Excursion to Naumburg

Last Saturday, we took an excursion to Naumburg. We took the train to Naumburg and then got bused to slightly farther away so that we could canoe down the Saale to Naumburg, our final destination.That is right. We paddled Old Towns. The only problem with them is that they had a third seat where the yoke was supposed to be, which made the portage we had to do really annoying. How can people honestly think that hoser-carrying is easier? Anyway, canoeing down the river was fun, even though there were cars on the road nearby and was garbage in the river and on the trees.
Halfway through the trip, there was a dam that we needed to portage around. On the other side, there was an old mill that we got to tour after we ate lunch. After the tour, we went back to canoeing. After a while there was another dam. This time, there was a lock that we had to go through. Going through one of those in a canoe is definitely an odd experience.
You can see the water level we were originally at on right wall. After getting bused to the youth hostel where we were staying, we all walked down the hill into town. At the beginning we were at a café in the town market where there was a Neil Young cover band playing. During a set break, we went wandering around the town and ended up finding a Cuban bar. After spending a while there, we went back to the town market and listened to the band for a while more. They had moved on from just Neil Young stuff to playing standard "classic rock" kinds of things. Smoke on the Water, Born to be Wild, etc..

The next morning we got a tour of the city. I feel that, after three of them, they are all pretty similar. Here is a house where a famous person lived or was born, here is a church that is pretty old, here is a cathedral, here is some mildly interesting anecdote that you will forget in fifteen minutes, etc. That being said, those parts of Naumburg were much more interesting than the other two cities I have toured. The famous person's house was Nietzsche's, the church had an organ that Bach played, and the cathedral was more interesting to look at than the other two that I had seen so far. I was very impressed with Naumburg. In addition to having a city part, it also had a lot of nature. And I mean nature nature. Magdeburg may have a lot of trees and parks, but all of it feels very artificial. The trees are always in rows along the streets and the parks are all well groomed and designed. Nice, but not quite real nature. Naumburg seemed to have a higher concentration of trees and nature in general. The trees there also seemed to have decided to grow where they want to. That, or whoever planted them did a damn good job making it look like they weren't planted by a human. Anyway, here are some pictures.
The Nietzsche House. The plaque says "Here lived the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the care of his mother during the years of 1890-18979." He also lived there in his youth, but I guess that that isn't important enough to go on the plaque. It was kind of nice to visit the museum there, but I wasn't terribly impressed. Mostly, it had big plaques that told his life story with some pictures that I had already seen on Wikipedia. They did have some original letters and books of his, but not as many as I was expecting. There is another Nietzsche museum in Weimar, where he lived out his final years, hopefully that one will be more impressive.
The first edition of the second volume of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Also, my camera's shadow.
The altar at the city church.
The organ. I am not sure when Bach played it, but it was built in 1746 and Bach died in 1750. My guess is that it is probably somewhere in between those two years.
The cathedral. Attached to it is the St. Peter Paul church. This is my picture.
This is a better picture that I stole from Facebook. I am not sure where it was taken from.

There was a ropes course in the woods next to the youth hostel called "climbing forest." The name doesn't quite work as well in English. Anyway, we trekked back through down and spent the afternoon climbing trees and then jumping out of them. It was loads of fun and was definitely worth the €10 admission and the sore muscles the next day. I didn't think to take my camera out of my backpack, so I stole these photos as well.
I feel like this group photo could have been posed better. There aren't any pictures of me doing crazy stuff that I know of, but there is this picture that I took (for someone else) which gives you an idea of what the course was like
I think that is this is all I have got for now. Next week we have no class because of Jesus' Ascension, so I will be going to Weimar, Leipzig and Lübeck and tomorrow I will be going to Dresden, so expect to see a lot of posts sometime next weekend or week. I will try to do posts shortly afterwards, but that might get pushed back. We will see and hope.

-Marc