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unexpected music in Speyer
Saturday, November 8 2025
location: Cabin 102, MS Grace, Rhine River, Speyer, Germany
Overnight our ship had moved from the part of the Rhine that forms a border between Germany and France to the part that was entirely within Germany, and we'd ended up docking at the city of Speyer. This morning after breakfast, Gretchen and I left the boat on foot, walking into Speyer to see what was promised to be one of the oldest cities on Germany. On the way, we passed the Technik Museum, a sprawling semi-outdoor æropsace museum featuring actual airplanes that can be climbed into and otherwise explored (in the distance, we saw people walking on the wings of one of the outdoor airplanes).
The main attraction in Speyer is the big romanesque cathedral looming at one end of a low hill that the center of the city is built atop. The cathedral lacks the fussy fractal ornamentation of the subsequent gothic styles, but there's a serene majesty in the relative simplicity, especially given the soft regular undulation of colors used in the stonework. Inside, the tall ceilings held niches of understated murals of the sort we hadn't seen so far in the gothic cathedrals.
From the front of the cathedral, we headed west through down the wide central promenade of the city, generally in the direction of a gothic spire I'd caught a glimpse of and then could no longer see. At some point, though, it came back into view, and it, the Gedächtniskirche der Protestation, was a lovely (though smaller-scale) example of gothic architecture, complete with an elaborately colored roof. We entered through side door just as a chamber orchestra was setting up to rehearse Felix Mendelssohn's Paulus, Opus 36 (something Gretchen determined using Google AI technology). The conductor was a stickler for getting things right, and he kept stopping the orchestra to have them redo things and then jumping around in the program. There were three vocalist who were part of the performance, and Gretchen thought the one woman had an exceptional voice. It was such a moment of kismet to just come upon such a thing randomly after seeing a gothic spire in the distance. Gretchen managed to leave her gloves behind when we finally left, but she realized this later and went back to retrieve them. (Something similar had happened yesterday in Strasbourg after Gretchen had made use of a port-a-potty.)
On the walk back to the boat, we checked out a huge arch with a tiny actual pathway through it and then, closer to the main cathedral, Gretchen decided she wanted to duck into yet another church. I'd had enough, so I said I'd see her back on the boat.
Later this afternoon, Gretchen and I went up on the roof of the boat for a soak in the hot tub. The water was a little cooler than it had been last night, but it was still plenty good.
At dinner, I opted for some sort of stew, which ended up being very good. Meanwhile Kelly was trying to convince me to join her, Gretchen, and Brian on an after-dark stroll through Speyer. But I was done with Speyer and had no intention of going. I ended up holing up in the cabin, drinking gin I'd smuggled from the United States and doing further work on the migration of my ESP8266 code to a templatized system where parameters can easily be changed remotely. In so doing, I was starting to run into some limitations of my ad-hoc backend framework, the tooling that easily allows me to make web-based editors. Much of that tooling assumes that there will be no compound primary keys and even that primary keys will be autoincrementing integers that end with "_id" in their name. This wasn't the case with the new sensor table I was creating, as the IDs were based on their names. For example, a BME680 has the ID 680. But that cannot be a primary key, because every tenant in my system will be using the same IDs, yet they will have separate sensor records. So for this table, the primary key must be compound, consisting of a sensor_id and a tenant_id. And I would also need to change the code in my system that saves and updates those records to accommodate this (and other tables like this). The downside was increased complexity, though the upside was a more flexible framework.
As I was working and drinking, Gretchen sent me a Facebook direct message saying, "I'm watching you." She, Brian, and Kelly were on the nearby land waving at me, so I waved back.
Later Gretchen and I went up to the hot tub for yet another soak.
Insde the old romanesque cathedral. Click to enlarge.
Another view inside the old romanesque cathedral. Click to enlarge.
Outside the old romanesque cathedral. Click to enlarge.
Insde the Gedächtniskirche der Protestation in Speyer. You can see the chamber orchestra in the distance. Click to enlarge.
The outside of the Gedächtniskirche der Protestation in Speyer. Click to enlarge.
The big arch with the tiny archway in Speyer. Click to enlarge.
The Technic Museum from the outside in Speyer. Click to enlarge.
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