Bamberg February 1-28

I spent the month of February in Bamberg. The weather stayed cold and snowy until the last week, so I had little motivation to go anywhere on weekends.

The winter semester at the university wound down in the first half of the month. On Saturday February I held the last three class periods of my history and archaeology course as a block seminar.

Me with the students

February was a good month for work on the sites and monuments of Jerusalem project. Hanswulf Bloedhorn came from Tübingen on February 23 to discuss progress with Klaus and me; we still have a lot of work to do, so I will return to Bamberg in the fall.

I also worked on my article for Fred Donner’s festschrift and worked on editing an article by my Palestinian colleague Khader Salameh and wrote a short article about Jerusalem for the Arab Thought Forum, based on my presentation last year.

On Monday February 22, I joined the field trip of Islamic art students to the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, where we spent the full day seeing the museum’s collection of Islamic art and ethnographic items. We received a thorough tour, including the storerooms and then got to examine some of the metal objects close up.

The group examining metal objects in the Linden Museum

One lecture at the university that I attended was by Haim Goren on Germans in Palestine in the 19th century.

The last Volkshochschule French class for the semester was on Tuesday February 2; afterwards I joined the group for a restaurant meal.

Me and the French students. The instructor is at the head of the table.

Tuesday February 16 was Carnival, marked by a parade through the city center. It seems that having a parade is only a very recent development in Bamberg.

The carnival parade

The last week of February I wound things down. I put two suitcases back in storage in Klaus’ office, made final arrangements with my landlady and left Bamberg at noon on Sunday, February 28 for the Frankfurt airport for my flight that evening to Jordan.

I took a train that was scheduled to get me to the airport four and a half hours ahead of time. That turned out to be a good idea, due to the hurricane force winds that day that led to major disruptions all across Europe. My train was stopped at Hanau, near Frankfurt, due to the winds, but I was able to take a subway to the airport without much of a delay. At the Frankfurt airport, almost all flights to European destinations were being cancelled. My flight to Jordan and other long distance flights were not affected, but there was a huge hour and a half long line at the check-in counters for Lufthansa.

My flight ended up leaving on time. But there were remarkably few passengers on board. Only about a third of the seats were occupied, so I was able to stretch out over three seats and get some sleep on the flight of about three and a half hours.