Germany September 20-26

On September 20, I took a night-time flight from Amman to Frankfurt, arriving at 6:30 in the morning. I then traveled to Marburg to attend the Orientalistentag conference at the University of Marburg from September 20 to 24. That is the German Oriental Studies conference held every three year that I had attended in 2001 and 2007. I gave a presentation on Muslim pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Ottoman period on September 22. I also attended a public presentation by Christoph Luxenberg on his very controversial ideas about how the obscure vocabulary in the Quran is best understood by examining Christian Aramaic-Syriac cognates. He is a scholar of Arab origin who has been living in Germany for years; Christoph Luxenberg is the pseudonym he uses to protect himself. This was the first public presentation he has ever given.

While in Marburg, I met Mareike Hilbrig, who had been at the Henry Martyn Institute in Hyderabad in 2005-2006.

Mareike Hilbrig

The Old Botanical Gardens in Marburg

The conference ended on Friday September 24, but because I was not able to move into my short-term housing in Bamberg until Monday, I spent the weekend sightseeing.

On Friday I traveled to Aschaffenburg, half-way between Marburg and Bamberg. As I walked around the city center, I came across the national fork-lift driver competition.

The fork-lift competition

On Saturday September 25, with drizzly weather, I went to the romantic castle of Mespelbrunn south of Aschaffenburg.

The castle of Mespelbrunn, swans and all

I then did some hiking and I came to the village of Heimbuchenthal, where a six-hour cross-country relay bicycle race was in progress. One oddity was a participant on a unicycle. The fuzzy photograph demonstrates the limitations of the camera on my iPhone.

The bicycle race

The unicycle

On Sunday September 26 I went south of Aschaffenburg and hiked around near the village of Amorbach. Amorbach with its well-preserved core of old buildings proved to be a bit of a dud, because the historic abbey was closed for a few hours while an orchestra rehearsed for a concert later that afternoon; the art museum was temporarily closed as well.

Buildings in the center of Amorbach

That afternoon I traveled to Bamberg.