 What's up guys? Evil D here. So today I'm going to give you my impression of the German city Herzberg am Harts. Now this city has a very important place within the Esperanto community. It's actually got a secondary name, kind of like a commercial touristy type name, and that name is La Esperanto Urbo, which translates out of Esperanto as the Esperanto city. Now for those who don't know what Esperanto is, it's a hundred and fifty year old created language designed for intercultural communication with somewhere between a hundred thousand to a couple of million speakers. If you want to know more about Esperanto before diving into this video, just click on the link down below. Anyway, so if you've been speaking Esperanto for long enough, you've bound to have heard about La Esperanto Urbo. It's spoken about quite a bit. It's considered like the model Esperanto city where Esperanto is kind of used as a secondary language. Well anyway, so back on my honeymoon, I actually decided to detour through the town for like a day and a night. I wanted to see what it was really like because you hear, you read a lot of contradictory information. You hear some people that say that, yeah Esperanto is really utilising here, others that say, there's nothing there, it's pointless. Why would you even, why are they even advertising it? So I wanted to see for myself what it's really about. So anyway, we diverted our trip through Germany from Munich there. It took about three hours by train. It's in a pretty rural area. When you actually arrive like the train, it's not like a big train station or anything. It's just like an open platform and you walk down under one line and you come out the front and when we're actually there, they're repaving everything. So it's very like rural in its look. Now when we come out of the station, you can pretty much tell straight away that this is in some way related to Esperanto because straight out the main like exit from the train station, you see this statue just across the road and it's got on it, I think it was like La Esperanto Urbo. It's like this big paving stone type of thing. It's quite obvious. It's as obvious as it is today. Anyway, so we had a middle aged Esperanto slave come along and she decided to pick us up with her car and everything. So that was straight away, that was really nice service. But we went out and we had a closer look at this statue. So it's quite obvious. It's like at the gate to the city. So if you don't know what Esperanto is and you've just stumbled here, you kind of go, okay, what is this? So it's a good way to represent the language. Anyway, so we jumped in her car and she took us to kind of like the Esperanto house or library or something. I'm not sure what it is. But anyway, we're traveling through the town and she's actually indicating randomly every now and then when there's a few Esperanto signs. So we're starting to get signs of the language here and there. Nothing like blatantly obvious, but you're getting some of it. And she takes some detours for streets because it's a very small town. And every now and then you do see like maybe one Esperanto flag here or there. And she says, you know, there's actually two groups of Esperanis in this town. So there's those who have moved in and Esperanto is part of their life, their culture, their history. But they're not the Finvenk history. They're not the ones who are out to kind of like push it to the world type of thing. But then you've got the others who are there for the movement and some of them have moved in. Some of them are actually from the town and they're there to promote the language more and more. So there's two different kind of groups there. Anyway, so she takes us around through the town and then we stop off at this little Esperanto house. And it's kind of obvious it's an Esperanto house. Okay, I'm back. Sorry, I almost died then randomly over a cough. But anyway, let's just continue off the story. Now, it's kind of obvious that this is an Esperanto house because there's this big like two poles sitting there. One's just got this giant Esperanto flag and it's just kind of waving away in the wind. It's like, look at me. And then there's like, I think it's like a little Esperanto type garden and stuff with like, you know, like little name tags and stuff everywhere. But there was another signpost which they obviously changed the flag depending on the people who come. They must have a lot of flags because when we arrived, there was actually an Australian flag flying, which was quite surprising because, you know, Australia's on the opposite side of the world, the Germany. So I don't know if they've got every single flag or they've just gone, we've got Australians coming quickly, someone ran into the flag shop. And if you own the flag shop in that town, you're making a lot of dough. But anyway, so they take us into this little house and it looks like a house from the outside, but actually internally, it's a complete library. Like if you go up the stairs where the main portion of the library is, there's bookshelves everywhere on like every corner in the hallways everywhere. And it's just like the entire history of Esperanto is, I don't know how many books. It must be like 10,000 plus books easily that just what I could see. Maybe 40,000, who knows? But there's periodicals, there's like random books, there's like books from China, books from America, books from, you know, all over Europe. It's just everywhere. And I