Leipzig and Ulm in October

The glass structure is a university building they are rebuilding on the site of a church that the communists destroyed.



St. Thomas Church in Leipzig where Johann Sebastian Bach was the choir master for 20 years.



Downtown Leipzig.



This is the Leipzig Main train station. The biggest in Germany!



Biking from Ulm to Blaubeuren in the Swabian Alb, a limestone karst landscape filled with caves, underground rivers, canyons and vampires (I made the last one up).




Blautopf which means Blue Pot. An underground river that runs through a long cave system exits the ground here and makes a river which is really clear and bluish. The flow rate is pretty good and when there is a rainstorm it bubbles up like a hot tub and gushes water out very quickly. The river flows into the Danube River 20 Km downstream.



See it's really blue! I saw a big fish in there too!



Here is a Closter that was built around this mystical site in the middle ages. Science has since disposed of all such mysticism. Too bad. Legends are fun.



I'm up on a cliff looking into the valley. It was a nice warm place for a Sunday afternoon nap in the sun.



Tallest cathedral in the world in Ulm. Built over the course of 400 years in competition with a very similar looking cathedral in Cologne. It is 512 feet tall and you can climb to the top along narrow spiral staircases.





This is part of the old city wall and watch tower along the Danube River. Ulm is a very nice medium sized city with a well preserved old city. It also has only three letters in its name which is impressive! If only all German words could have so few letters. They tend to have very long words in German. English speakers would consider some German words sentences like Schwarzwalderkirshetorten (Black Forest Cherry Cake).







This house is 500 years old, like most of the houses in the fisherman's quarter of Ulm. It is an example of subsidence with one end of the house's foundation in a stream bed. The wood has slowly bent to accommodate the settling and the hotel guests all have levels attached to their beds to ensure no settling is occurring during their stay.



Here we go up the cathedral!