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Lüneburg
Sunday, September 8 2024
location: cabin 105, Swiss Ruby river boat, Elbe Lateral Canal southwest of Scharnebeck, Germany
This morning our boat was docked on the Elbe Lateral Canal, a last-minute change to the cruise due to low water levels in the Elbe itself. After breakfast, Gretchen and I got a ride on an excursion bus with a bunch of other people, including our boat "homies," Kelly, Brian, Simon, and Cathy. We sat in the back of the bus, though later on the way back to the boat when a woman nearby on the bus started coughing a liquidy cough, Gretchen and I moved up to closer to the front. The bus took us to the center of Lüneburg, a once-prosperous city built with the money from nearby salt mines. But the city fell on hard times during the Enlightenment, preserving its unique medieval character to the present day. Both Simon and I were hoping to find a wine store in Lüneburg so we could stock up on cheap wine to decant into bottles we could take into our boat's dining room. But then we realized it was Sunday and nothing would be open. It turned out that the cafés were open and so were a few tourist attractions. But for most part the city was slumbering.
Gretchen and I broke away from the others, marveling as we walked along at the unique style of the gabled ends of buildings, which were broken up into stacked cellular niches (perfect for pigeons!) forming pixelated triangles. Since some of the buildings had settled unevenly since they were built, some of the walls between the niches were visibly askew.
We walked down to a long cobbled square called Am Sande and marveled at a huge church (St. John's) towering over its eastern end. The church looked to be mostly a tall, wide, suprisingly unadorned spire that seemed to be a leaning out a little over us. I actually felt a little uncomfortable standing beneath it, thinking it might suddenly crumble. We went into the church just as a choir was finishing the singing of a hauntingly beautiful musical piece. If there had been CDs of their music, I would've bought one.
Gretchen and I continued to wander around, trying to get to a tower we could see rising above the houses. Eventually we got to its entrance, and a young man seated there told us (in German at first, but then in English) that the tower was open to the public today for free. It turned out that it was a Neogothic masterpiece made in the early 20th Century and decommissioned in the 1980s. Now it's just an interpretive exhibit with a stairway that spirals up to the old tank, into a hole cut in its bottom, and then out through a hole cut at its top to a viewing platform at the top of the tower. Superficially, it looks like an ancient structure. But then you notice that it's in very good condition and lacks the ornamentation of true (that is, non-neo) gothic architecture.
We eventually came upon Simon and Cathy drinking coffee outside a café. They'd actually found a place selling wine in the town: a gas station. While Gretchen was off checking out some vegan something or other, Simon and I discussed our experiences fixing our various cars, with me mentioning an idea for a poor-man's lift: a hole dug in the ground that a car can be parked over. I also told Cathy and Simon about my adventure about a year ago replacing the starter in the Subaru Forester. At some point Cathy pointed out a nearby bench with a missing section labeled, in German, "no place for racism."
Back on the boat it was lunch time, and then the boat continued east and I don't really remember how I spent my time on the boat. Without free unrestricted access to caffeine (that is, without having to pay for it or otherwise obtain it through an intermediary), I can't really get into the zone I like to be on to either do my writing or develop software. I had a little booze left from the small amount I'd smuggled onto the plane, but it's not the same.
This evening, our six-person clique dined in the frontmost port booth in the Swiss Ruby's dining room, joined this time by Liz, an older British lady with terrible NHS teeth named Liz. She seemed kind of boring, though she was a language teacher and was fluent in German. Unexpectedly, though, she wanted to try a bit of my ghost pepper, which she put in her mouth and acted as if it was nothing special, which seemed on-brand for her personality. At dinner, Simon always likes to engineer some sort of gag, and tonight it was all of us speaking in the accents of the person to our right (or left), something none of us were any good at. It gave Gretchen a chance to deploy her Dickensian street urchin accent, which was probably the best one at the table.
After dinner, Gretchen and I sat with Kelly and Brian up on the top sundeck in the dark as heavy concrete bridges occasionally sailed past overhead, talking and laughing about all sorts of things, particularly our various experiences being arrested. Gretchen told about the time she was arrested for participation in a righteous protest but not about the time she was busted for shoplifting, so I also left my shoplifting arrest out of my crime CV, telling instead about being arrested for trespassing at Oberlin in 1990 and for being drunk and disorderly on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville in 1996. Not surprisingly, Kelly had never been arrested, though Brian had. As a teenager, he was busted for urinating in public, though he wasn't even caught in the act. He says a police van rolled up to arrest him several minutes after he'd drained his bladder.
The distinct end-gable design in Lüneburg.
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More Lüneburg gable ends.
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So many!
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An ancient medieval inscription.
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A unicorn. They're not totally fictional.
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Am Sande with St. John's church at the end.
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The front of St. John's, with its terrifying steeple leaning out overhead.
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A view of Lüneburg from the top of the Neogothic water tower.
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A mural on a Lüneburg side street south of Am Sande.
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A street excavation in Lüneburg. There could be Neanderthal bones in there.
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