literally just sat there just looking at random books going, wow, this is really fascinating. Like I've never even heard of these books before. These like there's an entire history there. And obviously my Mrs. with me the whole time, she's like, I have absolutely no idea what any of this means. Should I be worried? But anyway, so we're there for a couple of hours because I just wanted to like peruse through the books. But eventually we actually arrived late in the day. I forgot to mention that. Sorry, guys. So we arrived late in the day and it's getting dark. And anyway, so they've hooked us up with some accommodation. We can't stay in the library. So we jump back in her car and she takes us to the other side of town. Now, on the other side of town is the fire station. OK, there's a fire station and she hands us the keys to the fire station. Apparently, Esperanza got something hooked up, some type of deal with the fire people. I don't know if it meant to be talking about this now. But yeah, anyway, so we stayed in the fire station. Like how cool is that? We've got like this massive room of sheets and everything. And she's like, yeah, just, you know, don't lose a key because it's like a lot of money. That was pretty much the only rule. So we could stay there. And she said, you know, if there's randomly a fire, you might have five brigade people come running through and grab everything. So just be prepared for that. That, you know, randomly in the middle of the night, a bunch of men by just come running through the door going, grab everything in German. And then I'm just going, oh. But anyway, so that was a possibility. But it wasn't just us there. There was actually another older Esperanto staying there who had come from another part in Germany. He was visiting. There was actually just before we arrived, there was like a film festival for Esperanto held in the town. So he kind of hung around afterwards to help out with the library and stuff. So anyway, we spent the night there. That was pretty good. We had a little bit of a chat with him. He's been in the movement for a long time. And then the next morning came around and we decided to take like a little walk through town. Now the town's very small. Actually, it's not really like a town. It's like a grouping of towns in the area. But we were, I guess, in the main one. And we took like this little walk through the town. And when you go to the main street in the town, it's kind of like this winding street. It's not like cars traveled down. It's like a big walk road type of thing. Anyway, at the entrance to the main street is this giant statue of like Zamenhof's head and another Esperanto flag. So if you haven't got the point that there's Esperanto here, you definitely have now because this statue is massive. And you could read on it and it says it was actually like built in China and it was imported and all that type of stuff. I think that's what it's about. I might have read that somewhere else on a brochure or something. But anyway, so you see this giant statue and then you go down the main street. And I tried, like everyone else, randomly speak a little bit Esperanto to different people. Some of the people knew what the language was but they couldn't communicate. So obviously not everyone's trained, which is kind of obvious. I had that idea in my head already but I'm just stating it now because I was told by my host that some Esperanto's had come through expecting everyone to be speaking this language, which seems to me a bit silly. But anyway, so we tried it out on a few different people. Not too much success, but in the main street there is several shops that are clearly run by Esperanto's because they've got big flags in the window. They've got Esperanto menu cards there and stuff like that. Unfortunately, we were a bit early in the day so they hadn't opened up yet and I was, I really wanted to go check out some of that. I think it was like an Esperanto cafeio, which is like an Esperanto, you know, little cafe. God, I can't even think right now. So there's like a little Esperanto cafe and there's a few others and then there was also some shops where they had Esperanto menus and you could order from them and like the way they knew what you're talking about but they didn't actually speak the language. So they'd obviously become accustomed to, you know, the menu being both in German and Esperanto. So anyway, we had a little walk around there and then we walked around the lake that's in the center of town and there's literally everywhere these little signs in Esperanto saying, you know, this is this type of tree and this is this type of tree and you're now here. So it's very well signed. Like you can definitely tell where you are in this town if you use Esperanto. There's plenty of signage. So we walked around the lake and then we came back and we went up to the castle. Now, if you go look up Hutzbergam hearts, I think that's how it's pronounced. If you go look it up on Wikipedia, you'll see that there's a giant castle. Now, this was a tiny bit of a disappointment for us because we wanted to go through the castle and explore it but apparently most of it's off of bounds because it's actually like government building even though it's like a traditional castle. So there is one part you can go up in and it's a museum and they've actually got a whole floor devoted to Esperanto stuff. So they go like, you know, puppets, memorabilia, like books, all sorts of stuff. And