Pretzsch, Wittenberg, Coswig June 13

The next 25 km on into Wittenberg were much like the previous 25 km - flat, pretty oat fields. The weather was excellent - clear and not too hot.

We were looking forward to Wittenberg for three reasons. First our friend Andreas who we met in Prague lived there. We wanted to have a beer with him. Second the town is very historic because it's the birthplace of Martin Luther, the guy who started the protestant reformation. And third, we heard there was a big party going on.

Some people we met at a cafe in Turgau had told us in broken English that Wittenberg was celebrating Luther's wedding. We couldn't credit this. He was a monk. I didn't remember him getting married. We figured they meant to say anniversary of his birth or something.

But they were correct. The town had gone all out: the streets were filled with live bands and wurst and beer to celebrate the anniversary of Martin Luther's marriage to a nun. I suppose getting married was a great "protest" for a monk and a nun to do against the Catholic church.

So we got some sausages from street vendors (ordering in Germany is more like the text books than any other country: "Zweimal bratwurst mit zweimal bier bitte" really works) and joined the party for a while.

The town looks great. Its got a great main street and marktplatz with an interesting Rathaus and so on. Quite nice for strolling.

We locked our bikes against a wall among thousands of others. Bikes were everywhere. Those medieval city planners didn't leave much room for parking cars.

We had a project in Wittenberg: find our friend Andreas without knowing his last name.

First we tried looking for him among the throngs in the Marktplatz drinking beer and listening to the bands. It seemed the whole town was here. We looked carefully at hundreds of faces. They must have thought we were spies or something.

This didn't work. So we went to the library hoping to find internet. They didn't have internet and they were busy taking ballots. It was election day. But they told us where to find a phone booth with a phone book.

Andreas's email started with "And" then had three other letters like "nie" or something. We looked for any name in the phone book starting with "nie", first name Andreas. We found one match, called the number and found another Andreas who spoke English, but was the wrong guy.

One band finished so we asked the sound people if they would make an announcement for us. They spoke English and were very friendly but they couldn't because the M.C. was off eating. But they did tell us where the internet cafe was.

This had promise. We hadn't expected Wittenburg to have an internet cafe when Dresden, 10 times its size, didn't. But Wittenburg had an excellent one called Cafe LeBit. It was a bit nerdy though. The sign out front advertised a "Linux Installation Party" for that weekend while the rest of the town was celebrating the monk/nun wedding. The one message we had managed to send from the Dresden library was to Andreas telling him we would be in Wittenberg in a few days. We had high hopes. But there was no message from him.

We sent him another email and to his buddies Torsten and Jens but didn't expect them to be online late on Sunday afternoons.

Our next tactic was to go to likely bars and chat up the bartenders. Andreas was born in this town of just 50,000 people. So although looking Andreas in Germany is like looking for John in the U.S., we figured we might be successful. In a town the size of Wittenberg, no one could be much more than one degree removed from him. (That was definitely true in Juneau, when we were trying to figure out more about our host, Tom, a guy we had met over the Internet. Everyone in Juneau seemed to either know him or know someone who knew him. Here's that story.)

We tried a Lions Club booth. No go, but very friendly people. JOAN: The woman serving beer honestly tried to think if she had ever met or heard of this guy. We tried an Irish bar, too. We didn't have a lot of money, so we just ordered one beer. "Very strange," the bartender said. I thought I was hearing things. I asked Eric if he said what I thought he said. The bartender repeated, "Two people, one beer, very strange." I said, "We're trying to conserve our beer dollars." "Then it's allowed," he said. We were totally encouraged that he spoke so much English. No wonder. He was from Ireland. We told him our mission (I kept thinking of the Blues Brothers ... We're on a Mission from God ...). We felt foolish trying to find an Andreas in a nation full of them. We described his looks, his beer tastes, and how he liked watching bike racing on TV, but not doing it himself. Our bartender gave it a long hard thought. "I think I know the guy you're on about," he said. But he didn't know the guy's name or hone number.

ERIC: After that we tried another bar with no luck.

It was eight o'clock so we were running out of time. We had the last name of Jens and Torsten though not the exact city they lived in. We tried information to get their phone numbers but a combination of not knowing how to say the letters in German and not knowing which part of Berlin or which part of Cologne that Jens and Torsten lived in made that attempt also a failure.

As a last ditch effort we went back to the internet cafe to see if anyone got our message. Apparently they hadn't. So we reluctantly left town, quite discouraged at our failure. It was not just not meeting Andreas but all the effort we had put into the attempt resulting in failure that was hard to take.

But in a way it had been fun to have a project. We talked to a lot of people and practiced a lot of German.

Fortunately we found a mini mart 10km down the road and bought breakfast supplies then 2km later we found a great free camping spot.

Next: Germany Chapter 6 - Grounds keeper Willy

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