuff here than simply disputations about justification by faith and consubstantiation to Torgau. Luther’s rather formidable wife Kathe left Wittenburg after her husband’s death to avoid plague. She came here to Torgau. Unfortunately, she had some kind of unfortunately accident in an oxcart and died of her injuries not only after. This is where she died 

and she is buried somewhere in the parish church here.

I found all this rather interesting though my enthusiasm was not shared by my friend in the window. 

I do think that most dogs are Catholic, anyhow. Cats are definitely Presbyterian. 

Tomorrow we go to the heart of Lutherland, the city of Wittenberg. 

For earlier generations the word Dresden made people think of “china.” For me, and I suspect for most people my age, the word that comes to mind when I hear Dresen is “fire bombing.” While most of us grew up thinking of World War II as if not a “good war” at least a justifiable one, the incineration of Dresden and the slaughter of 75,000 of its people counts perhaps as the greatest of the war crimes of the allied forces. So it came as a great surprise to discover how much the city has rebuilt in the the last 25 years, recovering both from the horrors of the war and the desolation wrought by socialism. 

We had a superb guide for our walking trip this morning. I wish I had a decent picture of the woman; it was a windy day and all the pictures I took of Liliane had her hair blowing across her face. Unlike Alex, our guide from yesterday, she had grown up in Dresden and spent her childhood in the German Democratic Republic. She was coming the to end of high school when the wall fall in Berlin, so she was old enough to remember how oppressive it all was, and yet young enough that the communist system had not destroyed her opportunities for further education and a career. 

We began our tour in the middle of the main square right next to the Frauenkirche. This has always been the most important Lutheran church is a traditionally Lutheran city. It was one of the casualties of the allied bombing, and during the years of the atheist government of the DDR, it remained as a pile of rubble in the middle of the city. As soon as east and west Germany were reunited, however, donors from the United States and England provided funds for reconstructing this historic edifice. 

Still, as a memorial to the war, a small bit of the original church was left in place, a charred reminder of the horrors of the bombing.

While we were there, our guide gave us some background on the history of Saxony. Although I had always assumed that Saxony functioned more or less as the junior partner of Prussia, it turns out that the two regions of eastern Germany were deeply antipathetic. During medieval and Renaissance times, Saxony was governed by a Prince Elector of the House of Wittin. The put the leader of Saxony just below the Holy Roman Emperor in importance as the seven electors chose the Emperor. After Napoleon finally ended the presence of the Holy Roman Empire, the Prince Elector became King of Saxony. Even after the unification of Germany in the late nineteenth century, the regional kings retained their titles although real power had passed to the Kaiser. 

The Prince Electors and Kings of Saxony lived in the Dresdner Residenzschloss, usually rendered in English as Dresden Castle. The castle was severely burned in 1701, and it was reconstructed by perhaps the greatest of the Saxon kings, Augustus the Strong. In the late 19th century a great mural called the “Procession of the Princes” was constructed to show the different rulers of Saxony in one great parade. 

Although it looks like a tapestry, the Procession is actually constructed of about twenty thousand porcelain tiles. Because porcelain is fired at a high heat, the mural actually survived the fire storm of 1945 with minimal damage. Colors are still vivid.

Augustus was not only the king of Saxony, but he was offered the crown of Poland. There was one catch, however:  the Pole were willing to accept a foreign ruler, but not a Protestant one. Much as Henri of Navarre decided that “Paris vaut bien un messe” Augustus decided that becoming a Catholic was a price he was willing to pay for such an extension to his lands. However, breaking with the tradition of “cuius regio, eius religio,” the principle that the ruler’s religion would become that of his people, Augustus freely allowed his subjects to be either Lutheran or Catholic. In this way, he pioneered the idea of freedom of religion long before it became a principle of Enlightenment thought. 

As a Catholic, Augustus needed a church and he had the current cathedral of the city built right next to the castle. It is a magnificent Baroque structure. 

The cathedral, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, was connected to the palace to that the rulers could easily hear Mass from the royal box. 

As a ruler, Augustus was obsessed not only with power but also with beautiful objects. He adored porcelain, at one point saying he had a “porcelain sickness.” He also loved intricate objects in gold and ivory. The Grünes Gewölbe or “Green Vault” of the palace contains the treasures that he and his successor commissioned and collected. He saw many of these including these intricate clocks

There are devotional objects

drinking goblets

and pure objects d’arte.

I have to admit that after a while all of this became kind of overwhelming. 

We also went to Zwinger Palace. This surrounds a magnificent central courtyard. 

The tower at the end has a carillon of porcelain bells that plays a portion of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons three times a day. We were present as it played today. 

