NMKOP - #43

I know that this is way off track and encroaching unashamedly on Lachezar's territory, but there's a restaurant/sports bar type place called MKOP in Albany, north of Auckland.
Stands for My Kind Of Place. (It's not - they microwave food to a limply comatose state and the service is frequently naff)

Hence the abbreviation NMKOP - NOT My Kind Of Place

This place is also NMKOP, although I can see that it appeals to a certain (predominantly female) segment of the market. And I like the people in there. And it's a real success story.

This is the "Girlande" ("Garland") in the Kartäuserstrasse, just off the Augustinerstrasse in the old part of town.

Christel Wolf opened the place in the early 1980s, selling classy greeting cards, little boxes, ribbons and the sort of stuff that women go breathless over and blokes don't really understand.
Christel's daughter, Marion Becker, took the place over a few years ago and it's going from strength to strength..

Which is no surprise, because she's got her finger right on the market's pulse.
And her window displays are immaculate.

They don't have anything really useful like chainsaws, log splitters or oil filters for the tractor, but they do have lots of things in pink.
Or yellow.
Or blue.

One hears the word "cute" quite a lot.
Also "sweet"

I got chatting to a flight attendant and copilot from a Qantas crew this morning. (They stay at the Hyatt in Mainz on their layovers.)

She was saying "Isn't this cute. Can't you just see me pouring my tea from this (pink teapot with white polka dots)?"

He was looking as bemused as I do in similar circumstances.

And he was being very non-committal, which - in my considerable experience - is the best tactic.

Things are a bit quiet.. - #42

Normally on the Rhine, you'd see wall-to-wall barges and lighters at this point. (This is from the North railway bridge, linking Mainz with those rascals across the river.)

But it's a bit quiet around here at the moment.

The captain of a container barge downriver close to Cologne pulled a fairly rapid U-turn in mid-river on Sunday, dumping 30 or so containers into the river.

Some merrily bobbed around like corks, some headed straight for the bottom, some floated around for a bit, got tired and submerged themselves elsewhere. 3 appear to have dissolved. Not to be found.

Not an easy job retrieving them. The current really zips along and they're setting up deflector shields (What? Where's Dr. Spock when we need him...?) to let the divers work underwater to attach cables without getting flushed away down to Rotterdam.

So there's not a lot of traffic on the river at the moment.

None, actually.

Now would be a good time to go for a swim...

The bridge to nowhere - #41

This is the Theodor Heuss bridge, named after the first President - from 1949 to 1959 of the Federal Republic of Germany.

And that's Wiesbaden over there.

Wiesbaden's the capital of the state of Hesse,

Wiesbaden's a bit - forget that - a lot more elegant than Mainz. Which you'd expect for a spa town.
They twin with Royal Tunbridge Wells, Mainz twins with Watford....

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were more millionaires in residence in Wiesbaden than in any other German city. Tons of Russians.
What goes around, comes around, as they say.

So sibling rivalry's to be expected.
Wiesbaden studiously ignores Mainz, but the locals here harp on about the parts of the city that got nicked after the war and take huge pleasure in cackling at any misfortune across the river.

Such as when one of the main political parties neglected to lodge the documents in time for their candidate for the mayoral election.

I had a quiet chuckle, too.

Closed. Forever - #40

That's what the blackboard says.

And someone's written underneath "That's a real shame"

This used to be a Home Depot-type superstore on a greenfield site.

Except that there were 2 established competitors within 5 km. And a new one planned not much further away.

And they weren't open evenings.

And - whisper - they were a bit trashy....

So it wasn't a big surprise.

Cheating! Boo, hiss.... #39

Asparagus is one of the finer things in life.

Bought fresh from your local farmer, steamed and enjoyed with butter, new potatoes and fresh chervil or parsley from the garden.

Can't beat it.

The season used to run from late April until June 24 - St John's day - but this year, it's been on the market for a week or more already.
At €12 a kilo - twice what you'll pay in season.

How come?

Well, it's economics, innit Brian.

