Ulm.1

After several days in Munich, Stearns and I headed by train to Ulm, a little town in Germany.

Ulm has the tallest church in the world, Ulm Minster, and it's Gothic. It was extraordinary.



This picture gives you a vague idea of how high the ceilings were.

After deciding not to climb a church in Munich, I thought we'd better climb this one. Which was a decision Stearns and I regretted repeatedly in the half an hour it took us to climb to the top--as we neared the top we were climbing through passages so narrow that to pass a person you each pushed yourself against the wall and hoped for the best.



























You could see into the room full of bells. I would have liked to see it when they were ringing. I took these pictures for Hopkins (who, with Stearns, would like to be a bell ringer).




















The art in the church was wonderful. Here is a picture full of women, including Mary stepping on a dragon (women, too, get to slay some dragons).









Here was a surprisingly graphic picture of Jesus' circumcision. That's a scene from Jesus' life that there just aren't that many paintings of...











In addition to the church, Ulm has a lovely section of town called the Fisherman's Quarter. The buildings are old and a little bit falling over.





There are rows and rows of canals in between the houses. It was perfect.






















This is the steeple of a church that you see just as you walk into town. The steeple is on the church crooked! (The things they do with churches in Europe...)









Here are a couple of pictures that we saw (I forgot to post them in Munich, where we saw them). This one is called, "I lock my door upon myself." The title refers to a line from Christina Rossetti's "Who Shall Deliver Me?" Here are a couple of lines:

All others are outside myself;
I lock my door and bar them out
The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.

I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?

Here is the picture I was most thrilled to stumble across--it's Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Margarethe Stoneborough-Wittgenstein, the sister of the philosopher (it was her wedding portrait).