Traveling Man

I'm sorry about not blogging for several days. On Sunday, we traveled by bus from now relatively familiar Berlin to Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia. A small group of us then traveled to Weimar. Weimar is an important cultural city in Germany, being the home of Goethe and Schiller. It was behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War (as was Erfurt) so there are a few things that are still being rebuilt and updated.

In Erfurt, we continued meeting with government officials and party officials. In back-to-back meetings, we met with the mayor of Erfurt, a member of the Social Demcrats, and then with a Christian Democrat candidate for the state parliament (Landtag). Both are quite young. Each was well-versed on his party's platform. Both also expressed some concern about the low voter turnout in recent elections. One interesting thing about Erfurt is the larger than expected Catholic community. I would have thought after decades of being in the GDR that most of the Catholics would have disappeared.

Understanding political parties in Germany is both easy and difficult. After meeting with a part of the administration in Thuringia, we traveled by train to Frankfurt. It is a case of moving from small city to very large city. We will be checking out Wiesbaden because it is the seat of government for the state of Hesse.