A scarce good, combined with an irrational and price-insensitive (read: salivating) market will rack up prices in any free market environment.

Add the "first-to-market factor" and you're away.

So how do you get to be first to market?
You force the crop by covering the fields with black plastic. And this year they're using foil tunnels on top of the plastic for the first time, which turbocharges the whole scam even more.

And what you get?

The equivalent of the hothouse tomato.

Watery. Tasteless. Rubbish

Cheating! Boo. Hiss...

Third time lucky - #38

The Brand Centre in Mainz has a long history of commercial significance.

The original Kaufhaus - a massive 2-storied warehouse - was built here in the 14th century to take advantage of the newly granted Right of Guests (Ius emporii).

This law gave a city the right to require that any goods passing through its jurisdiction were unloaded, stored for a given period - 3 days in Cologne - and offered for local sale.

Oh, and the city had a monopoly on all stevedoring activities.

And - as in Monopoly - you could pay a "consideration" to avoid the process.

At least Dick Turpin wore a mask....

The original structure was damaged during the bombardment of the French occupying forces by German artillery in 1793 and demolished in the early 19th century.

Then everything in the immediate area got demolished as a result of 2 bombing raids in world war 2.

The houses on the billboard were built in the style of buildings that existed prior to the war and are again being replaced. (They were built using recycled rubble and only lasted 40 years or so before they started reverting to their original state)

They'll be rebuilt properly this time.

Third time lucky?

For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth... - #37

Just keep going, mate....

I can swim.

Feeding frenzy - #36

Most of the gastronomy at the Rheinland-Pfalz Ausstellung wouldn't actually knock the socks off your average gourmet.

There's Ditsch's for brezels, of course, and the standard currywurst and french fries.

Plus canteen cuisine for the seriously hungry.

But there's also haute cuisine. For free even.

Chefs from a couple of top restaurants work behind a kitchen island under an angled mirror to show the salivating crowd how really easy it is to create restaurant quality meals with fresh ingredients in no time at all.

And then they put out free samples for the punters.

You should have seen them get the nosebags on.

I've never seen people move so quickly....!

Sneaking Brunhilde through the Gasse... #35

The Kapuzinerstrasse and the Rheinstrasse are linked by the Hänleingaesschen, the Scharfensteinergaesschen and the Färchergaesschen.

Old names (or spellings) no longer in use, but they give us an idea of what trades were pursued in them.

Scharfensteiner (lit: sharpening stone) would have been the place to go to have your knives sharpened

Färchergässchen was where the ferrymen lived - virtually everything between the Rheinstrasse and the river is reclaimed land - and they provided the infrastructure for trade between the settlements on the opposite banks of the river.

And you'd buy your poultry in the Hänleingässchen.(Competition for the fishermen and river folk who dominated this part of town.)

And a Gasse is an alleyway (as the Robert Palmer fans among us will be aware).

And a Gässchen is an even narrower alley.

And here's a really cool website that delivers the semantic relationships of the word.

Amazing what you find out when you look closely.....

Private audience - #34

Mainz hosts the annual State Fair - the Rheinland-Pfalz Ausstellung.

It's a bit like the Easter Show of my youth in Auckland. Without the sheepdog trials. And candy floss. (Cotton candy, before you ask..)

This one's an eclectic mix.

It's got everything: PR for the state government, fashion, wellness, gastronomy, more flimflam and snake oil merchants than you can shake a stick at. And lots of oldies.

And stuff.

Probably need stuff: House insulation. Solar panels. New hip joints.

Might need stuff: Indestructible bike cable locks.

Definitely don't need stuff: Garden sheds. Garages. €30 black boxes that cut your power bills by coverting "bad" electricity to "good" electricity.

WTF? stuff: Kitchen knives that cut through bike cable locks. (Hang on, I thought he said it was indestructible...)

The media's there, of course.

ZDF - one of Germany's two public service TV channels - is just up the road from here and they've got a mock-up of their news studio to show people where their license fee goes..

