RDVIK2016

Thank you for this. I have seen a lot of those Easy German videos with Cari. She speaks so very clearly. I wish all Germans spoke to us Amis that clearly and in standard German, but even her husband Janusz has a Polish accent. I'll have to work on understanding Rhineland dialects before I return there. I recently binge-watched the first four seasons/Staffeln of Babylon Berlin on ARD online. I realize that was just a little bit of Berliner dialect, but I will be there soon, so I wanted to hear some of it (I was in West Berlin for three weeks in 1970, but I was there among other US Army soldiers most of the time.) Surprisingly there were a couple of characters in the series that spoke like a Bayer (Dr. Schwarz) and a Wiener (Katelbach). There were also the Russian accents, the Jiddisch speaks, and a couple of American accents where I was saying "I hope I do not sound like that!". RDVIK

St John of Nepomuk is the patron saint of bridges, confessors, and river mariners because he was thrown off Prague's Charles Bridge to drown or maybe had already been tortured to death before being thrown into the river. It is said that King Wenceslaus IV (not Good King Wenceslaus I - who was really only a duke) had Jan Nepomuk killed because the priest refused to betray the secrecy of the queen's confessions. These events led to Johannes von Nepomuk becoming the patron saint of confessors, bridges, and river boatmen as well has Bohemia, Bavaria, parts of Austria and many others. Five bright stars shown from the sky when Jan Nepomuk's body was retrieved; that's why he is always depicted with a halo of five stars. His statues are ubiquitous in Czechia and Bavaria. I find this period fascinating as it coincided with the life of the reformer Jan Hus. The queen, wife of Wenceslaus IV, was Sophia of Bavaria who was for a time very much fascinated by Jan Hus. Look at Mucha's Slav Epoch panel #9 lower right corner and see Sophia giving rapt attention to a Jan Hus sermon in Bethehem Chapel in Prague.

The key to protection of skippers may actually be the additional presence of a statue of Johannes von Nepomuk. RDVIK

These dolphins in photo below at the Betsy Ross Bridge in Philadelphia look rather more formidable. The tugs could at least provide steering. DALI seems to have taken a bit of a turn towards the bridge pillar. She must have lost steering control when power went out, also thick black smoke comes out of the stack at the same time indicating there was something going on with combustion of fuel. They need to have some speed on for steering control, but it is not just speed through the water. The propeller can force water at a higher speed over the rudder (called screw race). If there was an issue with the propulsion shaft slowing down that will also reduce ability to steer.

Harkening back to our discussion of "Dolphins" and "Starlings". Dolphins came up in the reporting of the Baltimore bridge collapse. The protective structures at the bridge pylon that was struck are totally inadequate. There actually are dolphins in front of the pylons, but there are woefully small and not positioned to block or deflect a ship coming towards it at the angle that DALI did. Some say nothing could have stopped a ship that massive at the speed she was going, but it that is case they need to have tugs accompany the ship under the bridge.

This is a rather nerdy question that comes to my mind when I read along with this verse: Den Schiffer im kleinen Schiffe Ergreift es mit wildem Weh, Er schaut nicht die Felsenrisse, Er schaut nur hinauf in die Höh. Would Heine have spoken a dialect in which Weh and Höh rhyme? I mean like in Bavaria where Böhmen becomes Behmen and schön is schee. I could even imagine "bedeuten" rhyming with "Zeiten", like in Bairisch Deutsch/Deitsch Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten Daß ich so traurig bin; Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn. RDVIK

That word "Lay", or "Ley" as Wikipedia says is new to me https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley The English word "lay" that threw onto the trail of Heldenlieder has just this one uncommon usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_lay RDVIK

