Today I start the semi-live Blogmas blogs! That is, today is Tuesday and I was still in Frankfurt yesterday! It’s my first solo trip to Germany – I know! – and while I feel a bit like I’ve spent a lot of it not doing much, I’ve managed to come home with plans for five blogs. Just got to get them out over the next five days. Anyway, this first one is my day in Wiesbaden.
Wiesbaden is the capital of the Hesse reason and a place I’m inclined to describe as a “small” city. It’s not part of Frankfurt but the two are connected by three S-Bahn lines, which makes it feel like a Frankfurt suburb. I repeat, it’s not. But it’s nice and easy to get to. I took the S1 in the morning from Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof and that took 42 minutes and I came back on the S8 which seems to make far more stops and took 56 minutes. In fact, I’m writing this on my phone on the way home.
Wiesbaden is a hot springs town. Its history dates back to the Romans but it was Kaiser Wilhelm II who put it on the map by making it a spa resort town somewhere around the 1870s. Like most nineteenth century health resorts, it’s fallen a bit out of fashion now but the hot pools remain. The one my guidebook recommended was Kaiser Friedrich Therme but that’s closed at the moment to save energy. That was a bit of a disappointment – I thought these were geothermal pools, powered and heated by natural hot springs. You don’t save energy by turning those off, ergo that Therme is not the natural geothermal wonder I’d been imagining.
But Thermalbad Aukammtal was open. Its bubble bench and whirlpool are closed because they can’t get spare parts but there was an indoor and outdoor pool and they were both open. That’s a good sign. If you were trying to save energy by closing a Therme, you’d go for the one that’s freely losing heat into the open air, wouldn’t you? Yes, they’re owned by the same company, that’s why it’s relevant, by the way.
The website suggests this water is natural spring water. The website doesn’t directly say so but it talks about what the warm thermal water does for the body and the minerals it contains and so on. High salt levels, apparently. Love this sentence:
Thermal water can be drunk to cleanse and detoxify the body, stimulate digestion, improve the metabolism and support the relief of metabolic diseases
As someone who’s accidentally drunk Iceland’s lovely geothermal water (didn’t let the cold tap run long enough), you realise that “‘cleanse and detoxify the body”‘ means this stuff is a purgative? Picture all the Victorians in Bath and Harrogate and all the English spa resorts, drinking the healthy water – and what’s actually happening that no one’s taking about!
But I’m getting ahead. I took the S1 suburban train to Wiesbaden and emerged at the south end of town. The Therme is at the north end, to the east. Wiesbaden is dominated by “‘the Rue”, which is a long straight road officially called Wilhemstrasse.
Really, the route most of the way from the main station to the Therme is following that route but who wants to walk along a major road when there are parks? I walked pretty much all the way through a succession of parks and they were gorgeous. It has clearly been snowing not too long ago: the streets were entirely clear but the park were well-frosted, the paths crunched and squeaked satisfyingly underfoot and the ponds and lakes in every park were frozen solid. I enjoyed seeing some unfamiliar geese in the par (There’s a certain old school friend who’ll tell me when I put the pictures on Facebook when I get home but my first guesses are Blue Winged Goose, Orinoco Goose and/or Bar-headed Goose. I’m no longer sure how many interesting and unfamiliar geese I saw) and I didn’t enjoy seeing people walking on the ice, especially not the kid with the hammer who was smashing at it, right under the watchful eye of his parents. I guess this ice is probably thicker and more stable than the ice we get on lakes back home and that the events of last week didn’t make quite as many headlines in Germany as it did in the UK but I’m always kind of uncomfortable with people walking on ice but it’s particularly sensitive right now.
Other than that, it was a spectacular walk. At least three parks, an absolute winter wonderland, frozen streams trying to bubble through wooded lanes, a huge and interesting theatre presiding over one of the parks and I was a little surprised to discover when I reached the door of the Therme that it had been 55 minutes and nearly 3.5km. But speaking of the Therme, as I entered the last bit of park, it became very obvious where I was going. There was a billowing cloud of steam ahead. The walk had been worth the effort of travelling out to Wiesbaden. Most of the snow in central Frankfurt melted pretty quickly. It’s still lingering where feet and wheel don’t touch it – there’s a car parked down my street that hasn’t been moved since Wednesday. There’s still an inch of snow on it, although so many people have written in the pristine snow that it’ll be clear by the time its owner remembers where they parked it. I haven’t really had the chance to enjoy the snow in Frankfurt. There have been no crunchy paths or frosted trees. So I really enjoyed that winter wonderland walk.
But now it seemed the Therme might be worth the effort too. I went inside and paid for one adult for swimming. Consulting the website, perhaps I should have gone for sauna. There are extensive sauna-ing facilities and you get admission to the pool included. Admittedly, it’s a naked sauna, as is the way of things in Germany and while I’ve been getting comfortable with public nudity, getting changed and having a pre-swim shower are different to trying to relax in sauna.
