Michael Coombes took part in the DAAD-US Ancient Studies Museum Trip to Germany 2013; here is his story.
Trip to Germany:
Our trip to Germany included going to three beautiful and completely different towns and cities, namely Munich, Tübingen and Berlin. Starting off in Munich, we arrived at 9:30 in the morning on a Thursday and immediately made our way, via some hectic underground train navigation, to the hostel where we were to stay for the next four days. Soon after we met up with Prof. Dr. Schneider from the Ludwig-Maximilians University who took us for a fantastic trip to the stone and marble workshop of Dr. Pfanner. This visit was one of the highlights of the trip for me personally as it gave the full impact of the level of craftsmanship needed to produce the sculptures that we were to see later. That night we met up with the vice consul from South Africa who welcomed us and we had a fantastic mingling session with some of the local students.
Without going into too much detail, on the following day we visited the Köningsplatz and the Glyptothek and the Antikensammlungen, which were both fantastic. Of real interest to me were a number of items which I had studied by way of photograph during my undergrad and postgraduate degrees. For this reason they were particularly pertinent to me personally and I took great joy from seeing these pieces in person. The following day we went to the cast gallery that belongs to the University, which in turn made all of us South Africans realise how much more the German universities had in terms of actual items and full scale casts in particular, but they are expensive and delicate. However, it would be fantastic if Stellenbosch could acquire just a few.