Leipzig

More photos! Wee! Last weekend Erika and I took a trip to Leipzig to visit her cousin and her cousin's boyfriend.  They hadn't seen each other in over 10 years, but now that both live in eastern Germany it was about time for a reunion. Leipzig is about 150km away from Erfurt and is about double the population. It's a rapidly growing city actually, and it's arts friendly attitude attracts a lot of young people and recently the New York Times wrote an article praising the music scene and hip culture as a "better Berlin". We didn't venture into one of these venues, but we did go to the Spinnerei, an old cotton textile factory that has been transformed into an art haven.

Some of the buildings are actually apartments for visiting and in-house artists.

From the outside everything looks pretty raw. I guess it makes for good inspiration. There is a custom bicycle maker: Rotor. Also art galleries and a pretty big art supply store.

But on the inside the buildings are nicely refurbished, but I bet heating can get pretty expensive. Here was a small art gallery that is open to the public

 Their specialty is the steel city bike. Looks pretty nice and I bet it rides smoothly. They have a few bikes prebuilt for sale, but you can also talk with one of the builders to fully customize your own.

Someone want to explain the lever on the left side of the handlebar to me? It connects to the front suspension, so it must be a lever for adjusting the compression on the fly.

A few old racing bikes on display, as well as some of their own creations hacked in half. And a bigass rear hub

Lots of old derailleurs in a glass case

I liked the upstairs office... 

I took some more pictures of the downtown area, but I'll only post a couple more. It was a pretty nice downtown area, lots of shops and people. But as I said earlier, Leipzig is much more for the hip, gritty, grungy, student types, so the shopping center is not the "cool" place to go. Oh yeah! Speaking of grunge, Erika's cousin told us that Leipzig hosts the world's largest goth festival each year. Thousands of people come to show off crazy outfits, piercings, and whatever else is happening in the goth world. I recommend you all google it and check out some of the pics.

This was a very cool cafe in the downtown area. The inside was also gorgeous, but I didn't take any pictures unfortunately. It was originally made around 1908 in the style of some Austria architecture so there was really ornate wood carvings all around the windows and above the bar with deep red velvety curtains and some very nice chandeliers.

One of several Kaufhalles, fancy shops and some historical statues of Faust giving his soul away to the devil. Stupid tourist group was in the way so I didn't photograph that either.

All in all, it was a very nice weekend trip, and not too costly either. Double score. Since gas is so expensive here, there are a lot of people that do ride shares and several different websites that organize them. So to get there we met up with some guy near a highway exit who was traveling from way western Germany. He dropped off one person in Erfurt, and picked us up and drove us to the main train station in Leipzig at a meager 7 euros per person. By comparison, we took the bus home and it cost us 11 euros. I can't believe how expensive the buses are in the US by comparison. $50 to go from Ames to Minneapolis, one way. 18 euros is about $25, for both directions.