Unbeknownst to us, they sell food here in Germany.
Several people from my last diary told me to post a food picture, so here is a typical dish from Schwäbisch Gmünd, where we are currently staying. After eating that (and drinking too much German beer), my wife poured me into bed.
The Official FredFredZ and Village Vet Tramping through Germany and Poland Photo Travelogue!
Numerous pictures abide at that link. Many more than I will put here. If you don't mind a pair of atheists tramping through churches and photographing them, here you go.
Yesterday we toured the border wall of the Roman Empire (the Limes Germanicus), a 360 mile set of fortifications manned with 40,000 troops, seventy forts, and hundreds of watchtowers. The Limes (lee'-mays) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
When someone tells you to "build the dang fence" (referring to Mexico), point out the Romans could not defend 360 miles of border by force-of-arms. Didn't work in Berlin, didn't work here, doesn't work in the Korean DMZ, didn't work with the Great Wall of China, the Maginot Line, won't work with Mexico.
(Border defences are welfare for military suppliers; they always have been. They never actually accomplish the objective for which they are constructed: border security.)
City hall in Schwäbisch Gmünd is a much nicer facility than that in my town of Broadwater, Nebraska.
Our group also visited with Lord Mayor Richard Arnold (pictured below in the orange tie but without red eyes in real life) and the former minister of the European Parliament for the area. I was introduced to the MEP and Lord Mayor as a visiting city councilmember from Broadwater, Nebraska. (He has a power handshake.) The mayor was somewhat surprised that a town of 128 people has a town government at all, and was interested in what it is our own town government actually does.
People in my village ofttimes wonder that as well.
Afterward, a kind clerk from the Traffic Division of the city government took us on a tour of churches in the city centre.
The ceiling painting of the nave of the Church of St Augustine
St. Mary Fountain (originally a Roman fountain) outside the choir of Holy Cross Church in Schwäbisch Gmünd.
Lord Mayor Richard Arnold, in the orange tie. He kindly took time out of his day to accommodate our group. The city also served pretzels, cheese, and champagne to us for breakfast at City Hall. Perhaps our own government divisions would be better oiled for the machinery of governance with pretzels and champagne.
The exterior of the nave of Holy Cross Church. The architecture is heavily Gothic.
There are lots more of these at Flickr; I don't want to clog the diary up with a hundred photographs.
This afternoon we toured the The Landesgymnasium für Hochbegabte (German for State Grammar School for Highly Gifted Children), the gifted children's school here in the city. According to the German Constitution, all children must be provided an education to maximise the potential of their strengths or gifts.
In the cases of art, or music, or sport, that is a fairly simple metric to achieve. In the case of intelligence, not so much. There are two schools of thought in the German education system regarding intelligence (one is that intelligence is the sole determinant of ability to succeed at a given field, the other states both intelligence and environment are needed).
The school is funded by the state, and is a boarding school. Much of the German populace sees schools that cater to the intellectually gifted as elitist, whilst schools promoting sport or music are not. Thus there is grumbling amongst the taxpayers about such intellectually-gifted schools.
On the other hand, across the world psychologists and psychiatrists note that the intellectually gifted are ofttimes the targets of bullying, or worse. Such treatment stunts social and interpersonal skills. Combined with the social ostracism that a highly intelligent child receives from his peers, and his education and potential suffer - by extension, the society suffers. The German solution to this problem currently is the boarding school.
The school seeks not so much to channel a child into a particular field, but allow the child to develop his or her interests and provide for those. (Thus the school can accommodate those who choose any number of eventual endeavours: mathematics, engineering, chemistry, physics, &c.)
With a group of children that are all told their IQ scores upon arrival, and a social network of academic peers, students do not suffer bullying and mistreatment that is all too common in schools across the world when a child is too smart for his or her peers. Being much easier to make and keep friends is one less pressure to succeed in school.
They study together, socialise together, eat together, everything. Visits are not prohibited with the outside, though, this isn't a cloister or a jail.
Currently the schools are limited to high school. With evidence that the schools achieve their stated aims, the education system hopes to be allowed to identify children in their primary school years and conduct the same sort of education. (That is already done with art, sports, music, &c, but those are not seen as elitist. Soccer star, yay. Composer, wonderful. Painter, sculptor, marvellous. Physicist? Mathematician? Chemist? Elitist.)
Germany sees such gifted schools (in all areas, not just intellect) as the wave of the future, for the sake of both society and the German economy. (As part of this vision, Germany has recently made post-secondary education free for any citizen that qualifies for it.)
The approach to education here is much different than the USA (where the goal seems to be to starve the system of cash and kill it in many places).