notamermaid and Jazzbeau, I went off in several directions in my efforts to answer the riddle. Actually the first thing I did was to google "20. März in der deutschen Geschicte". Turns out Friedrich Hölderlin was born on this date in 1770. Having learned that I chased for any connection he might have with the Loreley. The fact that he wrote a poem titled "Der Rhein" had be down in that rabbit hole for a while reading that poem. However that was dead end. You gave us a really easy clue to know that you were talking about the Loreley song played on all the cruise ships has we sail by Kilometer 555. Also, I knew that Heinrich Heine wrote words for the popular poem which was set to music by Philipp Friedrich Silcher, but so many other composers created music named Loreley/Lorelei. A melody by Silcher seems to have had influence on part of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. So I am looking Schubert's works (so many) and see a catalogue number "D.555". Aha I sez to myself. I found something! Well I hadn't. That Song Sketch D.555 sounds familiar, but is not the Loreley song we know. (Schubert's does have a Loreley - S.532). I already knew that Heine's poem had another source. So I looked at that and found, as you then told us, it was Clemens Brentano who wrote "Lore Lay" as part of a novel. Now I know that is as far I as I had to go, but as you had written "something we call in German a "Lay"" I was not sure if the title of Brentano's poem was the end of the road. So I started looking for a connection with a Heldenlied - a "heroic lay" - from the early Middle Ages. I was stuck there when I had to run an errand and asked how much time we had. You had written your answer by the time I got back. Is there a Heldenlied connection? As you said it was for a bit of fun! Thank you. RDVIK

OK, It is the Kilometer mark on the Rhein for the Loreley.

Hello notamermaid, Well I think we all know what that modern day song is on the cruise ships and I have figured out the the significance of 555. How long do we have to figure this out? RDVIK

Thank you for the gentle admonition to check out the Elbe thread [and keep to the subject on this Rhine thread]. (edited to add that part in brackets). I just signed on to follow it. Interesting info there already this year. RDVIK

Thank you for this. I never realized there were river cruise ships that actually sailed from a dock in Prague all the way into Berlin! I figured maybe an old style barge cruise, but not a "hotel ship". Is Croisi the only major line that does this? I looked at Nicko and they seem to rely on buses for the Prague part of the cruise.

We'll see the Elbe later this year, but from the train and on foot in Dresden. Maybe I was looking at cruises at the wrong time on the Elbe (Labe on the Czech part), but I saw too much low water and a substantial amount of bus travel for the Berlin and Prague legs of the travel packages. I'm afraid the only river cruising we will do will be a couple hours on the Spree in Berlin and maybe an evening dinner cruise on the Vltava (Moldau) in Prague.

The railroad bridge at Bogen seems to have slightly less headroom/Durchfarhtshöhe at 5.00 meters with the Luitpoldbrücke at 5.15m. It does not matter for all of the cruises that terminate or start at Passau or Vilshofen. When we were on a Viking cruise from Budapest to Nürnberg in late May 2016 the rail bridge at Bogen seemed to be the one bridge the captain and his pilots/mates were concerned about. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenbahnbrücke_Bogen Heavy rain continued and a few days after we got through this was the situation in Passau: https://youtu.be/6-czSUPHGz0

The walk from the Viking dock at Rüdesheim was 15 minutes or less on level ground and smooth pavement. Our docking location for the Koblenz visit was actually upstream at Braubach, which makes sense because it is on the same side of the river as the Marksburg castle and the Ehrenbreitstein fortress (and very close to Marksburg). We took the gondola from Ehrenbreitstein over the river to Koblenz and the bus took us from there back to Braubach. Regarding the river name: We don't get much help from several common fonts to distinguish upper case "I" (aye) and lower case "l" (el) and it is odd how many rivers have short names beginning with "I" aye, Ill, Ilz, Ilm! RDVIK

We docked at a berth in Deutz just north of the Hohnzollern Bridge on our cruise last April. We were on Tialfi from Amsterdam to Basel. I thought it was good spot and we easily walked over the bridge a couple of times during the day and evening. The "love locks" cover every millimeter of space on the fence on the bridge. I got a kick out of the combination locks which defeat the purpose of closing the lock and throwing the key into the river so one's love is sealed forever. Looking Google maps the area of the dock is identified as Kennedy Ufer and it is right by the RTL studios and Kölnmesse trade fair grounds. RDVIK

It is such a marvel that Roman aqueducts still stand. How long will the concrete trough bridges of the canals survive? By the way it seemed to be a remarkable sight to be on board a river cruise ship passing over a busy highway. RDVIK

