The Fog On The Rhine (is All Mine, All Mine)

After that news post, back to Thann, for this view of the Thur valley and the Vosges mountains. On the day of my visit, I climbed here first, before continuing along a ridge to the Grumbach summit and down to the Grumbach pass, before circling back down to Engelbourg Castle which I posted about first. A nice hike, not too difficult - most of the climbing is done when you've reached the Roche Albert viewpoint. There's something to be said about why it's called "Albert's Rock", but I'll save that for another time.

We've seen these trains before, quite recently in fact, but they're back, on a much brighter day to really make their colours pop, and in a different border station between France and Germany.

This is Lauterbourg, the easternmost town in France, in the North-East corner of Alsace, and it shows the contrast between the line on the left-hand side of the Rhine, and the one on the right-hand side. The line from Strasbourg to Wörth am Rhein is not electrified to this day, and only sees local regional traffic. Nonetheless, Lauterbourg appeared to have a massive yard back in the day, now just a flat expanse of disused rails.

At the North end of Lauterbourg station, we find some old German mechanical signals, still in use!

Finally, like in the previous post on these trains, I have an amusing place name to share. It's more funny to pronounce with an English accent than anything else, but it also looks like a game of Countdown gone horribly wrong!

Grand Geroldseck castle - only a cat of different coat

Close to impressive Haut-Barr castle, a one-hour hike from Saverne, sit two more ruins. All of these castles were built around the same time, late 10th to early 11th century, but despite being so close, they weren't owned by the same people.

While Haut-Barr was under the control of the Bishop of Strasbourg, the two Geroldseck castles, the Petit and the Grand, were built by the Geroldseck family, in charge of protecting the lands of the Abbey of Marmoutier. At the time, Alsace was part of the Holy Roman Empire and divided into many largely independent pieces, so these castles facing each other were on a border of sorts. However, the male Geroldseck line went extinct at the end of the 12th century, and the land was co-owned by so many people that no-one was maintaining the castle. The last stand came in 1471, when a group of disgruntled knights used it as their base. The Imperial bailiff laid siege, won and the castle was left as a ruin after that.

While Haut-Barr castle gets a lot of visitors, owing to the possibility of driving there, the Grand Geroldseck is worth the extra walk and brief climb from its neighbour. As well as the dungeon, lots of walls and rooms are still present, making it an interesting place to explore. The remaining walls continue to receive restoration work - there seem to be a few differences between my first visit with @teamroquette and my second this summer, for example, I don't remember seeing the little garden a few years ago.

All that's left to say is: "OI YOU!... YES, YOU! Have a good time."

Strasbourg's tramway's 30th anniversary!

On this day in 1994, Strasbourg inaugurated - or rather, resurrected - its tramway network. Like many cities in France, Strasbourg had a streetcar system until the late 1950s, when it was decided that cars would take over. 30 years of worsening congestion and pollution later, the town chose a tramway, which had made a successful return in the mid 1980s in Nantes and Grenoble, over an automatic metro to revitalise its transit service.

Unlike Nantes and Grenoble, Strasbourg looked to foreign streetcar manufacturers Socimi and ABB, who designed a fully low-floor tram with generous windows. The Eurotram was at first a 33-metre vehicle (original form seen above), which quickly proved insufficient. A lengthened version, with an extra motor module and carriage, appeared in the following years.

Personally, I quite like this tram for the massive windows, the very mechanical sounds as it runs, and the fact that the warning bell is a real bell (later models have an electronic bell which... just sounds worse). A downside I have noticed, though not for me specifically, is that it has a low ceiling.

After losing out in the 90s, national constructor Alstom won the next round of contracts for Strasbourg's trams in the 2000s. The Citadis model, fully low-floor and taller than the Eurotrams, entered service in 2005. More Citadis trams arrived in 2016, with a new design that I really like, and with special adaptations to allow it to run in Germany, as the network crossed the border to Kehl in 2017, a first for a French tram operator.

Today, the network consists of 6 lines, crisscrossing the city centre and heading out into the suburbs. A 7th line is in the planning stages, due to head North towards Bischheim and Schiltigheim. Despite refurbishment, the Eurotrams won't be around forever, and new trams are on order - more from Alstom.

Another short one today, just a couple of Christmas decorations from Strasbourg. The "tree of cathedrals" was, as far as I can remember, new for last year in front of the station, and is back again this year. I definitely should talk at length about the cathedral at some point... Not to worry, normal nerdy and rambling service will soon be resumed.

Golden Week has begun in Japan, and this quick succession of public holidays ends with Children's Day on 5 May. It's for this occasion that the koinobori, or carp streamers, are brought out. Here are some flying over Asuka-gawa in Kashihara during my visit in 2018, with Unebi-yama, at the base of which Kashihara-jingû is located, in the background below.

My part of France is also on school break. With my homework done, it's time to get out and about again for my own Golden Week!

Friendly faces on Dôtonbori

Dôtonbori is the street to go restaurant crawling in Ôsaka (if you have the stomach). As there's a lot of venues, there's a lot of competition, so a lot of wacky stuff to draw the passer-by's attention.