Porcelain bells will never replace bronze bells for volume, but they were beautifully pitched and sounded lovely. 

John and I returned after the tour to the ship where we had lunch and a nap. Although there were plenty more art museums to see in Dresden, we decided to look for something quite different, Dresden’s bohemian neighborhood in the “Outer New Town” area. This was a part of Dresden that had not been bombed during the war, yet by 1990 it was in such bad shape that few believed it could be saved. Dresden residents had a saying, “You do not need bombs to create ruins.” Now it is on the cusp of serious gentrification and its residents now are fighting to preserve its SoHo-in-the-seventies ambience. 

One of the reasons tourists like us come to visit this neighborhood is the Kunsthofpassage. This is a series of courtyards with different whimsical themes. 

The most famous part is this one, a giant device that makes music when it rains.

After checking out this neighborhood, John and I went back to the center because I heard that there was going to be a free concert right outside the Semperoper, the Dresden Opera House. 

As it turned out, however, it was going to be the live simulcast of a concert later in the evening, so we did not stay. We stopped briefly in the cathedral. Some kind of event — but not Mass — was ending and we did get a chance briefly to hear the famous Silberman organ.

The town was lively as we walked back to the boat with all kinds of street performers including a guy who had been blowing enormous bubbles all day to the delight of children. 

It was a cool, gray morning in Bad Schandau. I woke up early and worked on editing photographs. John joined me later and we had a bit of breakfast. At about nine we boarded a bus for our first excursion of the voyage, a trip to Sächsische Schweiz, Saxon Switzerland. Despite the somewhat bizarre name, this is one of the most famous places in  southeast Germany. 

Saxon Switzerland is nowhere close to Switzerland. It is on the border of the Czech Republic. The Germans use the word “Schweiz” to refer to any area of great natural beauty. This area of Germany became popular in the early nineteenth century, the time when Romantic painters and poets were looking for wild natural scenes to evoke equally wild passions within themselves. Anything that looked vaguely desolate was the best for this. And this area fits that description perfectly. No wonder it became a popular spot for painters like Caspar David Friedrich.

Viking gave us a free guided tour, and it was not as lame as many of those tours often are. We took a bus from Bad Scandau to the entrance of the national park, about half an hour away.

The park is apparently dog-friendly, though I only saw one there. 

You only walk a few feet into the park before you see the eroded sandstone cliff formations that are the signature feature. 

As I said, we had a great guide for this. His name was Alexander. He lives in Dresden but with originally from Mainz in the west. So he admitted that he still could not understand a word of the local Saxon dialect. Fortunately, everybody in German can speak both standard German and their regional tongue. 

He explained that Saxons love to go sleep overnight in the woods. Instead of using established campgrounds, they look for small indentations in the rocks like this one. Today, since this is a national park, they are obviously not doing it here. But there are many inscriptions to show that visitors have spent time here in the past. 

The most famous feature of the park is the Bastei Bridge. This connects several of the pinnacles. 

And indeed there are many evocative vistas even for those who, like Jane Austen, find the early Romantic emphasis on “sensibility” somewhat silly. 

There are also vistas of more pastoral countryside

and the Elbe, flowing below.

The nineteenth century writers concocted a story of a monk and a nun who fell in love with each other. Of course, vowed to celibacy, their love was romantically doomed to fail. But each went to monasteries on opposite sides of the river and each evening would climb onto rocks so that they could see each other from a distance. Somebody decided to put a metal statue of the monk on one of the higher rocks. 

On a less romantic note, we saw a high fortress that had been used at various points as a prison. This was also one of the places where art treasures from Dresden were hidden during the war. 

Alex took us to one point where we saw both the rock formation

and Caspar David Friedrich’s rendition of it.

After a couple hours in the park, we went back to the bus and drove back to the ship. John and I decided that we wanted to actually go to the hot springs in Bad Schandau as the town is famous for this. We grabbed our swim trunks and walked about 500 meters to the Toskana Spa. The facilities is quite new, even though the springs themselves have been an attraction for a century. Inside, the lady at the desk, who basically spoke no English, sold us tickets and showed us how to use the lockers. It was an ingenious, but a little complicated, system of something that looked like a small poker chip being inserts into a bracelet for us to wear. Suitably attired, we went about to explore. The main area had about a half dozen pools of various sizes. Some were designed mostly for kids. John found a large pool in a darkened room with a light display on the ceiling. This was a little warmer than the other pools, and it was the only one with salty water. The neat thing about this pool was that you heard music when your ears were under the water, but not when you were out of the pool. There was the “Saunaland” area. A sign on the door here told us that nudity in this area was “compulsory,” though, somewhat confusingly, we were also told to use a towel. There were at least a dozen saunas and steam rooms here. Each had a different theme. There was also a big pile of ice, but neither of us felt like using it. 