The local Walter Mitty mob even get to pretend to read the news and take it home on DVD

ZDF delegates a couple of minor personalities for the duration, one of whom burst into song a la Tony Bennett quite unexpectedly.

Cleared the place in a flash....

(I think these two had nodded off. Didn't have the heart to wake them.)

Things are looking up - #33

From the bottom of the circular stairwell in the Theatre underground carpark.

It's not a good idea to hang around here for too long, though - you'll bankrupt yourself.

Parking (€1.60 an hour) around here costs only marginally less than in Frankfurt, which is the Big Smoke.
Mainz is a village in comparison.

And the City Manager wonders why people stay away from the city centre in droves.

And why small merchants go out of business

Eat your veggies - #32

We buy our veggies from Lorenz and Hildegard Schuster.

They live in our village and you'll find them on the market in Mainz on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

They only sell what they grow, so if you want papayas, pineapples and coconuts, you'll have to look elsewhere.

(Until global warming turns the Rhine valley into a tropical paradise, of course...)

So eat your carrots. It'll help you see better in the dark

And if you believe that, I'll have to enlighten you - it's one of the better urban legends.

What actually happened is that the Brits had developed airborne interception radar in the early days of world war 2 and needed to disquise the real reason for their nightfighters' increased success rates. So the disinformation machine got cranked up and pictures were taken of gallant fighter aces merrily chomping away on carrots.
And everyone believed it
There you just do go...

Checkmate -#31

Winter came back with a vengeance over the weekend - snow in the hills, we flatlanders (200m ASL) are forecast to get thumped this afternoon.

So I let this morning's appointment to switch from winter to summer tires slide ...

But spring might return and here's one of our seasonal friends which we're hoping will survive the cold snap.

Fritillaria meleagris aka snakes's head, leper lily, guinea-hen flower and checkered daffodil in English.

And Schachbrettblume - chess board flower - in German.

They're meant to be tricky to grow, but this is from our own seeds.

And it also features on Croatia's national flag.
How about that. (Not that I know why...)

For the techies - Nikon D80 with an AI Micro-Nikkor 55mm plus PK-13 macro extension tube, bracketed due to the lack of auto-exposure. The rest are over here on Flickr. I much prefer the washed-out delicacy of this image.

Going, going, gone..... - #30

210 years isn't that old.

If you're a glacier, that is.

These days, though, it's a pretty good innings if you're in business.

Johann Anton Lutz opened his goldsmith's shop behind the cathedral on the corner of Augustiner Strasse and Grebengasse in 1797.

The next 5 generations - Joseph Lutz, Joseph Anton Lutz, Josef Christian Lutz, Anton Lutz and Margit Lutz - continued the tradition, even opening a second shop in the very flash Vierjahreszeiten Hotel in Wiesbaden in 1904.

I'm not sure when they moved from the original location in Mainz's Old Town. Certainly post-war -there wasn't much left standing after 1945 in that bit of Mainz - and the current location is classically ugly build-it-quick 1950's style.

But the market in Germany is gradually polarising between quality and bling (or its equivalent), with not much breathing space in the middle.

You'll see a lot of "hybrid buying" going on - shopping at no-frills discounters like Aldi and Lidl (who've got around 50% share of the grocery market) for basics and buying smoked salmon at the delicatessen and the best cuts of meat at the local butcher.

Pretty much the same in all market segments.

And that appears to be the story of how Lutz the Jewellers ended up with a broken neon sign and "Everything must go" signs in their windows.

Bit of a shame, really.

Scalped - #29

The €10 haircut salon has become quite a phenomenon in Germany.

Mainz now has one, too.

Production line, no appointments. no frills, just the basic "wash and cut", blow-drying costs extra but you can do it yourself for free.

It's very entertaining. Almost as good as a trip to the laundromat.

I was intrigued to watch one person having her hair wrapped in copious quantities of aluminium foil on to which the hairdresser was plastering even copiouser quantities of gunk. She looked like something out of one of David Bowie's "Diamond Dog" - era videos...

