Last Friday, I had to go to a business meeting with an important potential partner to Freibrug im Breisgau. It is quite close to Basel, Switzerland, but sadly not very close to Munich, so it was a 4 something hour drive.

To sum things up – it was very well worth the drive. Business wise and to experience this wonderful city. My colleague Anselm is from here and I was invited to stay as a guest in his parents house, which I appreciated as it was much more comfortable than a hotel room or driving back in the night.

The drive already offered some nice sights. Due to traffic conditions and good experience we decided not to take the road through Stuttgart, but went on the southern route instead, through Lindau and then along the Bodensee lake. This is wine country with some amazing sights, sadly we did not have time to stop.

So upon arriving to Freiburg, you see the standards are set high as well, even dogs have their own Porsche cars, something you have to get used to in Germany 🙂

After getting gas on the petrol station, we hurried to catch the meeting. So the city itself has some 200k+ inhabitants and is spread out through several valleys and is bordering on the Dark forest (Schwarzwald) which is a wonderful green part of Germany with some mountains and hilltops including ski slopes. You might also have heard of the cake that is named after the forest. I did have my ski gear in the car with me, since I knew I could use up Saturday, but in the end I visited another country, but that is already material for another blog post.

So Freibrug – I got the opportunity to check out the city centre, which is beautiful, has a great atmosphere and there are many young people as well as Freiburg is a university city. It has a fairly similar standard to Munich, so housing is expensive so is the food if you eat out, but I am already used to prices in some German cities, so I was not surprised at all.

There is also a small hill in the city from which you can see almost the entire city and reminded me of Roznik and Cankarjev vrh in Ljubljana. That is a small big thing missing in Munich, the city itself is completely flat except for a small artificial hill in Olympiapark and that sometimes really makes me miss Ljubljana and Slovenia. Freiburg I could adapt to much easier as there are a lot of hills and climbs to choose from in the vicinity.

So being in another state I can see that language is a bit different than in Bavaria and I did have some problems catching up to everything that was being said in the meeting but luckily my German is already good enough that I can fill in the gaps of the dialect words that are sometimes used by people I meet.

Freiburg has a great vibe to offer, very nice city centre and I would gladly spend an extended weekend there to get to know the city better. Here are some photographs captured by my professional Samsung phone camera. If they don´t convince you, still go and visit, you will not be sorry.

What also got me thinking was a memorial to a synagogue that was destroyed in 1938 by the SS. I do want to explore that part of Germany more as well, I have been to Dachau, but I would like to understand the politics and the times better and there are many places in Germany someone can do so.

Freiburg today is a bit atypical, as people tend to try to find work in Basel, Switzerland, since salaries are much higher there and continue to live in Freiburg. It is about 1 hour drive between the cities. French people tend to try to work in Freiburg, as I guess salaries in Germany top the ones in the nearby parts of France. An interesting mix.

As far as first impressions, after spending some hours wandering in the city, go, I can really say without a doubt that Freiburg is a place worth visiting. Also the region has much to offer. My first plans were to visit Switzerland and then Lichtenstein on the way back towards Munich and try to get some skiing done somewhere in between, but when I woke up on Saturday and saw that rain was pouring (even though Freiburg should have the highest number of sunny days in Germany), I decided to go to France and visit Strasbourg as the Christmas fair was being opened on that day, but as I said, Strasbourg is well worth another blog post on its own.

What I also noticed in Freiburg and it was the first time I saw that (but was frankly never very specific in examining churches) on the walls of the main church in Freiburg there were engravings used by the market traders as measuring units. So for example how big should a loaf of bread be, a “underarm” length unit, called Elle in German. What was interesting the bread sizes differed and different models should be used based on how fruitful the year was. I found that quite interesting and ingenious. So the prices stayed the same, but the unit size was changed based on the general community welfare and stocks.

So enough about Freiburg, for a first visit it was short but sweet. I do hope I will get an opportunity to know the city better and if I spoke Germany well enough maybe even be there on business more often, as the company we met might just be the right partner for the banking sector in Germany and Switzerland. I will be happy to dedicate more posts to Freiburg in the future either way.