Month: August 2014

Wed 6^th:

It’s our wedding anniversary. To celebrate, we decided to cycle into Bamberg, drink a few beers (possibly), and have a meal. Sounds a bit like last night, in fact.

We started off at Brauerei Fässla – simply because it was right alongside the bicycle alley leading onto the Königsstrasse. Again, no problem taking our bikes down the entrance and into the Biergarten/Atrium. I tried the Zwergla – a dark, rich, 6% Märzen.

One of my main reasons for wanting to come to Bamberg was for the Rauchbier (literally smoked beer). Bamberg is famous for Rauchbier and there are very few other places in the world, never mind Germany, where it is made. In fact, there are now only 2 breweries left in Bamberg that still produce this style.

It may sound weird, or even unpleasant, but Rauchbier often has a “bacon-like” smokiness flavour with sometimes a peppery finish to it that comes from the smoked malt used for brewing.

The first Rauchbier Brauerei I had on my list was Brauerei Spezial. It had to be close by Fässla as the street name was the same. In fact, it was on the opposite side of the road. Directly opposite. No more than 15 metres away. Fall out of one into the other if you’re lucky enough to avoid being run down by bicycles and cars.

First up for me was the Rauchbier Märzen – a 5.3% smoked dark lager. Well-hopped (again, this is feature of Fränkische beers compared to those from other parts of Germany), with smoky and toffee flavours. Most excellent.

Joy then departed to do some window shopping, and a local joined me at my table. So I had to have another beer just to be sociable. This time, it was an “ungespundetes” (unfiltered) 5% lager. Naturally cloudy, with malt, coriander, and woody flavours. Had a long chat with the local who was telling me all about the maltsters of Bamberg: there are two of them, both with large maltings supplying not just Bamberg, but the whole of Germany. Some of their malt makes it to the UK, apparently.

Time for the next brewery – Schlenkerla. This was a 5 minute bike ride away in the Altstadt, but was most definitely worth it. Again, I was able to park my bike in the Biergarten. This time however, I was unable to find anywhere to sit. It was crammed. I did the German trick of inviting myself to sit on someone else’s table (which is perfectly acceptable in Germany). As soon as they left, their spaces were seized by several Asians. In fact, when I looked around, the place was full of them. A couple more arrived and I was struggling to keep a space free for Joy.

Over a Rauchbier Weizen (a most unusual and extremely hard to find beer), I got chatting to the Asian couple who turned out to be Chinese, and from Canton. They were really friendly, and wanted to tell me all about their 11 day tour of Germany (including Füssen, Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Munich in one day). They’d visited England last year but – apart from London and Bath – couldn’t recall where they’d been. Only that they found it very, very expensive (so do I). When their party left, they insisted on taking a photo of me!

In the meantime, I’d started on the Rauchbier Märzen – at 5.1% and probably the best German beer I’ve ever come across. When Joy arrived from her shopping expedition, I had to order another to go with our food. I’m not entirely sure what I ordered, but it seemed to be Bratkartoffeln mit kleine pieces of Schweine. It was exceedingly good.

I’m guessing we left at something around 7:30, and the place was still heaving. As were all the other Gaststätte we passed on the way back to Memmelsdorf.

This is a place I’ll definitely return to in the future.

Tue 5^th:

Her at  the top of the windscreen has done it again. About 1km into the (shortish) drive from Würzburg to Bamberg, we hit another Umleitung (diversion) in the middle of town. Off we went on a jolly detour. We were doing all right until she said something like “turn off left then stay left”. I did, but there was another “left” exit immediately following, and the lane I was in peeled-off. Wrong. So she quickly recalculated, and we followed her revised route. In completely the wrong direction again. My theory is that she gets the hump at us not following her every wish & then takes us on a wild goose chase to get even.

Instead of going East towards Bamberg, we were taken some way North and onto a completely different road to that which we’d planned to take.

Anyway – enough of that. We stopped for a bite to eat in a tiny place called Ebrach; just catching the bäckerei before he closed for lunch – he really didn’t seem pleased to see us. It turned out that Ebrach has a 12^th century monastery and abbey, with wonderful gardens open to the public. It also has a 16^th century orangery – now turned into floral gardens with a central fountain, and a 16^th century wine and beer cellar – unfortunately not open. It also boasted the most scrupulously clean public toilets I’ve ever seen, in gleaming stainless steel, complete with electronic sensors to automate anything could atomated and more besides. It also had the most stupidly designed urinal I’ve come across for a long time (albeit fantastically clean). These are housed in what was part of the wine cellar. Obviously the designer believed the ordinary male to be vastly more well-endowed than is really the case, with the result that the floor gets more use than the urinal. This probably explains why the floor had that “just-mopped” look about it, and it was scrupulously clean. I wonder if there are some robots that pop out of some 16^th century hatch and mop the floor when there’s no-one looking?

