Mannheim

For the past few days, since i have not started working, i have been traveling a lot around Mannheim. My arrival to Mannheim was at a transitional time where spring meets summer (or rather spring meets global warming). With temperature soaring to 29 degrees and rising, Mannheim has been officially declared as the warmest city in Germany. Despite that, everybody seems to welcome the warm climate with arms wide open. One activity German people like to do in this weather is having a BBQ picnic. In fact i am just back from a BBQ picnic myself. Families would gather at the park beside river with their BBQ sets and have a jolly good time playing football in the field. The Rhine river is one of the longest river in Germany and has been a centre of attraction for family picnics each summer (or in this case spring). And why not, its a really nice place to be in. However due to the popularity of this place, whenever there is a bright sunny weekend, it sems that the whole population of Mannheim will come down to the park thus depriving the park of its precious parking spaces. When this happens,one might be presented with scene similar to a day during Friday prayers in UTM (minus the motorcycles).

Mannheim has also a number of churches. The number of churches are comparable to the number of mosques per square feet in Malaysia Some of them date back to the post world war era. And some of the churches are still under reconstruction in conjunction with the 400th "birthday" of Mannheim city. It not only the churches, but the whole Mannheim has been under a total makeover for the past few years in celebration of the anniversary. All over the city one may see constriction going on and a handful of beautiful flower beds and not to mention a majestic fountain in the city center behind the water tower. All of this for the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Mannheim city, or so they say. However I wouldn't say the makeover is just a way to get rid of the years budget or a way to win voters hearts. Mannheim has now become one of the most beautiful cities i have ever been to. Forget Singapore, KL or Bangkok, this city is filled with the best architectural buildings Europe has to offer. No wonder the government spent so much money on building restoration and maintainence.

Talking about Mannheims' buildings, its really not hard to get around Mannheim since the buildings and streets are arranged in such way, it seems like a Battleship game board. The way you search for a building or street is pretty much how you bomb a battleship in the battleship game where you launch your torpedo's to a specific coordinate such as C1, D5, L12, being the alphabet is the longitude and the number is the latitude. So if you ever loose your way in Mannheim, picture yourself playing a game of battleship. Don't worry of starving to death when you loose your way too as each block of apartments has some kind of shop or restaurant on the ground floor.

Getting around Mannheim is also not a big problem. Because is a small city, you can easily cover the whole of Mannheim by bicycle in 1 day. Alternatively you can take the tram or taxi but that would cost precious money, money that is better spent elsewhere. The tram systems travels around the city and moves to areas outside the city too. I was told that it could take up to 1.5 hours for a tram to complete its round trip. I guess it covers quite a lot of ground. Because the tram rails run through the city and along roads that usually people walk, i was once asked by my friend "isnt that dangerous?". Well the trams usually have a driver, brakes and a bell to alert people of its presence. so far i haven't came across a tram accident. thats a relief.

In the next post maybe i will make a coverage of the Mannheim University that previously was a castle that was destroyed in the allied bombings during world war 2 and rebuilt to be a beautiful University campus. So stay tuned...