Despite traveling halfway around the world, I ran into...a co-worker here. I shouldn't have been…read moresurprised, as he *is* German, this *is* his home town, and he was visiting his mother for Christmas.
The surprising part came when, as he was leading me on a tour through the enchanting neighborhood known as the Schnoor, we ran into a *second* co-worker! What are the odds?! And, since he was also German, I now had two tour guides to lead me through this historic district, that somehow survived firebombing in World War II!
Cobbled streets, narrow alleyways (some barely larger than shoulder-width, forcing my much-larger tour guides to have to shimmy sideways to pass through), adorable shops and restaurants with gabled roofs, lamplit signs; all the charms of a world gone by have been preserved here, tucked away in the heart of the otherwise modern, bustling, urban metropolis of Bremen, like the remnants of a lost, magical kingdom!
If I could, I would raze every strip mall, chain restaurant and dive bar on Earth, burying the current zeitgeist's trend of uninspired, mass-market, capitalist dreck, in order to build a new architectural landscape, comprised of neighborhoods like the Schnoor. If only more places in the world (or at least, back home in America) were like this!