Wanderung 32

For our free day in Magdeburg, we discussed either riding our bikes or walking around the downtown area. But when we went out to the "Back Factory" (English: Baking Factory) for breakfast, we found that the frozen puddles I had seen on the roof were not a mirage, and it was really quite cold (below freezing). So we layered up and took our hats and gloves for our walk, starting around 9:00.

The Ratswaage Hotel is centrally located, so we just had to walk a couple blocks over to a central bridge across the "Strom Elbe" (Flowing Elbe) , which together with the other branch, the "Alte Elbe" (Old Elbe) forms a rather large island in the heart of Magdeburg. Crossing the bridge, we had nice views up and down the river under a bright blue sky with brilliant sunshine. Very pretty!

Once across the bridge, we turned right past a small carnival and took the shoreline trail to the South, and that gave us really nice views of the main buildings across the way including the large Dom or cathedral.

We diverted over to an old railroad lift-bridge that has been preserved by the citizens of Magdeburg and can still be used by pedestrians (and bicycles, if you are willing to push them up and down a ramp attached to the stairs at each end!). Donors to the preservation fund were apparently entitled to install commemorative plaques, and the sayings on those plaques were quite touching as many of them celebrated their families. One plaque, however, cited an old Swahili saying that translates as "It is better to build bridges instead of walls!" How appropriate, given this old preserved bridge and our new wall-building regime in the USA!

Just beyond that, I found the ship museum mentioned in our brochures, which was an old steam-powered Elbe River steamer, but it was closed for repairs for damage incurred in the 2013 flood. Darn! But inland just a bit from the old ship we came across a great kiddy playground beside the large, brick City Hall and a really, really tall lookout tower, which looked like it might have been a WWII fortification of some kind, or possibly a holdover from the Communist East Germany days.

Beyond that complex we found a huge city park that occupies almost all of the southern end of the island, and inside the park was a lagoon with an island in it. We went onto and came off of the island by some of the prettiest little pedestrian bridges I have seen. They were kind of humped up like Japanese style bridges, but that resulted in a very graceful arch which reflected nicely in the waters below.

We continued to the other side of the main island and the Alte Elbe as Monika had read of a waterfall there. Well, the Alte Elbe is mostly a wide, empty stream bed below a shallow coffer dam that backs up this old branch of the Elbe into a small lake. The lake is apparently just deep enough for small sailboats as we saw a sailing and a rowing club on the shoreline. The coffer dam does have a small cascade running from its center, but it would be a real stretch to call that a waterfall!

Continuing south, we finally located the ruins of Fort XII, which seemed to be just ruins inside an old moat. But the gates on the one access road to the old fort were locked up tight, so we didn't get to see that either! Curling back north to the playground area, we had by then been walking a couple hours and we were getting hungry, so we crossed the next bridge over to the mainland to find someplace to eat. Waiting for a stoplight, we noticed that the green and red lights were not only of the old Communist-era style, but also had been customized to include a bicycle symbol, which I had not seen before.

Finding a restaurant took a surprising amount of searching, but we found a kabob place with good food and a weirdly shaped ceiling, something inspired by a cavern or a bat cave perhaps (?), up in the nighttime bar area. Continuing our city walk, we headed for the Dom (cathedral) and had a nice look at that. Monika even lit a votive candle at a peace memorial there, a first for her I think. In my experience, any person like Monika who has experience war at first hand usually strongly prefers peace whenever possible, and it is mostly those who have never had such experience who are so enthusiastic to go to war. The memorial was a wooden sculpture by Barlach in memory of WWI. It was supposed to be burned during the Nazi and the Communist era, but somebody hid it and brought it back when it was safe.

Wending our way back to the center of Magdeburg, we chanced upon a weirdly shaped and colored building, which reminded me of Gaudi's fanciful buildings in the city of Barcelona, Spain. But although the building and its decorations had the same whimsical, almost outlandish, combination of random colors and shapes, apparently it was built by a local group of artists and had no formal connection to Gaudi. Still, it was fun to walk around it although we had been walking well over four hours by this time and our feet were really getting tired.

Closing the loop back to our hotel, we passed the Saturn electronics mega store and picked up a new SD card for my camera as I was running out of space for pictures. We also picked up sandwiches for our evening snack plus some orange juice and headed back to rest our aching feet as we had been walking almost 5 hours by that point.

We did recover enough to do a spot of shopping later that afternoon, and I picked up a new gel bicycle saddle cushion at a Woolworth store, which are pretty rare nowadays. But it had been a very beautiful day in Magdeburg and a nice end to our bike trip.