even if you go into the computer within the like the normal German parts of the castle, you can look up things in Esperanto. So like there's like a little program and it's running and you can go out, you know, you select German and it'll speak to you, select English and it'll speak to you and select Esperanto and it'll speak to you. So that was really cool. I enjoyed listening to that and actually hearing and it was really well done as well. Like there was no mistakes or anything. So then after that, we came back down through to town because we're actually down on the weekend. A lot of stuff was closed, especially like the cafes that I wanted to visit. And then we went back to like that Esperanto library place and we actually, we were only there for this night. So we decided to go check out a, like a hotel that was owned by an Esperanto family on the other side of town. So we got a lift over with a bunch of Esperanto. So it was like four of us in the car and my missus. We're all chatting away in Esperanto. My missus is like, I don't understand, translate. But you know, I'm getting payback because every time we go to China, she never translates anything. So this is my revenge. But anyway, so we go over to this hotel and it's actually this really old hotel. Like apparently it's like the oldest one in the area and it's a couple of stories high and it's owned by this Esperanto family. You walk in there, it's obvious it's Esperanto. There's signs everywhere in Esperanto. You can order in Esperanto. They've got like menu cards and everything and the owners, they speak Esperanto perfectly as well. So we're all sat, sitting down. We're having like Esperanto meals as like, you know, like Esperanto cakes and all sorts of stuff. Like, you know, kind of like just the selling that's commercializing it, baby. They're really commercializing it quite well. But anyway, so we're all chatting away and you know, speaking about various things. This is the only night I could spend there. But when you're in here, you really feel like if there was somewhere in the world where Esperanto is an actual language used every day life, you could almost get away with it in the Esperanto urubo. Like you could put yourself into plenty of situations where you seriously don't need any other language. There's plenty of places that speak Esperanto. Obviously the whole township doesn't, but there's enough to survive if just with Esperanto, I reckon. You could probably get a buy. You could get buy with it with the help of the other Esperanos who do speak German. So anyway, we spent a good time there. We had some fun. My Mrs. chased there like cat around or was it a dog or was it a cat dog? I don't know. She chased some animal around. I was entertaining her, that was good. Then the next morning, unfortunately, we had to leave. And that was a bit saddening for me because I really wanted to stay like a couple of days, especially into the working week so I could actually go check out all the Esperanto shops and all that type of stuff because apparently there is quite a few dotted around the little township. So that would have been cool. Anyway, I guess the whole thing here is I wanted to see if Esperanto was actually used in any fashion in this town. And it definitely is. So if you wanna do like an Esperanto cultural tour or something, I don't know. If you wanna just check out the sites where you're over there in Europe and see where Esperanto is used, definitely check out Esperanto urubo. It's definitely got something going for a layer. I don't know how to say it. If you're wondering what a model city in Esperanto would look like in the future, possibly in other locations, that's definitely a good starting point. They're onto something there. And I just wanna mention, I don't know if they've started this campaign or it's finished, but they're actually planning to purchase a really big library because they've run out of a spot in that house library that they've got for all the material that's coming in because they're continually getting sent material to catalog and put away. So I think they're gonna start a campaign or they've already finished it. I don't know. But if they have, yeah, you can go check them out. I know they're on Facebook, so you can actually go look them up and you can donate to that. And I highly recommend it because if there's any chance in the world that Esperanto is gonna be used anywhere, it's gotta start in one location. It's almost like the Esperanto mecca, for instance. That's like how I'd put it. And it makes me think now, the Universal Esperanto Association's located not too far away. It is in another country, but Europe's pretty close all around. I'm wondering why they haven't decided yet to get up and move and go there because they would get so much support. There's a lot of Esperandists there, like a lot compared to any other location. So yeah, anyway, that is my story. I've probably gone way over time. I hope you've enjoyed it. If you did, subscribe and I'll bring you more stories like this. I've got plenty more from my crazy Germany's regarding Esperanto, regarding my military service, my wife, you know, animals, whatever, it doesn't matter. You told me, actually, what you wanna hear and I'll keep spewing it. That sounds disgusting, but anyway, that's the end of the video. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope to see you in the next video. And if not, well, you will be hunted down by the Esperanto mafia. No!