BREMEN

Bremen! Well, the name didn't fill me with pulse-racing anticipation and, although I had looked at the few details which our guidebook had shown (and we are beginning to find shortcomings with our jumbo every-country-you-have-ever-heard-of-guide - perhaps, now on our 14th. country, we are becoming experts) it didn't seem as though it was particularly going to be worth stopping for. But it was the requisite distance between Copenhagen and somewhere we'd never heard of which wasn't in the guidebook. It offered a decent-looking campsite, so we stopped there. Very gemuetlich it was too. The weather was a lot sunnier than our poor old readers in UK had been experiencing and we could get Radio 4, but the fact that it was on Long Wave and still carried the bloody cricket, slightly curtailed our enjoyment. We had a very pleasant time strolling around the streets in the Altstadt and alongside the river. The Beck's beer was better than I remember it, as well. In the cellar of the cathedral there are 8 mummified bodies from the 17 and 18th. centuries, preserved by the lead from the coffins in which they were placed. The private parts of the bodies were delicately screened from view by carefully placed cloths. A good thing, too! If I want to look at shrivelled up old private parts, I don't need to go to a church to see them! (But that's only a personal reflection.)





I'd never heard of the Musicians of Bremen, pictured above. Anyone interested in hearing about them?

Bremen has the Paula Modersohn-Becker museum so I got the chance to look closely at the work of this feminist icon. Her subject matter is narrow but she seems to look deep into it.