Bamberg, Sunday July 6, 2008

I spent the past week in Bamberg in northern Bavaria. From Monday to Friday I took an intensive German course at the Treffpunkt language institute. I was in an advanced group with four other students for three hours of class each morning. I had considered enrolling in such a German course during my year in Bamberg in 2007, but I decided then that I was in Bamberg to work on my sites and monuments of Jerusalem project rather than to study German. The Treffpunkt program is excellent, but you have to pay for it at about $25 an hour ($50 per hour for private tutouring). I had not had a systematic review of such German grammatical points as the first and second subjunctive since High School.

My fellow students, the instructor and me at the Treffpunkt certificate function

I stayed for the week in a room in a private apartment, arranged through Treffpunkt. I mostly spent the afternoons in the university library, where my password for internet access is still valid, and in the evenings I mostly reconnected with people at the University. I was able to attend a public lecture on Monday about a Russian traveler to India in the 15th century and a public lecture on Thursday about the Tablighi-Jama'at Muslim prosletizing organization, while Wednesday was the semester party for the Faculty of Catholic Theology, with which I was formally affiliated in 2007.

Then on Friday afternoon and all-day Saturday was the annual conference of the Ernst Herzfeld society for Islamic Art, sponsored this year by the University of Bamberg Oriental Studies department, which has an Islamic Art and Archaeology program. In 2007 I had taught three courses under their auspices. At the conference I gave a presentation about an overlooked Ottoman period inscription in Jerusalem's Haram al-Sharif. I had considered giving the talk in German, but I chickened out and gave it in English. I had attended last year's conference in Vienna.

After traveling in the second week of July to Oxford University for a conference, I will be back in Bamberg for the second half of July.