Based on the number of construction sites around there, If the author comes today to the city, probably he would spend hours in a traffic jam.
Leipzig: A walk around a city reborn
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Re: Leipzig: A walk around a city reborn
#12I had the chance to stay for a couple of days in Leipzig, in 1990 just a few month after reunification :
1) The city was 100% Steampunk !
There where steam heat pipes everywhere along and over the streets. Those pipes where the main source of heating for the city houses and facilities.
Things like this one, but everywhere in the city : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haltepunkt_Leipzig_A...
The steam was produced by dedicated factories near the city, and the main energy to produce this steam was lignite (brown coal) excavated near the city at Bergbaurevier Südraum Leipzig.
There was gigantic and very impressive bucket-wheel excavators south of the city (some of the biggest of the world at the time) :
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bucket-wheel_exc...
But the pipes where in bad state, so you could see steam escape from every tubes at every street. At the time it was estimated than 50% of the energy produced by the factories was lost during transport...
2) The houses where all greys and dusty because of said lignite factories around the city. There was steam from the pipes, but also smoke from the factories... That said you coul still imagine the former glory of the houses under the grey.
3) There was still many "bomb holes" here and here along the streets since World War Two. The GDR did try to patch the city centre with impressive (and ugly) buildings and but i did see plenty of missing houses in the main streets.
Re: Leipzig: A walk around a city reborn
#13I was in Leipzig for a few days for my brother-in-law's first wedding in the early 2000s. Driving around we saw quite a few abandoned villas with pockmarks from bullets from WW2. We also saw one street with apartments that were still occupied by some hard-core communists that the government seemed to leave alone as they were contained.
It kind of felt like time had slowed in Leipzig after the war. It reminded me of a quote I heard from a guide when we toured a home near the harbor (now government owned) in Gloucester, MA that a family had lived in for generations and never updated: "Nothing preserves like poverty".
Re: Leipzig: A walk around a city reborn
#14I was visiting it 2010 and it had many empty houses. I even read the Deutsche Bahn wanted to cut them off from long-distance trains. Today it's the new hip location to live at, like Berlin. People are gentrifying it in swarms. It's a pretty nice place and compared to the rest of east Germany pretty leftist. But, yeah, when you leave the city there is nothing much.
"But, yeah, when you leave the city there is nothing much. "
Well, there are lots of nice lakes around. (left from open coal mining and renaturated). And if you drive a bit, you can reach quite nice mountains, for example, or other cultural interesting places, like Weimar or Dresden.
And the average village around is indeed quite right leaning, but more and more nice projects are growing as well.
Re: Leipzig: A walk around a city reborn
#15Go visit the Völkerschlachtdenkmal at the outskirts of Leipzig to get a visceral understanding of the dark undercurrent of Teutonic culture that led to militarism. This is a war memorial that celebrates war and military sacrifice, no pacifist message there at all. It was inaugurated less than a year prior to the outbreak of the Great War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Battle_of_the_...
The feeling you get inside under the unyielding gaze of the granite "Watchers of the Dead" is absolutely creepy.
Re: Leipzig: A walk around a city reborn
#16Based on the number of construction sites around there, If the author comes today to the city, probably he would spend hours in a traffic jam.
Why would they be driving?
Re: Leipzig: A walk around a city reborn
#17Based on the number of construction sites around there, If the author comes today to the city, probably he would spend hours in a traffic jam.
Why would they be driving?
Tram, bike, you name it. But specially in the beginning of the Autumn, with 2 days of rain, you see few bikes in the street. I'm biker myself. Right now I'm seating in the tram 16. In the traffic jam, because of a construction site.
Re: Leipzig: A walk around a city reborn
#18Leipzig has a nice zoo, and it’s one of the rare zoos that has Bonobos. They are amazing to watch: mothers happily walking upright holding their baby, lots of playing, just generally enjoying themselves. To me they seem much more human than chimpanzees do (they are equally distant in evolutionary terms).
Re: Leipzig: A walk around a city reborn
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very nice. Out of curiosity, how is it for foreigners? I see that AfD gets a pretty high vote share there.
In Saxony yes, but not in Leipzig. About 50% of my colleagues are foreigners and they all love the city -- it's very international and you can come by with English in most places. Little caveat obviously: there are also quarters where it's not that simple and you are looked at sideways if you have the "wrong" skin tone -- Grünau, Gohlis-Nord etc. But these are the parts of the city tourists usually don't visit...
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Re: Leipzig: A walk around a city reborn
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very nice. Out of curiosity, how is it for foreigners? I see that AfD gets a pretty high vote share there.
In Saxony yes, but not in Leipzig. About 50% of my colleagues are foreigners and they all love the city -- it's very international and you can come by with English in most places. Little caveat obviously: there are also quarters where it's not that simple and you are looked at sideways if you have the "wrong" skin tone -- Grünau, Gohlis-Nord etc. But these are the parts of the city tourists usually don't visit...
Anecdote time!
I had a much harder time trying to get by as a white anglophone in Leipzig for about a month in 2018 than I had in Berlin, but much of that was admittedly my own anxiety around asking people for help in the wrong way, and travel-green-ness.
For example, I definitely can't pronounce entschuldigung correctly! As in well enough for people to know what I said. I then often perceived a palpable disdain or exasperation after not having been able to ask for simple things in German or understand simple German responses, compared to other places I've been where people seemed more excited to try to help someone who seemed lost than annoyed at the disturbance. I frankly shared the feeling, though: I found it very frustrating that my long duolingo practices had yielded almost no ability to ask for or understand things in the language of the country I was visiting.
I also found the in-town train terminal UIs to be incomprehensible as a foreigner: long lists of abbreviated names of places, with sub-menus holding more abbreviated names! A name like "Strasse Something Name" could end up "S. Sth. N." and without fluency it was very tough to pick apart. I ended up with a ticket to the wrong place once and the fare inspector, who I had to communicate with via Google translate, was very skeptical of my innocence (and absolutely incredulous that someone would not be able to grok the menus) but ultimately let me just pay the difference and go on, after initially threatening to levy a fine.
I still loved the city! It's beautiful and has very nice walks and libraries, but I personally often felt uncomfortable and out of place while visiting.