The changing rooms have double-ended cubicles. Close the doors and they click closed. Release by a lever on the bench. Reception on one side, poolside on the other. You get a magic bracelet, so you find an empty locker on the inside of the ring of cubicles, lock it by pretty your bracelet against the doorknob and go to the pool. Oh, because they’re private cubicles, it’s mixed use. You won’t find people walking around naked but you will find men here. I was quite glad I did, actually. Pools presume you know where you’re going and don’t put up signs directing you from the locker area to the water and a man noticed I was lost and confused and walking around looking hopeful, and pointed me in the right direction. Thanks, random Wiesbaden man.
The pool comes in two areas. The inside pool is split with a rope into a play area, with various bubbling things, and an area deep enough to swim in but not long enough, I don’t think. Then you swim under a bridge which connects to the baby pool, and you go outside into the outer pool. It’s like another world. Inside you get shrieking kids. Outside, zen. There’s no reason for the kids not to come outside but it’s very cold and there’s nothing fun out here.
It’s set in a frosted garden but you can’t really see a lot because of the thick mist coming off the warm water. The water itself is perfectly clear and an interesting shade of green exactly the colour of the pool on the front of Cathedrals of the Flesh. It’s warm, around 32⁰, so you just have to dunk your face every now and then to defrost your nose and ears. And when you’re paddling around, look out. The haze is so thick it’s easy to have no idea that you’re about to crash into anyone.
I wish I had photos but obviously, that’s not allowed. If this post was scheduled later than it is, I might have had a shot at painting it but I don’t have the time. It was very lovely.
I’d been in two minds about coming to Wiesbaden. Was there any hot water to make it worth it? Is there anything in the city? Well, that winter walk was worth it and then Thermalbad Aukammtal was worth it all over agin. Oh, it was perfect. The hot water. The steam. The peace of the garden. The frost. It’s a good thing I left it to my last day, really, otherwise I’d probably find myself wanting to keep going back.
I watched Minority Report the night before. I like Tom Cruise movies and I hadn’t seen this one since it was new – not keen on the sick-sticks and the eye screams these days, and indeeed, I had to watch half of it from behind my phone. But the Precogs – they have a circular screen above them, divided into three equal wedges. Thermalbad Aukammtal has a huge blue shiny circle on the ceiling above the indoor pool, divided into three equal wedges. It’s neither a screen nor a mirror but it’s shiny enough that you can see reflections in it, so yes, I floated on my back and stared up at myself and pretended to be chief Precog Agatha. I also mused on a lot of plotholes and problems in that movie (how is Burgess’s crime the echo? He intended to do it long before the stooge he used to do the “‘official” murder. Why didn’t an engraved ball pop out for his murder? How did he get Anderton’s framing in motion? Just going to Crow and telling him to spread out lots of photos wasn’t going to get Anderton to come and kill him. Anderton didn’t premeditate it – why wasn’t it a red ball? Anderton could be walking around today as an eight-year-old. Such a dystopian cyperpunk future movie and yet the main character is Brownie-age right now).
It was so cold outside that, as I’ve said, I had to keep defrosting my nose. That makes it very unappealing to get out, especially when you know it’s a 55 minute walk back to the station and you didnt have the sense to bring food with you. In fact, it was a longer walk. There’s an active hot spring in the middle of town and I wanted to see it on the way back. A disappointment. It’s housed in a weird structure that looks a bit like a giant rock, with a chipboard door closed by a padlock. The only evidence that you’re in the right place are several steaming manhole covers and a large metal dish, possibly once a fountain, absolutely plastered in a thick layer of mineral deposits. It’s a work of art. But it’s not an active hot spring.
I walked back through town. I think I managed to miss all the interesting bits. There’s supposed to be a blue and yellow-themed Shooting Star Market which runs through November and December. Never found it. I did find a single large stall selling various Christmas market foods and a large ferris wheel. But the big market, no sign. And it was 4pm on a Sunday in midwinter so the rest of town was closed. I was probably just not quite in the right place.
But what was interesting was that I realised my hair had frozen. I’d gone out into the cold with it wet from the Therme, hadn’t I? And the ends were frozen solid. In Svalbard, my hair froze on the way home from the pool but not as solid as this. That’s not because Germany is colder than the High Arctic. It’s because this walk took me an hour or so whereas walking home from the pool in Longyearbyen probably took less than ten minutes. I sat on the train later and bent one plait into two right angles, which it held for quite a while before the warmth of the train melted the ice.
So that was my day in Wiesbaden. It was quite a short day and I’m sure there’s a lot more to do but I had a wonderful walk and a wonderful swim and came home very satisfied with the day. Tomorrow we’re going to have an evening out in Frankfurt, I think. See you then.