Or a scarecrow.

Or a lightning conductor

You can see her slightly bemused look in the corner of the picture.

I'd look bemused, too.

I'm told that this is how you get highlights. I've seen (paid) the bills for this stuff, so I know it costs more than €10...

My hairdresser - you take potluck - was all my nightmares rolled into one - looked about 12 years old, technicolour hair, something glittery attached to her upper lip and the standard "hipster-bare midriff-muffin bulge-tramp stamp" uniform.

The scalping took all of 8 minutes.

I think I only got €5 worth.

A hat is probably appropriate attire for the next couple of months.

Not long now - #28

Slumbering under these mounds is the 2007 asparagus vintage.

Not the green stuff (although you can get that here these days, too) that most of the world knows.

This is Spargel - white asparagus - and the idea behind the mounds is that the spears - growing upwards towards the warmth - are deprived of light (which is kicks off the photosynthesis that turns the asparagus green).

Harvesting it's a real pain.

You have to get up at stupid o'clock and wander along the mounds, looking for disturbances where the spears are just poking through the surface of the earth.

Then you dig down to the root (crown, actually), cut the spear off at the base and smooth off the earth.

Of course, it's as cold as a witch's, most likely raining and your back's hurting like hell from bending over for hours on end.

Not that I'd know - I buy mine from the folks in the village.

A kilo for about 5 Euros.

Then you steam it and eat it with the best prosciutto you can buy, buttered new potatoes, sauce hollandaise (of course we make our own..), fresh chervil, straight from the garden and fleur de sel.

And a glass of New Zealand sauvignon blanc.

Yum.

You'll have to speak up.... - #27

KUZ put on its finest floodlighting for us last night

Or maybe it was for Bernard Allison

Probably.

Or for the twin rattlesnake heads on his hat.
What an excellent gig.

Over 2 hours of blues, rock and funk, the usual tour-through-the-crowd, kick-ass band, boss drags the guitar technician onto the stage to show his chops, supporting act comes on - shy as hell - to sing harmonies, booze is cheap, a good time is had by all.

Good thing I can still read, because I still can't hear a bloody thing.

Worth it, though.

What did you say....?

"Tiger, tiger, burning bright.... - #26

In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry"
Wm. Blake

Well, Philipp Harth (1887-1968, son of a local stone mason, huge talent, works in places such as the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco) could.

His tiger stands guard on the Rhine promenade, snarling across the river at the state of Hesse.

Which is unsurprising, because they stole big chunks of Mainz after the war and animosity sits deep.

Happened like this.

During the post-world war 2 occupation period, the Russians got the east, the Brits got the north, the French got the southwest (again), the Americans got the southeast.

Using rivers as arbitrary boundaries (as one does - look at the Middle East, as a prime example), Mainz - which has straddled both sides of the Rhine since Roman times - was split between Hesse (American) and the Palatinate (French).

So Mainz found itself short of the suburbs of Amoeneberg, Kastel and Kostheim (known as AKK), plus Bischofsheim, Ginsheim and Gustavsburg.

And 100,000 inhabitants, compared with 1935.

And its industrial and tax base.

They're still trying to get them back from Wiesbaden which absorbed them. (Though they're still called Mainz-Kastel etc...).

I don't really see it happening....

KUZ - #25

Just down the road from the Lampenfabrik and up the road from the elegant Marina, you'll find the Kulturzentrum.

Translation required?
Didn't think so.

It's in a fine old brick building that dates back to 1888, when it originally housed the laundry for the army garrison.

In one of earliest civil conversion projects (these days, they convert all ex-NATO airfields to civilian airports, whether there's a need for them or not. Don't get me started...), it became one of Germany's first vocational training centres in 1932 and in 1981, KUZ took it over.

Excellent place.

They have poetry slams, cinema, theatre for kids of all ages, parties ranging from Dark-Wave to over-30, you can watch Mainz 05 on Saturday afternoons if you can't get a ticket and they have a beer garden in summer.

And concerts.