If anyone knows why this restaurant is called Shôwa Hormone, please let me know. Shôwa, I can guess, is nostalgia for the post-war Shôwa era; but Hormone needs a good story behind it!

Is this guy mad at people double-dipping their fried skewers?

By the way, that's two fronts featuring another monument of Ôsaka, Tsutenkaku tower, just in case you forgot where you were.

Finally, we have this guy, a true local hero: Kuidaore Tarô. This animatronic was introduced in 1950 as a mascot for the Cuidaore restaurant, which has since closed, but Tarô and his drumming were such a stable of Dôtonbori, that people clamoured to have him back.

I dunno. I think he looks like Brains from Thunderbirds under the influence of the Mysterons. A figure of his time though.

"Kuidaore" by the way, is from the proverb:

京都の着倒れ、大阪の食い倒れ Kyôto no ki-daore, Ôsaka no kui-daore Spend all your money on clothes in Kyôto, and on food in Ôsaka

Today, "kuidaore" is colloquially translated as "eat until you drop" - so go restaurant crawling if you can!

Contrasted sunset on Shinji-ko

On the south side of Matsue, there is a famous sunset-viewing spot, overseeing the "great lake" mentioned by Kitty-chan on the train, which would be Shinji-ko, and a small island inhabited only by a torii, called Yomegajima.

It's so famous, that there's a sign to tell you where to stand to get the Sun over the island depending on the season!

While the sunset was gorgeous on the evening I was there (last year to the day), there was also something ominous. To the left in the top photo, one can make out some rain hiding the horizon... and to the South, a thunderstorm was active in the hills.

Still, the showers were kind enough to hold back for us to see the Sun set between the cloud layer and the mountains. But they soon caught up - as soon as I stepped off the bus at Matsue station, it chucked it down!

Triberger Wasserfälle

In the heart of the Schwarzwald region of Southwestern Germany, we find the town of Triberg and its waterfalls. Following a fire in the early 19th century, the town was rebuilt with a high street that aligned with the falls. Here's how that works out today, from the opposite hill.

With the arrival of the railway, Triberg became a leisure hotspot. The falls were visited shortly after that opening of the railway by the ruler of the recently unified Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm I, for which a memorandum was carved into a rock. The writing is just legible:

"Zur Erinnerung an den Besuch der deutschen Kaiserfamilie am 30 September 1877"

In time, Triberg has become a renowned tourist destination for the falls of course, but also for all things related to Schwarzwald culture, such as typical costumes and music, cuckoo clocks and local food - Black Forest gateau of course, but also ham, which has a festival in the town next weekend. The entrance fee to the falls includes tickets to three of the town's museums and indoor attractions.

At a total of 163 m over 7 drops, the Triberg Waterfalls are among the tallest in Germany. Triberg advertises them as the tallest, and a review check reveals some heated argument about the claim. I'm letting Wikipedia settle the debate: the claim is not correct, and it's not even close - the Röthbachfall in Bavaria is 470 m tall. However, Triberg undoubtedly offers the tallest easily accessible waterfalls in Germany, and they are still very much worth the visit. They are in the same size range as Nachi Falls in Japan.

The falls have also been used by Triberg in the late 19th century to become pioneers of hydroelectricity. Power stations were built at the top and the bottom of the falls, and enabled Triberg to become the first town in Germany with electric street lamps.

For an extra euro at the gates to the waterfalls, you can buy a bag of peanuts to try to attract the squirrels. As such, squirrels might come close to you whether you have some or not. This one still moved a bit too quickly to get a good photo.

All in all, the falls make a very solid start to a day trip in Triberg in the mid- to late-morning, and there's plenty and a variety of things to see and fill the afternoon after that.

The things people write on clocks...

Craignez la dernière - Eglise Notre-Dame de Croaz-Batz, Roscoff

Literally, this means "fear the last". OK, but the last what? Well, you're looking at the sundial for the time, which here, in French, would be "12 heures", so the full saying is inferred to be "craignez la dernière heure" - "fear thy final hour". Reminding people of their own mortality was an important part of medieval-Renaissance Christian discourse, as we saw with the ages of Man passing before Death among the automatons on the Astronomical Clock in Strasbourg Cathedral, built around the same time as this church in Roscoff.

Die Zeit eilt, Die Zeit heilt - Rathaus St. Johann, Saarbrücken

I've only got a close-up of one, but the tower of the historic town hall in Saarbrücken has at least two clocks, each with a message. The meaning of "die Zeit eilt" is similar to "time flies", and could be linked to what we saw above: be aware of what time you may have left. The second clock cleverly adds one letter to that to make "die Zeit heilt": "time heals".

"How to use this sundial" - Piazza della Borsa, Trieste

In the ground in front of the Chamber of Commerce in Trieste is a sundial, but conspicuously, the hand is missing. That is because you are the hand! Taking astronomy into account, one should stand in a slightly different place depending on the season, and apply corrections to the minutes to get official time. It was cloudy when I saw this, so I'm afraid I don't have a nice picture of the sundial in action. The instructions are in Italian on the left side of the base.