Today we had our first day off in Magdeburg. We walked.....but only around Magdeburg. We went to the Otto von Guericke (1602-1686) museum in der Lukasklause. It's near the bridge we will cross on our way out of Magdeburg on Thursday.
The museum was on 3 floors and a water barometer ran up inside the staircase between the floors. The top floor was set up with a lot of physics demonstrations. For example there were experiments showing how sound doesn't travel through a vacuum and how in a vacuum a feather and a lead ball fall at the same rate. It must be a great place for children interested in science.
I saw copies of the Magdeburg hemispheres which when evacuated couldn't be pulled apart by a team of 16 horses but which fell apart on their own when air was let back in.
On the way to the museum we passed quite a few beautiful churches but on reading their histories they all seemed to have been dogged by successive disasters causing collapse, mainly by fire. However the most recent damage seems to have been caused by bombing during the second world war, much like Coventry Cathedral suffered.
Unless one has the time and money to rebuild faithfully, with original materials, I prefer the solution used in Coventry. Leave bits of the old building standing as a memorial to the futilities of war and then have a new building built to the best comtemporary design.
In the evening we went out for a meal to a Czech restaurant but my meal at least bore little resemblance to it's description in the menu. We will not be going there again.
We also spent quite a bit of time today planning for accommodation over the next few days. One of the surprising difficulties we have found in Germany is that, unlike the Czech Republic, it's much harder here to find places with free wi-fi. Most of our hotels had it in the CR. Also in a lot of small villages on the Elberadweg you haven't even got cell phone coverage, well at least not with Vodaphone. This explains some of our late postings.
At least Shiel has been getting excellent sports coverage on the TV's in our hotel rooms. She's even seen quite a bit of fencing (with no number 8 wire in sight).
I forgot to mention that our landlady in Felgeleben was a Bayern Munich supporter! She was well aware of Sir Alec Fergusson but she didn't know he had retired. She and Shiel were talking about the match between Bayern Munich and Manchester United in the European Champions League Final with both of them having little knowledge of each other's language but obviously both knowing lots about that particular game.
A couple more non sequiturs:-
Today it cost me half a Euro to urinate! That's almost a dollar!
The photograph of the penguins is for Natalie's benefit.
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