Tuesday, May 20, 2008

This is Freiburg


It has been raining since the time we came.... and has been getting colder too. The weather has not been so good to us. But we must move ahead. After a small breakfast (stomach is still full from yesterday's meal), we left Geislingen at 9.45 and we reached Loffingen by car. Matthias was accompanying us. From Loffingen we traveled through the black forests, crossing Neudstadt, we reached Freiburg at 12.05. Johannes Becker was waiting for us. We had enough time to walk around the Pedagogical Department of the Freiburg University besides a 20 minutes of wonderful piano music played for us by Johannes. At 1.00 p.m. we met Professor Haug, a tall man for German standards (too tall for India!), we had lunch together in the Mess. The food was good. I went for some Thai dishes. Fr. Susai was not keeping well, so he chose to have some bland diet, whereas others had typical German dishes. (Pictures : Freiburg from the Münster, traveling on a local train , the outside of the Pedagogical department of the University of Freiburg)
We had range of talks--from experience of Matthias and Johannes, poverty and development in India, some world politics, and Professor Haug's plan to come to a developing country to voluntarily serve for about one year.

Finally, we called it a day and took the tram to the city centre, to the apartment of Johannes. Leaving our baggage there, we went to see the Munster of Freiburg. It is under repair, and yet we managed to climb up to a close distance from the top most point which has been restricted for visitors. We could also see the way the bells rang at 4.00 p.m. We saw the 16 bells of the Church, with the largest of them being as heavy as 7,000 kilos! (picture on the side) We had our train to Offenburg at 5.00 p.m., from where we came to Gengenbach by train. Evelyn was waiting for us to receive us at the station.

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