I was just thinking that they might have been able to operate the canal for several years while it was still relatively new with minimal closures for only minor repairs. The full length between Bamberg on the Main and Kelheim on the Danube wasn't opened until 1992, although parts of it from each end had been opening for several years prior. I haven't searched too deeply, but I did find a few articles describing such things as the need to clean sediment from the Hilpoltstein lock on a periodicity of five years, and that the lock at Erlangen and some other place required major repairs a few years ago, but that was after 20 years of use. On the WSV website there are schedules for closures everywhere in Germany. You can search by watercourse and year. The schedules for future years are not complete, but for previous years it is interesting to see how many closures, planned and emergent, some just overnight, that there were. I only looked a the Main-Danube section. This year looks like a big year for planned repairs, taking up most of April, but in other years it looks like they have been planning much of the work as early as mid-March and into only the first week or so of April. RDVIK https://www.elwis.de/DE/dynamisch/mvc/main.php?modul=schleuse

For how many years have shutdowns been occurring at this time for annual lock maintenance? Viking's Romantic Danube itinerary used to travel on the canal as far as Nürnberg, with the other terminus at Budapest. However, not too many years ago they cut out that part of the itinerary - for the better in several ways. It made sense to cut it whether they were forced to by maintenance or not. There are 12 time consuming locks between Regensburg and and Nürnberg. My wife and I took this cruise in 2016 starting in Budapest. On the last full day we were transferred on to buses at a dock opposite the Nürnberg shipping terminal and driven into the city. When our walking tour was done we were taken back to the ship which had moved up to Erlangen - to another industrial area. The ship took all night and more to make the trip. You can drive from Regensburg to Nürnberg in 1.5 hours. They would have been just as well off to offer a day trip to Nürnberg from the dock at Regensburg. Another thing was that use of the upper deck was restricted while on the canal because of the low bridges, one of which crushed the wheelhouse of a Viking longship that had failed to retract. That was just a few months after our trip. RDVIK

It looks like it is just the Regen that will be exceeding the first one or two warning levels. The upper Danube does not appear to be carrying excessive water, nor the Naab, so the Danube should stay within its banks. Also there is no heavy snowpack in the Bavarian Forest. The Isar and Vils seem OK now also, the German Danube ought to be in good shape for a while. RDVIK

@notamermaidYou are not saying that a starling (structure) is called a "Star" in German are you? Doesn't German stick better descriptive work for such structures "Eisbrecher"? Those "ledolamy" (Czech for icebreakers) made of wooden poles protecting the Charles Bridge over the Vltava (Moldau) in Prague are interesting. RDVIK

Thank you! You reminded me that I have seen that URL issue elsewhere, e.g. bad-koetzting.de for Bad Kötzting in my old stomping grounds. One place name I have thought curious was Flossenbürg which seems never to be written with "ß" but always with "ü", and now that you mentioned it I looked and they do use the "ue" in their internet address. (hadn't registered with me before) It was a quasi-pilgrimage for me to go to the KZ Flossenbürg site because it was the site of the execution of Pfarrer Dietrich Bonhoeffer (by the way - always "oe" and not "ö"). And they say that (daß/dass) German is easy to spell correctly. *grins* RDVIK

notamermaid To call upon the orthographic aspect of your admitted language nerdiness I have a question about how I wrote Königswinter. I had spelled it Koenigswinter. Normally I would have used the umlaut, but my American English keyboard requires me to type ALT 0246, so five key strokes vs. two for oe. I know the orthographic reforms of the 90s were controversial and for a long time thought that the infrequent use of the two-letter combinations was more resistance to the reforms than anything else. I guess I was wrong about that. RDVIK

Notamermaid, I have been meaning to ask, if any major cruise lines among those that cater to English speakers includes a visit to the Drachenfels in an itinerary. It seems like visiting Koenigswinter, a trip up the Drachenfelsbahn, seeing the Drachenfels ruin and/or the Schloss Drachenburg would be very nice. RDVIK

The brewer that sharkster77 mentioned, Sam Adams, back in the 1980's satisfied the Reinheitsgebot with its Boston Lager and could sell it in Germany. The owner and founding brewer, Jim Koch, has since criticized the purity law as a kind of "artistic censorship" of brewers. I don't think the current label of Boston Lager claims that it satisfies the German Reinheitsgebot. Already in the mid 1500's other ingredients other than just barley, hops, and water were permitted until today the Vorläufiges Biergesetz incorporates many changes to the original. It remains the case, though, that very high standards are maintained. Heck, where would even the Bavarians be if they could not have their wheat beer and if we had to depend on placing the brewery next to a bakery to get the benefit of the yeast cells floating around in the air. As Haidling says "Mir kannst no a Weissbier bringa !" RDVIK