Hannover / Hanover

It is spelled with two Ns here, in Niedersachsen, and is the capital of that state. On our first day in Hannover, we saw both the Landtag (state parliament) and "New" City Hall building, both impressive edifices. The old part of town (that dated back to the 12th century) no longer exists. During the 2nd World War, Hanover was hit by 88 bombing raids, by the British RAF, mostly; more than 90% of the city centre was destroyed and more than 6000 civilians killed. The worst of the raids was in October, 1943. Therefore most of what Chris and I are seeing has been reconstructed since those days, the churches laboriously rebuilt with red bricks.

They seem to venerate Martin Luther and the 17th century philosopher-mathematician Leibniz, who was born here. We walked along the Leibniz-Ufer after finding a branch of the River Leine (on the Hohen Ufer near the market square were antiques stalls. The Leibniz-Ufer passes the back of the Landtag (state parliament buildings) and has shady trees and benches. Later on our walk we found a Leibniz memorial with a diagram of the binary numbering system he used. There are Leibniz butter biscuits too, nothing to do with maths. The Bahlsen Leibniz-Keks factory, built in 1910 in the Jugendstil, stands next to our hotel on Podbielskistraße; in fact the hotel is in its grounds.

We are just beyond Listerplatz, at the end of the Listermeile, a pleasant, traffic free, shopping zone. Cyclists and small children in a variety of conveyances or on their own wheels share the street with the pedestrians and in spite of the many human voices, it is a quiet place to be. You can buy flowers, fruit, baked goods and coffee, bespoke furniture, books and clothes here. Chris had his hair cut and beard trimmed at one of several Friseurs on the Listermeile. Posters on the poles advertise concerts and tatoo-removal treatments: you don't have to keep the evidence of your youthful indiscretions or sins, Jugendsünde. Get rid of your Scheißtatu, one said. There's a library at the city end, and, half way down yesterday morning, we were able to buy ourselves a good breakfast with Italian coffee. Today, walking in the other direction up Podbielskistraße we found a more elaborate, and more expensive, breakfast (with caviar, even!) at a cafe near one of the tram stations, the Vier Grenzen. Why there are four borders there we didn't discover. Chris has to go back in that direction for work for the next three days because his QNX office in Hannover is on the street called Am Listholze, which starts at Vier Grenzen. We walked to the office after breakfast; it is near a river bridge from which we saw a barge moored and unsurfaced bike paths on both banks. The QNX place is opposite a wide area of land full of neatly planted allotments belonging to a Kleingartenverein, several of these flying the German flag and incorporating small cottages.

A large recreation area in this part of Hannover is the Eilenriede park, actually an extensive forest of beech and chestnut trees, etc., crisscrossed with bike paths. In a corner of it is the Erlebnis-Zoo; "Zoo Experience", that means, although the only experiences Chris and I had there were to sit on a bench near the entrance and watch the young families coming and going and the guinea pig family scuttling around a toy village, because we had decided that the cost of seeing more exotic animals was too exorbitant (entrance fee 27.50 euros each) and in any case our legs were too tired by that stage of the day.

We ended the day, still too jet-lagged to function normally, at a Pakistani "Indian Tandoori" round the corner from the Novotel, having a filling supper at an outdoor table. We noticed that the cleaner's and clothing repair shop on the other side of the street, in business since 1833, nowadays offers a "gefinished" service. What kind of language is that?

Today we discovered that most commercial outlets are closed on Sunday mornings. We took a tram / train into the city and sat subdued for a while in the remains of the Aegidienkirche, which the Hannoverians left in ruins after it was bombed, for a memorial, open to the sky. Beneath its bell tower hangs a bell given as a significant gift from the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Thence we walked to the Sprengel art museum, passing a few Eiscafes, already crowded with customers, on the way. We ate a light lunch of bruschetta slices at the museum cafe, out of doors on the upper terrace which gave us a view of Hannover's artificial lake, the Maschsee, about 4km long. It had been dug out of a swamp by manual labourers between 1933 and 1936, the Nazis giving these otherwise unemployed people something to do during the Depression era. Today the lake was full of little yachts, pleasure boats, motorboats for tourists and paddle-boats in the shape of Volkswagen "beetles" which somehow reminded me of the lakes in the Beijing parks. We fell asleep exhausted on a bench by the lake, after an hour or so in the art museum, which boasted a phenomenal permanent collection, its exhibits all from the 20th and 21st centuries. I had better devote a separate blogpost to this visit.

Before returning to the Listerplatz by U-Bahn, we also stopped for a long time at a Bavarian cafe selling different drafts of beer in long glasses. For fear of falling asleep again, we ordered alkoholfreies Bier at an outdoor table there. Our third al-fresco meal of today was a tasty supper at an Italian restaurant on the Listermeile.