Back in Würzburg- “Our Town”
By Lothar. Filed in Germany |
We took the German ICE high speed train from Berlin to Würzburg and traveled at 250 km/h or 156 MPH !
German trains are still the best in the world, at least in our experience. They are very sleek, give a very smooth ride, very high tech with cell phone service, computer hook-ups and so on and almost on time. The trains in Japan were more punctual, but pretty utilitarian; the trains in Thailand were old, but they washed the train windows at the beginning and at the end of every trip.
We arrived here on June 24th and are back in our town. Würzburg is the town, where I graduated from Medical School, where Gabi and I met for the first time in the university’s cafeteria and where we got married in 1977.
Würzburg was first mentioned in a document from 704 and in 2004 celebrated 1300 years of town history. The Irish missionary Kilian was killed here by the Franks in 689 and nowadays there is the St. Kilian Cathedral and next week is the annual Kiliani Amusement Fair. First they killed him, then everything in Würzburg was named after him.
My Alma Mater, the Julius-Maximilians-University was founded in 1582 by Prince-Bishop Julius Echter Von Mespelbrunn. I graduated in 1976, almost 400 years later.
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered the x-rays here in 1895 ( 11/8/1895) and was the first to receive a Nobel Price in Physics in 1901 in Stockholm. We visited Röntgen’s labarotory this week and the old cathode-ray tubes are still on display. The building still houses the University Physics Department.
We are located at 49°48′ North and 9°56′ East and the days are still pretty long. Sunrise around 5:15 AM and sunset at 21:30 ( 9:30 PM). It does not really get dark until 10:30 PM and we never realize how late it is already. The church bells sure enough wake us up every morning at 8 AM ( they are turned off at night).