Trier

Day 13

Technically this starts in Trier but I figured Trier’s post was long enough already without shoving Koblenz into it as well. (edit: and this still has 250 pictures in it, I think I’m going to break up Tübingen even more than I planned T_T) I carried out my resolution to eat all the tasty things at the breakfast buffet this morning, and I had a croissant with Nutella as part of that omnomnom. Then we got on an earlier train than originally planned, and travelled back northeast to Koblenz. There we went for a walk, putting our stuff in a train station locker again, navigating our way around the confusing, loud, in-the-way car infrastructure in order to get to the old part of town and specifically the point at which the Mosel meets the Rhine, where there is a huge statue. We caught a train back from the old town area to the Hauptbahnhof where we had left our stuff (at the old town station there’s no ticket gates even, you just walk onto the platform, it’s amazing), and had a little bit of a snack, although the lady at the bakery misheard me and got Tharash a cappuccino instead of a tea. Oh well. Off to Heidelberg!

I liked Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof, instead of having a tunnel connecting all the platforms like other train stations this one had a pedestrian overpass, and then you go down to your platform instead of up. It made it very light and airy to walk to your train. Also there was a big model train set in a case, and you could make it go if you put money in which is neat. However, the bus ticket machine was slow and difficult to figure out. There were two machines that may or may not have done different things, and we poked both of them to try and figure out how to buy bus tickets to take us to the old city?? Even when we stepped away from one of the machines because someone was waiting in line behind us, she had trouble using the machine too. But eventually we got to the old town and found lots of compact little 18th century streets. Our pension was very antique. I loved the aesthetic but in the end it was my least favourite place that we stayed at, I felt awkward using the shared bathroom and the floor creaked like a banshee when you were going to it. And the doors were loud. Maybe that’s just how it is living in a period house, but I hate making noise.

We went for dinner at a small family-run place nearby; it seemed like the daughter was the waitress, the dad was the cook, and the mom was the manager. We each had a flammkuchen, I had one with smoked salmon and Tharash had one with garden vegetables. They were larger and thinner than the previous flammkuchens we’d had, and Tharash was able to watch the guy cooking from his vantage point. Later in the evening, when we were about half-done eating, the place filled up tremendously, I hope the guy was able to keep up with all the orders. We were thinking about dessert, but decided not to put more pressure on them and there wasn’t really something on the menu we wanted anyway.

One thing that was different here was that there was street noise late into the night, people talking and laughing (and occasionally smoking >.>). The noise was not obtrusive and it was nice to hear people hanging out. Heidelberg is a university town so maybe that’s where it’s from?

Day 14

I slept surprisingly well after I got to sleep. We went to a nearby bakery that had a café inside, had buns and coffee/tea. Then we went to the castle.

The castle’s practically in town, even more than Cochem, at least it’s closer to the main market square than Cochem’s is to theirs. Just the hill is also incredibly steep, oof. We saw some more blackbirds hanging out on the path. Technically we headed in the back way, but whatever.

It’s a really odd castle, because it’s been heavily renovated to have a lot of palatial buildings from the 17th century onward. It’s a very unmedieval aesthetic, a weird conglomeration of styles, and looks terrible for defending, but it has some really neat parts nonetheless. Besides the great view over the town, it also has: LEDs in the well so you can see how far down it goes; two huge casks for alcohol, one of which has stairs for you to climb up on top of; a very steep, deep dry moat; and a tower that’s been exploded in a real battle.

It also contains a pharmacy museum, which you can visit at no extra cost once you enter the castle, so we went there first seeing as my mom is a retired pharmacist. It had some pretty neat stuff, like samples of the many strange ingredients that chemists and apothecaries have used in the past to treat illnesses, including and especially mythical things like bezoars. I got her a pen shaped like a syringe in the gift shop. : )

We went out through the front gate and then down into the moat and around the garden there, past the ruined tower, and the sun came out but today we had finally brought our sunscreen!

The wikipedia page is really neat, apparently Mark Twain visited it and liked it.

Schloss Heidelberg
– Aesthetic: 7/10 – it’s a bit confused with all the renovations and the unrestored parts. The broken tower is cool af, though.
– Fortifications: 8/10 – lots of layers, at least on the back end! The front end looked pretty businesslike, too.
– Historicity: 8/10 – even though it’s more palace than castle now, it’s still got some pretty castley bits.
– Location: 8/10 – practically in town
Total castle rating: 8/10

 

We went back to the same bakery to buy bread for lunch (potato bread) (does not taste like potatoes, sadface), and to a tiny local grocery to buy other food. Rittersport bars were like less than €1 each so I got a couple, even though they’re not properly Fair Trade/sustainable/etc. We dropped off our groceries at our room (at least the common area has a minifridge for cheese, so we got some breakfast yogurt too). Then we went to cross the river and climb the hill on the other side.