I've seen:

Dr. John, Jeff Beck, Willy DeVille, Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings, Bernard Allison. Who's back again on Wednesday night. Me too.

All of which generates more than a few decibels.

Which annoys some people (although no-one lives anywhere near it) and gets the "Tear it down and build something ugly brigade" going again.

There's been an idea floating around for yonks to turn the marina into something like Docklands in London. Flash apartments and nice shops.

Really is just the sort of thing that Mainz needs.

"Ah, but we won't find investors with all that noise going on."

Ignoring the main trunk railway line that trashes by a couple of metres behind the proposed building site.

"And the.... people that these rowdy events attract...."

"Oh, and we're cutting your subsidy, by the way"

"And that tree that's growing on the property will have to go. It's damaging the foundations of the place next door. (And while we're at it, why don't we tear it down and build something ugly)"

Shame that the tree (30 metres high, 5 metres girth, 100 years old) is a Black or Lombardy Poplar (Populus nigra).

On the Endangered Species Red List.

Only 3000 in all of Germany.

They can't touch it.

I hope.

High and dry - #24

Mainz is a nightmare for construction projects.

I've been involved in contingency planning for some seriously big projects in my time, and I wouldn't touch Mainz with a bargepole.

All you have to do is dig a hole somewhere and you'll end up with something of interest to somebody, who will promptly instruct you to down tools until they've had a GOOD LOOK at whatever it is you've found.

As in the case of the annex to the Mainz Hilton back in 1981.

The Mainz Hilton is right on the river. Great location, great views, great restaurant. But too small.

Dig a hole for the foundations - this is way back from the river, on far side of a 4-lane road - and find.......a Roman boat.

Great celebration and much jumping up and down ensues. Television interviews. International interest

Dig some more.

Find another one.

Repeat 17 times, with an associated tailing off of expressions of joy and vertical modulation.

It turns out that they've dug right into a Roman shipyard that was abandoned in around 400AD in the hasty retreat from the invading Teutons (who had stuffed the Roman Rhine army elsewhere.)

And this really is a significant find.

The city fathers, of course, are a bit concerned about the turn this is taking. (The Mayor was quoted at the time as saying "We're very pleased, of course, but it's OK with me if we didn't find any more..").

What do you do with the darn things?

1 - Requisition the old Covered Market

2 - Carefully restore and re-assemble of the of most significant (and intact) ships

3 - Construct 1:1 replicas of others

4 - Found the Museum of Ancient Shipbuilding and put everything into an historical context.

Worth a visit. Free, too.

Oh.

And one of the boats was cast in bronze and sits happily 7.5 metres above where it was found.

In front of the Mainz Hilton.

"And I'll have...." - #23

You could be excused for thinking that this is a flashback to a food-queue in what used to be East Germany in the 1980s....

But it's not.

This is the queue at Mario's, the best Italian icecream maker for miles.

Real homemade stuff.

Real homemade people.

He says "Buon giorno" and "Mille gracie" and has a smile for everyone

I had orange, yoghurt and creme caramel.

It was wonderful.

Today was a cracker in Mainz - clear blue sky, not a breath of wind, 15ºC.

Yesterday was even better - the weather wasn't as good, but Mainz 05 won 1:0. Again.

What an excellent weekend

The power of life - #22

Mainz is twinned with more places than you can shake a stick at.

Watford, for example.

(Cousin Graham asked me whether anyone from Mainz had actually been to Watford before the nuptials)

Valencia's possibly a more attractive prospect and the mating ritual resulted in this sculpture, designed by Andreu Alfaro, which graces the square in front of the town hall.

Designed in 1979

Built in 1982.

Restored in 2006.

And reassembled the wrong way round.

These things can happen......

Tagging along... #21

This is a good trick...

Lurk around one of the guided tour groups that drift through Mainz of a weekend and pick up all sorts of useful information.

For instance.

"This is the St Ignaz church in the Kapuzinerstrasse. Built between 1763 and 1775, you could be excused for thinking that it's Rococco like its contemporaries, the Augustine Church and St Peters. But it is, in fact, a transitional style......

