Trip to Freiburg

Julie needed to do a research trip to a small town called Emmindingem, Germany. I thought it would be fun for me to tag along and also to help her with her research.

We landed on Thursday afternoon in Baden-Baden, Germany, then took the train to Freiburg. We stayed at a hotel in Freiburg for the whole trip. Emmindingem is about 15 minutes away from Frieburg but we decided to make our home base there because Emmindengem is a pretty small town with not much to do. Here is a map of what we did.

The German rail system is absolutely fantastic. High speed, electrified trains, that run all over the country (even to small towns like Emmindingem). I really liked the look of the train stations, they reminded me of WWII movies.

and the old fasioned clocks at the station were neat too:

I've been learning German for the past 4 months, so I tested it out a few times over the trip. It's a very interesting experience testing out your legs on a new language. I totally understand why foreigners sometimes come across as rude when their English isn't very good. For example, Julie and I stopped at a bakery for a little snack. I asked for a Latte and and apple Berliner. I said "Guten Abend, ich habbe eine milchkaffe und ein apfel Berliner", which directly translates to "good evening, I have a latte and a apple berliner". Of course, because I was nervous, I forgot to tack on a please. I'm sure the cashier could easily have been insulted. Nonetheless, it was much better to try speaking German rather than to just speak English. I find the best learning experiences are when you make an ass out of yourself because you will be much less likely to make that same mistake again. We found that almost everyone in Germany had a little English, some quite good but most only had very little. We improved our German even during the few days we were there. Somehow, every German we talked to instantly knew the second we started speaking that we were English - I wish I knew what they were locking into so I could correct it.

On the train ride, I saw more rooftop PV solar panels and solar hot water heaters than I have seen in my whole life in every other country combined!

The food in Germany was pretty much stereotypical. Lots of beer, sausages, breads, and pretzels. It's not a terribly vegetarian friendly place, but we found some good food here and there. The German beers were good, but I still think Czech and Canada have the best beers in the world. Here's me with beer and a big pretzel.

So, now onto the main purpose of our trip. Julie is writing her final paper for her masters on childhood during the Third Reich (pre-1940). So we went to an archive in Emmindingem to hopefully get lots of diaries, journals, paintings, etc. Anything that would give a glimpse into what it was like to be a child under the Third Reich before the war. So our plan was to go to the archives armed with 2 cameras and photograph each and every page of document that would be relevant. We had no idea how much or how little this archive would have. When we got there, we were very lucky the people from the archives had some English because what we were asking for was pretty complicated and beyond our level of German. Julie had sent them a few emails to let them know we were coming and basically what we were looking for. I thought it was nice to hear Julie greeted when she got to the archives as "Frau Bailey".

The people from the archives started handing us journal after journal. Julie was getting very excited because there was a lot of good stuff. I was clicking away with the camera and Julie was evaluating how relevant each journal was and whether we should capture it. Everything was going well until we realized after taking about 700 pictures that we were going to run out of batteries and memory. The memory problem could probably be solved by buying a new memory card or dumping the pictures at an internet cafe, but the battery problem could not be fixed because the cameras have special batteries that I couldn't just go buy. We were kicking ourselves because if we planned better, these issues could be been dealt with. Now Julie had to prioritize what she wanted given the limited amount of pictures left. Luckily, after that bit of drama, it all worked out because we managed to get pretty much everything. We snapped about 800 pictures in 4 hours. Most of the pictures were something like this:

That's about all I can think of. We had a good time. You can find all the pictures we took on our trip here.