After about 90 minutes, we returned to the boat. We had missed our lunch time, but the staff had saved us some soup and fried chicken. As we ate, the boat pulled out of Bad Schandau and down the Elbe. In a few minutes, we passed through Saxon Switzerland again, and this time we could see the attractions from the water.

It was interesting to see it from the water, but I was glad I had actually been up there on the Bastei Bridge. The dramatic scenery only lasted for about 20 minutes and after that it turned into flat countryside. We took a nap.

In the later afternoon, we pulled into Dresden. After dinner, we went into the city to explore a bit. We will have more of a tour tomorrow. We saw the central square next to Our Lady’s Church.

We saw a little bit of the old German Democratic Republic on the side of the main library.

As it started to get dark — and a bit cold, too — we went back to the boat.

It was raining when we woke up this morning, and it rained for most of the day today. I was glad, in a way, for this as we had been warned by Viking that the water level in the River Elbe was so low that we might not be able to complete our cruise, that we might be bussed from place to place along our route. So I decided to make the best of it and try to enjoy the day, however damp.

And damp it was, as you can see out the window of our bus. 

Despite this, the tour guides tried to carry on more or less as if it were still sunny. This included long breaks where we were supposed to enjoy outdoor cafes. This annoyed almost all the passengers and rightly so:  not even the French are boulevardiers in cold, rainy weather. All I could think was that the guides were told to give us a three hour tour and if it was even a minute less than that they would be in trouble. 

During one of those breaks three of us went off to a nearby church to stay dry and see if there was some good art inside this splendid baroque edifice. The church is apparently one of two in Prague dedicated to Saint Nicholas. Perhaps because of its dedication to the fourth century bishop of the city of Myra in the Roman province of Asia Minor, today part of Turkey, many of the statues inside were of saints from that region such as John Chrysostom and Gregory Nazienzen. But the overall impression made by the art and architecture was the triumphalism of the Counter Reformation. 

This is Tridentine confidence and Jesuit assertiveness at its best. 

After leaving the church, we continued to stroll through the old city in the rain.

I could have taken more pictures, but the camera lens kept getting wet. It seemed pointless.

They took us up to the castle, but we were not particularly given a tour of it. We did step briefly into Saint Vitus’ Cathedral there where we were allowed to stand in the back of the nave. I was not all that sorry not to tour the building as the majority of the structure only dates from the 1920s. The choir and the ambulatory are medieval, but even they have been altered when the church was “completed” in the twentieth century. There is some adequate modern stained glass, but that is about it. 

Towards the end of the tour, there was a bit of a break in the rain. We went back to Wenceslaus Square

and watched as the famous town hall clock struck the hour. 

We returned to the hotel and tried to dry out. I had arranged a bike tour of Prague for the afternoon, but decided I was not up for riding around in the rain. I suspect I will not get my money back, but it was only twenty five dollars or so. Staying dry is worth that. We napped instead. 

It was only sprinkling in the late afternoon. I wanted to see the famous Slav Epic paintings by the Czech painter Alfons Mucha. I figured out using Google Maps that the “Trade Show Palace,” an old communist era building now converted into an art museum, was not that far from us. Still, we decided to take an Uber just in case it rained. 

When we arrived, we were seriously disappointed. The woman at the ticket desk seemed annoyed that we were there. When she finally looked up from her computer screen she sighed and told us that “…the paintings are in Japan.” We decided to look at the rest of the collection as we were there. She seemed irritated that she had to go to the effort of selling us the ticket. 

As it turned out, the museum was interesting. It showcases Czech art from the late nineteenth century to the present. None of it is particularly great, but it is interesting to see how the larger trends in European art were reflected here in this distant and often isolated part of Europe. There were lots of landscapes and still life paintings. I find those frankly dull. I started to get more interested when I found a room of  those wonderful late Romantic narrative pieces. There was the inevitable ship wreck 

and this horrible murder.

I am not even sure the artist knew what was happening in this picture.

John particularly liked some of the twentieth century stuff like this vaguely cubist sofa.

And, horrible as socialism was, who can not be sort of moved by the naive optimism shown in this early bit of communist art?

Later Czech art became less political, more personal

and even probably somewhat cynical.

We could have spent more time there, but by the end the guards were more or less chasing us out. 

Tomorrow we head off on the river cruise, but I have arranged a tour of religious Prague for the morning. Plus we get to pick up our laundry. I can hardly wait to be reunited with genuinely clean tee shirts!