Look, would you mind not eavesdropping, please. Why don't you sod off!"


I guess I'll have to buy the guide book after all....

Monaco, it isn't... #20

This is the pride of Mainz's luxury vessel marina.

As always, there's a story.

These barges date back to 1898, when the city fathers had the idea of incenting folks to do their washing in the Rhine instead of overloading the newly installed water reticulation network.

So they had these mobile laundromats - "Waeschbrigge" - built and anchored along the banks of the river, where they stayed until 1962.

This one survived as a houseboat/floating (more or less) clubhouse until early 2006, when the level of the Rhine dropped significantly due to a dry spell and grounded it.

The rains came (or the snow in the Alps melted. Whatever), the waters returned, the boat stayed firmly where it was.

At about this point, the city gets in on the act. Which does not bode well. Ever.

They raise the boat - well, they TRY to raise the boat - without talking to the owner and everything goes pear-shaped.

Then they cancel his lease.

Now the lawyers are talking

Tripping the light fantastic - #19

This is the Lampenfabrik - the Lamp Factory.

In fact, it used to be a lot more besides that and it almost became nothing once the politicians got it into their heads that it was an eyesore.

Talk about a lack of vision.

It was originally an iron and bronze foundry built in 1899 for the Gasapparat- und Gusswerk AG (Gas Fittings and Foundry plc) who made street lamps and similar bits and pieces.

Hugely famous outfit - most major cities were customers.

The Reichstag was, too.

Since 1925, it's been home to lamp manufacturers, carpenters, artists and furniture dealers and things were ticking over in quite a jolly manner until the "Tear it down and build something ugly" brigade became vocal.

Countered by those good souls of the "Let's build something special" faction. Who won.

So now we have the original structure on the left, the addition on the right and a glass-covered atrium linking the two.

Bloody excellent place. Good gallery, good exhibitions sponsored by the Handwerkskammer (Chamber of Trade).

Just goes to show what you can do if you set your mind to it.

Pretzel logic #18

There are pretzels and pretzels.

They don't get much better than Peter Ditsch's.

His granddad started out as a traditional family baker in the Old Town and followed his instincts, his noses and the market when the demand switched from traditional products to his soft pretzels.

So how do your customers get freshly baked pretzels when the bakery's closed?

You take them to them.

Put your staff in white coats, give them baskets packed with the goods and set them off on their rounds through the wine bars of Mainz of an evening.

Not quite as romantic these days, although you'll still find the occasional pretzel man out and about.

But he's got locations all over Germany and more than you can shake a stick at here in Mainz. In fact, this one's probably not far from the original bakery in the Altstadt.

Just opposite my favourite cafe.

Cue for a song?

From the Dan, natch.

Lies, all lies.... #17

Received knowledge around this neck of the woods is that the linked wheels on Mainz's crest are attributed to Bishop Willigis and the fact that his father was a wheelwright.

So it was a sort of "Thanks for that, Dad, and I'll see you right" gesture.

Shame that crests only came into being in the 12th century.

And Wiiligis died in the 9th....

So much for that.

To find a more plausible yarn, we have to dig up our old mate St. Martin.

Not literally. (We sort of know where he's buried - St. Stephan's pops up again.. - but only to the closest 100 metres or so.)

Or even the Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament, where the prophet has a vision in June 593 BC (that's what it says here..) involving God's chariot - the merkaba - and all of a sudden (well, 1.8 millennia later, to be exact), St Martin turns up in a picture, brandishing a set of wheels.

And then the Archbishops of Mainz think "Aha, let's be smart and brand ourselves currum Dei - Drivers of God's Chariot. Even better: currum ecclesiae Moguntinae aurigantes - Drivers of the Chariot of the Church of Mainz."

Which is how Mainz got its wheels. (These ones are flags on the market square in front of the cathedral. They're all over the place. Even on manhole covers.)

Of course, if we find out that wheels and chariots were only invented i in 500 AD, then that story's stuffed as well...

