A beautiful, sunny day! We drove 30 minutes across the heath to Lueneburg, and then walked around this old Hanseatic League city for several hours. Aside from the unusual north German architecture – houses with elaborate fronts with stepped peaks build from multi-coloured glazed bricks, it features three churches in what is called Backstein gothic style – literally red-brick gothic.
These are churches from the 14th and 15th c, build to look like the then new gothic churches with high nave walls, lots of windows to admit light, thin interior columns carrying the roof load, and the whole thing kept from falling down by the new technology of flying buttresses. The difference in these churches is that they are build in red bricks, as there is no local stone with which to build them.
One is well know as the place where Johann Sebastian Bach was a choral scholar for over two years as a youth; all of them have fantastic organs, and unlike other gothic churches, which tend to have a neutral or even cool feel about them in their colours –light to dark greys from the stones – these churches are very “warm” in colour from the red brick.
As we were there on Saturday, it was market day, and everyone was doing their shopping in the market square in front of the city hall. Everything foodwise was to be had; vegetables of every kind, herbs and spices, fresh meats from refrigerated trucks, fish and seafood also. What was not to be had was the kind of junk that has become the staple of our Kitchener and Waterloo markets, which are now far more flea markets than food markets, especially the operation in St. Jacobs’s. Here in Lueneburg one can see that a market can be a vital part of the life of the town, rather than a destination for tourist buses (not a tourist bus to be seen here!) – and yet this town is obviously attractive to tourists.
We then drove the considerable distance to Luebeck, nearly on the Baltic coast, another of the Hanseatic League cities. There is no practical way of getting there except to head up the Autobahn to south of Hamburg, then around Hamburg, and eastward – all at high speed. I’m getting used again to thinking of 140 km/hour as a normal speed, and don’t get excited when I am passed by people going at least 100 km/hour more.
Luebeck has several attractions; one of them a city “gate” that is massive, thick and high, with two towers with pointy witch-hat roofs on them that are unique to there. Again several red-brick gothic churches, including one that is the prototype example of what can be done with this building style – longer, wider, and higher that all the others, because the Luebeck merchants were wealthier that those in other cities of the north. One of them, Our Lady, was totally destroyed in a bombing raid of WW 2, and has been re-built faithful to the original, and one cannot tell that it is not 700 or 800 years old, but only about 50. Left over from the original are the bells, which have been left smashed on the ground where they fell when the tower burned, as a mute warning against war!
Luebeck also taught us a travel lesson; check with your bank before going abroad to make sure your cards will work, as it seems banks change the rules without telling you. Last year, when I was in Germany with Scott, my Scotiabank card let me withdraw cash without a problem. We assumed that would continue. Each of us had some Euros from past travel, so that is what we used for the first few days. But now we needed cash, so we hit the bank, several, one after another. At each of them, I got variations on the theme, “Your card is not authorized/accepted/etc. June tried with her ScotiaCard – same thing. Now we were beginning to sweat a little. June tried a Royal Bank card – which gave her money, but from an account that didn’t have a lot of money in it. Big problem.
Thank God for a German cell phone (again) with low cost (39 cents/minute instead of $2 a minute that Rogers charge for roaming with their phones) calls back to Canada. Called the ScotiaBank number on the back of the card, got a very helpful person who explained that “for your protection” if you don’t use it for a while to make foreign withdrawals ScotiaBank lowers your limits to the point of making it impossible to withdraw any sensible amount of money abroad. The helpful person couldn’t explain how this protected me, and from what, nor could she explain why this happened without the bank letting us know it would happen. But, she did cheerfully raise our withdrawal limits back up to something sensible, and waited on line while I tested it by withdrawing enough Euros to last a week.
Moral of the story; go to your bank before leaving, and make sure they will let you get at your own money, rather than “protecting” you from something or other.
That settled, we went and had a fine meal by the side of the river Trave, served from restaurants on the other side of a busy road, admiring waiters dashing back and forth through traffic carrying meals. I suspect the forces for good in the community back in Canada would have something to say about this sort of thing, but here it seems to just part of how life works.
Then back to the hotel, and rest up for Sunday.
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