Regensburg

Regensburg & view of the Danube

This past weekend was a busy one. On Friday night, we went out to a very nice and hip lounge called Pacha, near the city center. I liked the place a lot: good music, nice atmosphere, an outdoor and an indoor area to sit down, and no cover charge for women. That night we ran once again into the subway dilemma: leave the club just before 2AM so we could catch the last subway straight to our respective homes or wait until the first subways of the morning at around 4:30AM. We opted for the latter so once again I got back home at the crack of dawn. Trying to keep up with these twenty something year olds (a.k.a “my students”) is killing my 8 hours of beauty sleep. I still tried to sleep that morning as much as I could to recharge my batteries for the Regensburg trip on Sunday. The remaining of the day I spent it at the open air opera and then on a barbecue we had on a lake on the northern part of the city.

On Sunday we visited the city of Regensburg (population 151,000) in the state of Bavaria, yet another beautiful and enchanting city about 1 hour and 45 minutes from Munich. Regensburg old town district was named in 2006 as a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO. The city is crossed by two rivers: the Danube and the Regen and it was the residence and death place of the astronomer Johan Kepler (laws of planetary motion).

Regensburg - Old town

Regensburg Cathedral

The Bavarian Jazz festival was taking place that weekend and the city was filled with stages spread all over the old part of town. Each stage had performances from different jazz bands from all over Bavarian. The weather was a little bit too hot for my tastes but at least it did not rain. It was sunny, clear, hot and somewhat humid. The city is not that big so we strolled around the old part of the city in about 2 hours. It was a great and relaxing day where we just walked, sat down to listen to some jazz, ate an ice cream to help us survive the heat, and enjoyed talking to other students from the school. The return train was delayed about 35 minutes due to a bad signal somewhere along the railroad. We ended up having to catch a train to another city and then catch a second train back to Munich. The second train was crowded as it had its regular passengers plus all of the people who were in the same situation we were: trying to go to Munich from Regensburg. There was basically no place on the train so I had to make half of the journey standing up in a train with no AC. We got back to Munich just in time to meet up with some other people from the group and say good-bye to the first person from our usual suspects who was heading back home (Madrid) on Monday morning. :-(