OK. Who turned out the lights....? #16

OK.

Technically yesterday's MDP, but if I'd waited until after midnight, the eclipse would have been total which makes for images of limited interest.

We had the usual festivities one has in primitive cultures - chickens were slaughtered to ward off evil spirits.Dogs met an untimely end to appease the gods.

I believe that virgins were the traditional sacrifice , but they're in short supply around these parts, I'm told.

If there are any left at all.

Weck, Worscht un ..... where's the Woi? #15

You won't find anything much more traditionally Mainz than this - a decent sized chunk of Fleischwurst, straight out the pot, a freshly baked roll and a dollop of mustard.

And the best place to get it is on the Farmers Market which occupies the 3 squares surrounding Mainz's Cathedral on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

And the best butcher for it (some would dispute this, but they're dead wrong) is the Harth family from Stadecken-Elsheim. Almost 150 years in the business ,so assume they've got the hang of it.

They trundle in to the city with their mobile butchery at 6:30am, pull up the shutters and fight off the crowds.

So.

The Phrase of the Day, as AFN used to put it

Weck = Bread roll
You'll only hear that name around this area. (And in Buffalo, NY, btw.)

Elsewhere they'll be: semmel, weckle, weggli, rundstück, schrippe kipf, laabla, stella...

The list goes on.

But weck are traditionally baked in siamese twin-like pairs - as paarweck.

And interestingly enough, there's a link to our old mate, St. Martin.

His feast day is the day - even now - that rents and lease payments for land are due. And - in addition to the dosh - the landowner got a Martinsweck from the tenant.

How about that.

Worscht = Wurst = Sausage
No need to expand on that one

and

Woi = Wein = Wine
Nor here.

And where's the wine?

Good question.

I appear to be the victim of some underhand dealings.

They've substituted some mustard for the wine without my noticing.

I'm definitely slipping...

Johannes, what DO you think you look like... - #14

"What have you got on your head? Come inside this minute! What will the neighbours think?"

This is Johannes Gutenberg, Mainz's most famous citizen and favourite son.

Time Magazine's Man of the Millennium.

So it's not a big surprise that he has a statue, right next to McDonalds the line marking the 50th parallel that runs through Mainz.

And a museum.

Some of the exhibits are even labeled in English, but we're trying to change that.

And a website.

Also partly in English.

We're trying to change that too.

And a celebration of his patronal saint's day on 24 June.

Which is also the day they stop harvesting asparagus around here. And rhubarb.

Swings and roundabouts.

So what's with the hat?

Appears that folk though he wasn't getting in the mood for the Rosenmontag carnival procession and gifted him a hat from one of the carnival clubs.

Better than a pigeon, I suppose.

At least he won't get crapped on...

How embarrassing.... - #13

...that I didn't recognise St. Martin.

(Wikidedia says that he's "one of the most familiar and recognizable Roman Catholic saints. Aaah! I'm not Catholic, so that's OK then..)

The fact that the sculpture is bang in front of the Martinus School in the Weissliliengasse (White Lily Alley) should have triggered some brain cells.

Didn't though.

Didn't even twig the rending of the cloak for the beggar.

(Sir Walter Raleigh saved Queen Elizabeth I's having to walk across muddy ground with his and I had a vague recollection of King Wencelas doing something along the same lines. But St. Martin didn't put in an appearance, brain-wise)

For all I knew, it could have been the historical equivalent of a mugging, with the cloak being the object of craving, rather than the new Air Jordans. Whatever.

The lady at the information office (before shunting me off in the direction of St. Stephan) knew, though.

So good luck to her.

But I do know that there's a St. Martin's procession in November for the kiddies. Lanterns courtesy of Uncle Johnny, in the non-so-distant past.

And that goose is the traditional meal of the season. Which is good reason not to fly Business Class out of Germany in that month.

Closer to my heart is the legend that he introduced grapes to the Touraine region.

Good man.

Besides being the patron saint of soldiers.

And God knows they need someone these days.