Leipzig

We splurged a little bit on a larger apartment in Leipzig. It was a newly remodeled apart-hotel and had a sauna in the bathroom. Couldn't pass that up. But by splurge, we mean spending $150/night instead of $125. The neighborhood of EisenbahnStrasse where we're staying is a bit edgy. It's full of immigrants, graffitti on every wall, and lots of vegetable and kabob shops. It feels totally safe, but this is the immigrant neighborhood for sure. There are lots of Syrians and Turks, which means..... Great food!

We arrived at the massive Bahnhof (train station) in the early afternoon after a quick 2 hour direct train from Nuremburg on an ICE train. That's the Inter City Express train, the fastest in Germany. It's slightly slower than Spain's AVE trains or France's TGV. But wow, the station is majestic and humongous. There's a two-story mall underground and the usual eateries and coffee shops on the street level where there's a couple dozen or so tracks.

We bought a 3 day Leipziz Card at a kiosk in front of the tram line. For the same price as just transportation for 3 days, we get museum discounts with it also. After checking in, we found a Syrian restaurant that gave huge, delicious portions. We paid $15 out the door for 2 entrees. Then we trammed it back to the center and walked around, soaking up the sites. Leipzig won't win any beauty awards for its architecture, but they do have a few old-style buildings, including the Rathaus, or city hall. Today was market day, and we caught the end of that in the huge MarktPlatz, or central plaza. They've been having a market there since the early days of the Holy Roman Empire. Leipzig was at the crossroads of the Via Imperii and the Via Regia, which connected Rome to the Baltic coast and Western Europe all the way to Turkey.

Leipzig is famous for a few things, mostly musicians. Wagner was born here. Bach worked and composed most of his work here and ran a boys choir. And Mendolssohn worked here and "discovered" Bach's mostly underappreciated music and helped make him famous long after his death. Lepzig is also in the neigbhorhood where Martin Luther lived and worked (and hid for awhile). The city museum in the Rathaus was a fantastic place to get the full story of Leipzig from its beginnings through the Cold War. They had many original documents printed and written by Luther. This was a printing town, among other things. It's fun seeing the "95 Theses" and other pamphlets he wrote that were printed here. They were quite the bestsellers of the day. And if that's not enough fame for one city, Goethe also went to the university here, as did Angela Merkel, who liked to drink at the same pub where Goethe frequented.

Leipzig was behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, and was the 2nd biggest city of the GDR, after Berlin. It suffered during those years but the decades of neglect led to a lot of empty warehouses and factories and what usually happens then is that the hippies and artists move in. They don't call this town Hypezig for nothing. There's a large university and lots of young Germans and immigrants, which gives it a great, lively feel. They're saying that Berlin is "over" now and that it's been too gentrified. Rents and hotel costs are double from when we visited Berlin 9 or so years ago. But Leipzig sure seems on the way up.

The next day we went to the Stasi museum. The Stasi were the GDR secret service during the Cold War and the small museum showed how the Stasi spied on everyone and paid untold informants to spy on friends, neighbors, and family. To this day, German citizens can go here and look at their record, assuming it wasn't destroyed. Many don't want to see it because then they'd find out which people they trusted ratted them out. One of the interesting exhibits was the technology used to tap phones. They didn't have a lot of money, so they'd confiscate cassette tapes of rock music sent from the West and use that to record phone conversations.

We ended the afternoon by exploring the Plagwitz neighborhood. I found an art installation that had immersive light shows and this one featured a recent artist named Tubke and did this amazing 23 minute light show on just one of his pantings, a panarama painting. They digitized it and animated many parts of it. With the intense soundtrack, it was a great show. We've seen a few of these now and just love them. Our first one was in Paris at the L'Atelier Lumieres, where this technology premiered with the original Van Gogh show, which is now shown all over the world.

Tomorrow we're off to Wroclaw, Poland to visit our new friends Bogdan and Beata. We meet them at a fest in Madison this summer. It will be our 2nd time there, but our first with hosts. We can't wait to see them again.

More photos and videos are here.
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