This was kind of gruelling for me. First came the Snake Way, a vary narrow stone-walled path that went wiggling directly up the hillside until it came to the Philosopher’s Walk. At that point my thighs were already tired of climbing, but we were only like a third of the way up the mountain. So upwards and onwards we went, thankfully into the shade of the trees, and then tried to figure out which of the many paths would go to the summit. Though really as long as we went up, we’d get there eventually. I don’t remember exactly how long it took, but probably over an hour (partly because the GPS wasn’t quite sure where we were and we paused a few times to try and figure out the correct trail). I had only brought one waterbottle on this particular walk, and had mild heat exhaustion by the time we made it to the Thingstätte, which is a Third Reich amphitheatre (I thought it looked a little modern for an ancient thing). So I sat in the shade and rested until I didn’t feel heat exhaustion anymore, and then we went up to our actual goal: the ruined St. Michael’s Monastery. (Because my parents are reading this: I brought both waterbottles on our remaining walks that looked to be long or hot, but I didn’t actually need both of them again, this was the only time I had any discomfort. : P )

This mountain has apparently been special for millennia, because the ancient Celts used to live up there; they had a village with two large defensive walls. Then the Romans came and built a temple to Mercury; the people who manage the site have placed the outline of those walls within the monastery ruins for those interested in seeing where it once was. Then the first Christian church was built there in the 9th century, and the monastery followed it not long after (I am blatantly referencing Wikipedia but most of this I did read about on location or in the museum the next morning). I appreciated that most of the remains of monastery rooms had little signs saying what the room used to be. Though we figured out a couple; the kitchen had a large fireplace, of course, but right next to it was a much lower room – of course, a storage room, slightly underground to keep things cold!

I was a bit disappointed in the tower reconstructions; they cheated and used modern materials like concrete, and then they couldn’t even get the stairs even. I mean, if you’re going to cheat, at least make it nice.

Had some great views on the way down, and came off the mountain low enough that to get back to the Snake Way, we walked the rest of the Philospher’s Walk. Back in the market square, we got a drink at a pub, sitting at an outdoor table in the middle of the square, but we didn’t want to have dinner there (Tharash said it didn’t have good reviews). So after we’d rested and hydrated, we walked down the main shopping street and back up another street. On the way back, we passed through part of the university, and a memorial for a synagogue that was destroyed in 1938.

Then we went for dinner at a place called Hans im Glück, the logo of which is a cute little duck and a boy, which previously I had seen in Leipzig in 2019 and not known what it was then. So I wanted to eat there, and they had vegan options! I had a vegan chicken burger, I tried to get it without cheese (or ‘cheese’) but they gave me ‘cheese’ anyway : P and I had fries, on which I put all of the sauces (ketchup, mayonnaise, and something citrus that was very nice), and a cocktail called Goldregen with “vodka, elderflower, mango, pineapple, passion fruit & lemon”. Or maybe it was Hofnarr, “vodka, apricot brandy, cranberry, grenadine, lemon & pineapple”. Either way, one of us had one and the other had the other and we shared because that’s the sort of travelling companions we are, we both want to try as much as possible. Either way, it was fruity and yummy. Tharash had a walnut burger and coleslaw.

It was kind of crowded in that restaurant (no outdoor seating), and there were no backs to the seats; booths were divided by thin birch trunks. So that did make me a little uncomfortable, especially since it was loud. But then I got tipsy and it didn’t matter so much anymore. : P

We went back to our place we were staying and tried to sort out our plan to obtain Deutschland-Ticket, a monthly subscription to the Deutschebahn that would let us travel on all busses and local/regional trains. It would be very convenient for us, and save us a lot of money. However, although Tharash could set up his, I couldn’t get my bank details into the Deutschebahn form. They require direct deposit information??? And Canada’s information format is completely different from Europe’s??? Tharash was also apparently not allowed to buy a subscription for someone else. Eventually we gave up because they were determined to make it as difficult as possible. Then we had tea and chocolate, and read some more Pratchett.

Day 15

We had that yogurt for breakfast! We packed our bags quickly, and I forewent a shower because I’d had one the night previous to get the sunscreen off. That was a mistake for two reasons, one reason was that I didn’t feel clean once we were out and about. The other I’ll tell you about later.

First we went to the Kurpfälzisches (Palatinate) Museum, at first mostly to park our bags in a luggage locker. But we did want to see some things in the museum, and attempted to walk through pretty quickly to find the Roman and monastery exhibits. It took a while because it starts with 18th/19th century stuff, being partly built into a historic building, I think. It was kind of humid. But eventually we did find the really old stuff, and it was really rewarding, especially the model of the monastery as it would have looked intact. There was also a replica shrine to Mithras, based on a historical carving – which was also there, but then they made a new version and painted it up and built shrine-like surroundings for it so you could start to get the contemporary effect.

Then we left our bags at the first museum (shhhhh) and walked to the University to see the museum there, which was entirely about the University. They also had a fancy hall, and a heavily graffitied ‘student prison’ which is super historical and preservation work is very carefully in progress. We were given conflicting directions on how to get in, and it was twice as expensive as the other museum while offering way less, and the info was only translated into English for the 20th century, so all in all I’m glad we went to the other museum.

It was lightly raining when we went back for our stuff, and so we went to a café for some Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake, supposedly a German afternoon tea kind of thing to do). Though Tharash had tea and I had hot chocolate. I had a strawberry cream roll and it was soooo good. Then we stopped by a shop I’d seen the day previous and got some odd pastry conglomerations known as Schneeballen (apparently from Rothenburg). It’s a bunch of deepfried pastry in a sphere, dusted with icing sugar or iced with hard frosting. I got one with Bailey’s frosting, and Tharash got one with Champagne frosting. We didn’t eat them for a couple days but they last as long as they don’t get wet. Though I will say it’s hard to detect the alcoholic flavourings.

We went to the train station, and our train was 40 minutes late so we spent the time talking to a Deutschebahn agent about buying me a Deutschland-Ticket. This took about 20 minutes and several different pieces of ID. But in the end, Tharash succeeded in paying for a ticket for me.

The annoying part is, it took me like another three weeks to cancel my Ticket after I got back from my trip. I had to pay them for an extra month because their stupid website is completely incomprehensible. Aaauuugh German bureaucracyyyyyy

(I finally managed to cancel it on Sep 1. And then got an email a week later in regards to one of my earlier attempts to cancel, telling me that it was already cancelled. >.>)

Tübingen – Bebenhausen