A Visit to Ulm

Tue and Wed of last week, Gwendolyn took a trip to the city of Ulm. Located nearly two hours away in the state of Baden-Württenberg, this was Gwen Wren’s first foray out of her home state of Bavaria. Here she met Elisabeth Kalko. Or re-met. The two had first been introduced when Rachel was 6 months pregnant, on Barro Colorado Island in Panama. Eli was delighted to see Gwendolyn ex-utero.

While Eli and Rachel worked on a manuscript together, David and the Wren took in the sights. Or tried to take them in. It’s actually remarkably hard to capture a baby in her björn, a tall church steeple, and one’s own face all in the same camera frame. Here’s trying:

The next day, we toured Ulm all together. First stop, the Münster, a cathedral with the tallest steeple in the world:

Inside, while the gothic archways pulled David’s thoughts toward the heavens, Gwen Wren contemplated the sogginess of her drool-soaked mittens.

In addition to its tall church steeple, Ulm has a second claim to fame. It is the birthplace of Albert Einstein.

Or translated: “Here stands the house in which on the 14th of March, 1879, Albert Einstein came into this world” – or something like that. Our German language skills are slowly improving!


David particularly appreciated this stained glass window in the Münster. The bottom left shows Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Einstein. The upper right has the equations E = mc^2 (Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence) and s = (1/2)gt^2 (Galileo’s free-fall equation). The middle depicts the big bang. Not bad for a church! A Lutheran church, mind you.

We took in a few more sights:

Ulm’s beautifully painted town hall.

A Jungian department store.

And a statue commemorating the exchange of a large pretzel.

At the end of a long day, we were ready to join old friends for dinner.

Eli treated us all to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant, which was delicious! We hadn’t realized how much we had been missing food with spice. (And eating one-handed with one’s fingers is definitely the way to go when balancing a sleeping baby.) Before falling asleep, Gwen Wren enjoyed the company of several old friends from the Panama bat research crowd.

Christoph Meyer…

…Kirsten Jung…

And our host, Eli Kalko.