I was pretty fed-up with “windscreen woman”, and hate her dubious pronunciation of German place and street names. So I switched to a German voice to see if the German woman was any better.

We got to our chosen Stellplatz by the park & ride in Bamberg with no further problems. Except that it was full. Pity, because that one was only 15mins walk into the old town. But it WAS by a P+R (Park + Ride), it WAS pretty cramped, and it looked like it might get noisy. A quick glance at the Stellplatzführer revealed another possibility, though it was about 6km outside Bamberg in a small town called Memmelsdorf. We drove round to there: it seemed perfect. A corner of a large car park of the Sportshalle set aside for motorhomes overlooking a brook and with some trees for shade, with the playing fields (unused in the summer) beyond. And there was space a-plenty.

It was 15:30. Time to get the bikes out for a quick trip into Bamberg. First impression: Bamberg is set out for cyclists. Big time. Cars stop at junctions if the bike lane crosses the junction and there are cyclists on it. This took some getting used to as we thought we’d just get mown down. Not a bit of it. The drivers are SO aware of bike lanes crossing road lanes, and bikes certainly seem to have priority just about everywhere. I wonder if we could introduce that as a concept in the UK? The bike lanes where they exist – are also completely clear from any “street furniture” e.g. trees, bus shelters, railings, parked cars, lamp-posts. However, cyclists are also expected to obey the cyclist traffic lights which are fairly common in the town.

We were heading for the Tourist Information office; hopefully before they closed (it takes a good 35 mins into the centre of Bamberg from Memmelsdorf). Fortunately, there are big Info Points (aka “Maps”) all over the city but we still managed to get slightly lost!

The TI office was able to provide small town plans. Thus armed, and with a list of pubs and breweries I was hoping to visit, we alighted at Brauerei Klosterbräu. This was the pub/brewery on my list that’s closest to the TI!

Time to test the Klosterbräu Schwärzla – a black lager. It passed the test. Several times, in fact. Well, it was a very warm day.

Brauerei Klosterbräu was really an introduction to the fantastic fusion of Gaststätte, breweries, and history seen all over Bamberg. It is a working brewery – the oldest in Bamberg (founded 1533) – producing no less than 9 different beers. It’s also a fascinating building with an ancient passageway leading to an atrium – where we sat and had a meal. Not just Bayerisch food, but Fränkische food. I barely understood a word of what was on the menu, and I consider myself pretty fluent in German.

They were completely unfazed by us taking our bikes into the pub – never batted an eyelid. Must be common here. By 6 pm, there was barely a seat left in the place, neither inside nor outside. Great atmosphere and friendly staff.

8^th Aug, 2014

I’m sitting here in the van stripped down to a pair of shorts (sorry – probably too much information!). It’s 21:30 and 29°C and I’ve just taken a shower after the 7km bike ride back from Bamberg. I’m waiting until midnight’ish before I can go to bed because the electricity supply arrangement on this otherwise good Stellpatz, is €1 for 8hrs worth of supply. All in all, not a bad deal on the face of it. You could power a blast furnace if you wanted to, but only for 8hrs. All I want to do is charge the laptop, smartphones & tablets. The solar panel on the roof will bring the van’s leisure battery back up to full power by mid-morning, so I don’t even need to rely on the mains supply for that.

Our fridge will happily run from any of  – gas (running a little low until I can get to a petrol station that sells LPG); 12V (when the engine’s running); or from mains power. But it’s dumb insofar as it won’t automatically switch to whatever supply is available – it needs a human (or trained monkey – but they’re in short supply) to switch it to whatever is the preferred energy source. It runs most efficiently from mains and – as I might have mentioned – the gas is getting a little low.

So if I were to insert my €1 now and switch the fridge to mains supply (and plug in all our devices that need charging), I’d need to get up at 05:30 when the mains switches off, to either…

• Get up, go outside and feed the machine again, or
• Get up, switch the fridge to gas.

Either way, I’d be getting up at 05:30. 05:30 is a perfectly nice time. I have nothing against 05:30. I just don’t want to get up at that time. So I’ll wait until midnight, feed the machine & then get up at a slightly more sensible 08:00 to switch back to gas.

All of this is by way of suggesting that not everything in Germany is perfectly thought out and executed. They may not be the masters of the universe in all respects.

