Northern Germany

 

   

Some places have a way of staying with you - of accompanying one on spring bike rides, dancing into your head in the sacred space between sleep and not. I love Bavaria best, of course, but there’s something about Northern Germany in the spring - something hopeful and bright, something sweet in the denim blue of the water, blankets of purple crocuses and in the bright colours of Strandkorben on a windy day. A something that uplifts and endures.

The cities are full of suspiciously wholesome people who sport the look of disheleved elegance which has become fashionable across Europe. The girls ride brightly coloured bicycles and braid their hair intricately, yet with such skill as to seem effortless. Old women with faces lined like crumped newspaper, but eyes as bright as the nearby sea, still own cafes and serve the sort of authentic coffee and cake which hip London institutions attempt to emulate. 

We hopped from museum to museum, place to place, even took a ferry to an outlying North Frisian island where we are Krabbenbrötchen (seafood rolls) from a rattling food truck and cream cake in a dingy coffeehouse. Two nights we stayed by the water, on an unassuming sidestreet of redbrick houses in a groundfloor apartment. Our host made us laugh with her hospitality and took us for dinner at a friend’s, whose house possessed an attic overlooking a dusky sky, blazing ombre, as rain trickled through her skylights. We took trains twice across the region’s highest bridge, ate falafel two nights in a row and had plenty a hostel picnic in the corridor of our humble lodgings.

And I often catch myself daydreaming of those busy days waltzing from museum to museum, with little stops for Kaffee and Kuchen in between, which were lovely and full and bright as anything.