Old stuff is kinda cool...

We left Berlin 5 days ago in a little Ford Cmax and have been driving through Germany ever since. From Berlin we drove to Bremen, then down to Kassel, Heidelberg, Colmberg and now we are in Füssen. We've travelled the Fairy Tale Road, the Castle Road, and the Romantic Road. We've seen old squares, fallen down castles, regal palaces, Franconian holdfasts, 500 year old town halls (an amazingly large amount of these...) and today we finished at a Bavarian king's extravagant castle, high in the German Alps, built so that he could withdraw from the world yet never got to see completed.

Throughout, something has struck me as potent. Old stuff is really cool. Australia has two kinds of old things. We have ancient old things, from our indigenous heritage, that is holy and older than most other things in the world. And we have the some areas like The Rocks in Sydney that are over 200 years old and still have some old buildings. But Germany has OLD shit. And most importantly, they don't get rid of any of it. Even after some of these towns saw large parts destroyed in WWII. Every little hamlet seems to have a Rathaus (Town Hall) that dates back to the 18th century at the latest. They've been reworked, but the design and structure remains the same. The lines, and cobbles of the old towns remain, perhaps polished and a bit more touristy, but in the end just as you may have found them from medieval times until now. I'll never complain when I drive down King William Road in Adelaide again (Apparently the longest single stretch of paved road in the Southern Hemisphere. Or something like that.)

It amazing to see how townships can grow organically over 600 years. As you wander the streets you can see where the walls are/were. Surrounding the markets, and town hall, and cathedral. And the houses just tuck into each other. They are built simply where they work. Even the modern buildings are made to look old, because the style is the most important thing. London could learn a bit from this.

Some towns have castles or palaces looking down on them, protecting them. In the smaller ones these are mere holdfasts, such as the Burg Colmberg that we stayed at last night. The larger towns have larger castles, that have grown and developed to give more protection to the township. You can imagine, on the occasions when it was necessary, the townsfolk fleeing to the relative safety of the keep when they feared for their lives. There is a synthesis between town and keep, a congruent relationship where each exists to support the other.

Amongst this you have the traditions, such as the Fairy Tales of the Brother's Grimm, who travelled the road from Hanau to Bremen collecting folklore and then scaring the living shit of children with it well after their deaths. After travelling in their footsteps, I begin to understand their inspirations.

But I'm not good at writing stories. I'll just say again: old shit is cool.

RaC