Bremen

Last weekend, I traveled to Bremen, in the northwestern corner of Germany, to visit a former rowing coach who is currently living there (and grew up there). The train ride was nice and quiet and uneventful. The train from Ilmenau was late (as usual), but it was okay because I had a twenty minute layover in Neudietendorf. Neudietendorf is a stupid little hole in the wall station, but you often have to transfer at it in order to go somewhere to the west of Thüringen. I caught a regional express train from Neudietendorf to Göttingen, and then took the ICE from Göttingen to Bremen. Apparently the ICE that run on the Munich to Bremen line are the first generation of ICEs, so they’re quite old school. In terms of the actual niceness of the train, the regional express train was much nicer.
Mark (also known as MOK from his initials, Mark Oliver Klages) picked me up at the train station and then we went on a tour of the old city of Bremen after dropping the stuff off at his mother’s house. Bremen is a quite cute little city, full of little tiny narrow alleyways and cute old shops. Most of the buildings along these little alleys are just stores, but some are houses. According to MOK, they are very expensive and ritzy, but the tradeoff is that you have to deal with tourists wandering by all the time.
Bremen is famous for the Bremen Stadtmusikanten – that old legend about the four animals who decide to travel to Bremen in order to earn a living as street musicians. They come to a house along the way and decide to spend the night there. Little do they know, but a band of robbers has made this house their headquarters. The animals (a donkey, a dog, a rooster, and something else) pile on top of each other in order to see in the window. The robbers are so scared of this strange four-headed beast, they run away and never come back. The four Bremer Stadtmusikanten decide they like the house so they just stay there and live there and they never actually make it to Bremen.