The problem with 8hrs mains supplies however, pales into utter insignificance compared with the utter backwardness of public Internet availability. Maybe we’re spoilt back in the UK, but it seems to be de-rigeur these days for just about every pub, library, cafe, restaurant, swimming pool, coffee house, service station (at cost, of course) et al to offer free WiFi Internet connectivity, albeit often of dubious quality. But at least, it’s available. In Germany – the most technologically advanced country in Europe, where even most urinals automatically flush themselves after your passage – my phone has failed to pick up a single WiFi access point – free or secured. Nada. Nichts.

This has meant that researching one’s next stop is impossible. Even checking the bus or train timetables can’t be done. Not to mention updating this blog. All that is taken for-granted back home. If you don’t have internet connectivity, you’re doomed to the dark ages (and missed buses). So I had to look for ways of getting some kind of mobile Internet access…

My mobile provider back home (T-Mobile) does offer a roaming data tariff whilst abroad. It used to cost £3 per 100MBy per day – which actually isn’t such a bad rate, and I have used it a couple of time. Trouble is, uploading photos to the blog tends to burn up 100Mby fairly quickly – and that’s after I edit all my photos to reduce the size prior to publishing them. Also, last weekend when I decided I needed something better, T-Mobile was saying (on my phone) that there were no further optional “boosters” (as they call them) available to me., until I got a marketing text message from them on Monday offering a new service of £3 per 50MBy/day or £5 per 100Mby/day, or £15 per 500MBy for 7 days. I.e. pretty much a doubling of costs, so they’ve excluded themselves from the competition.

Now researching smartphone Internet deals is pretty difficult with no Internet access. However, during the brief pre-burn-up time of my 100Mby, I managed to find a blog all about mobile phone Internet providers in Germany (in English!). One of the (apparently) best deals is offered by a German supermarket chain – Edeka. €9.95 for 500Mby in 30days. So I bit the bullet whilst in Edeka in Ehningen, and bought myself an Edeka SIM card for €10 that allegedly had €10-worth of credit on it. It uses the Vodaphone network here in Germany which – allegedly – is about the best (sorry about all the “apparently’s” and “allegedly’s”).

I eventually managed to remove the SIM card from my Google handset (the tool for this is at home, of course) and insert the Edeka SIM card. Now I’ve never had a pre-paid tariff before, so am very naive with how these things work. Add to which, all the instructions were (understandably) in German. I thought I’d managed to figure it out. There’s a toll-free number to call that connects with an automated system to register your new SIM card. The system didn’t recognise the SIM card/phone number combination. Fell at the 1^st hurdle. However, the system didn’t give up on me, it connected me with a very helpful (real) person who took the details and assured me that everything was hunky-dory. She also confirmed that the €10 free credit could be used for the data tariff (as opposed to phone calls & SMS messages.

The SIM card wasn’t working: Internet access simply wasn’t available. Back to the free phone number. Ah-ha! There was an option to change my tariff to “500Mby in 30 days for €10”. Done. Within seconds, I received a text message saying that my data tariff would be available as soon as I received confirmation of having registered my “account”. What account would that be? It’s a blasted pre-pay phone. And I was told the initial credit could be used for the 500Mby in 30days bit.

I then noticed that I had an Internet connection. Hooray! But my rejoicing was premature: the internet connection was burning up my “free” €10 at a rate of €0.24/Mby. I.e. the phone, rather than the data tariff. It was gone within 5 minutes.

So now, a long way away from the Edeka I know in Ehningen, I need to locate another branch of Edeka here in Bamberg in order to buy a top-up – this without any Internet connection; I can’t simply Google it.

Later…

We found an Edeka yesterday after a long bike ride on a mission. And they sold top-up cards. Guess what? The top-up cards are either €15 or €25. How does that work with my €10 per 500MBy per month tariff? No-one was able to explain.

Last night, I registered my top up, set up my phone as an Internet access point for my laptop, and wrote some stuff for the blog (not yet published). At midnight (see earlier electrical supply discussions), I went to bed.

This morning – just for a laugh, and because it’s a toll-free call – I called to check the balance on my account. They don’t tell you how many MBy you’ve used or have left; they tell you how much monetary credit you have left. €2.30 in this case. That’s equivalent to having used 375MBy within a few hours. Not impressed.

I think that what’s happened is that my laptop – running Microsoft’s mega-bloatware Windows 7 – managed to sneak in a quick Windows security update to supposedly patch yet another gaping security hole in their extensively quality-controlled operating system. Bugger. I’ve now set my laptop NOT to do any Windoze updates. I’ve also told Android on my phone NOT to do any background activity when not connected by WiFi.

That was one expensive Windoze update.

One day, I’ll have it all sorted and be able to tell you all about Würtzburg and Bamberg. Keep your eyes open, but don’t hold your breath. And in case you’re wondering; I write all this stuff offline, then upload it when I’m lucky enough to have a connection!