“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not” Ralph Waldo Emerson
This town is the dictionary definition of cute and quaint. We got dropped off from the buses in front of an old inn just a stones throw from where things were getting ready to happen it would seem. It was early and all the towns in this part of Europe, much like Erroll’s lifestyle, don’t really get moving until around noon. So it was, when we first arrived, a definition of a cute ghost town. As we did our walking tour of the town everywhere on every street were stages and tents for markets set up, and like the other towns and in the effort to get use of the pleasant weather months they were having a festival! We just arrived a bit early for the shindig, a continued theme for us; arrive too early or too late. The town was beyond cute and in the middle part of the old center there was a fountain of Poseidon. Our guide made sure to tell us if we got lost or later in the day we could ask any where the fountain was but not to describe it as the Poseidon fountain as no-one would know what the hell we were talking about. She told us everyone just calls him the forks man and in the German it apparently is spoken as (I’m typing the phonetic not the actually spelling) “gobble-môw.”
This small town not having too much to do in the war only saw 4% damage and so almost none of it had to be rebuilt and what we saw was mostly the original structures from medieval times. One of the buildings that did get bombed they never rebuilt and turned into a fountain, with parts higher and lower like the stones as they would have fallen. Its odd to look at something thats so soothing and such a lovely aesthetic both for the town and to just look at and think it came from such a destructive force. We made our way stumbling on cobblestone after cobblestone to the river that ran through town. Here we saw a few things, the town hall with a funny story, a butcher shop next to houses so prized they pass through families and haven’t had a sale in centuries and street performers and rafting river rapids. The town hall was built in the water, as the story goes, because the land owner of the town, the prince bishop, said they could build one but not on his land… As he owned all the land they built it in the water on the little island between the rivers as this was technically not his land. Yah, tricky little guys these old Germans. The butcher shop was built on the river and had trap doors where they would just dump all the waste right down the holes and into the river. There was a row of houses falling behind this butcher shop down the river and down stream. This lead to horrible smells as one could image.
Fast forward a few hundred years and now these fishing houses are the most prized in all the town, so much so that one hasn’t been sold and they are passed down through the generations. The guide recommend our best chance to get one would be to marry into the family but we would have to hurry as we were only in town for the day. In the middle of the bridge there was a girl street performer playing when the saints go marching in, yup. Over the bridge there were sticks suspended from wires spanning different areas for rafter and kayakers to run speed courses but unfortunately we didn’t see any in the times we were passing over the bridge. We pressed ahead, again fighting our reoccurring enemy the cobble stones, and made our way up the hill to the palace, another church, and the rose garden overlooking the city. The church had some interesting carvings on its exterior. On the right side there was a carving of a jewish person having his eyes plucked out by the devil because of their blind faith in the wrong god. Kinda went from 0-60 there pretty quick. In my last post I talked about some of the odd use of langue when some of the Germans have talked about the countries past, you know what I’m talking about. Anyway I’m doubling down because today our guide was exactly what you would have thought someone would have talked like. She was incredible and was also very young so I think there is a thought difference trailing on the curve with age. She explained the carvings on the church and then like many of the cities we had been to previously talked about the “Crystal Night” and the destruction of synagogues and the persecution of the Jews. She went on further and talked about how this was not the first time in their history this had even happen. In fact, the complete kicking-out of the jewish community had happened on several occasions. She, unlike previous persons, was upset in the repetition of history. She had a “normal” reaction when talking about these events and I understood even further what was missing from the other people when they talked about these events; conviction. I’m glad to see that there are people who understand the events and the gravity they hold and I’m glad it’s the newest generation I’m just surprised that the older one hasn’t seemed to have learned from the past or a better way of hiding how they didn’t really dislike it.
We found our way into a courtyard that was used as the scene for the large sword fight in “The Three Musketeers” with Orlando Bloom a really cool courtyard for a not so cool movie. We passed through the gate of the palace on our way to the rose garden and the floor was made of wood with such a cool pattern that it really drew my attention. The floor was made out of wood so as to absorb the sound better when the carriages came in the wood would absorb the sound and they would make less noise. We walked out to the rose garden and let me say, I want a garden. The gardens here are by far the best thing, Alex and I both find ourselves having travel thousands of mile to just find and sit in these gardens. Thats just what we did too. We sat and looked out over the city and got pissed on with sap by the trees we were sitting under. We thought it was a drizzle if rain, nope, sap. Still it didn’t detract too much we just had a bit of time to clean all it off our hands cameras and phones. With a few more full lung fulls of the sweet smells that surrounded us we decided to head back to the bus as the day before we were told stories of people that nearly got left behind as they didn’t make it back in time.
On the way back we seemed to have given the town enough time to wake up and things were really stirring. The previous empty streets were bustling and we retraced our steps back through the town passing all the now-filled shops and stages. Many of the stages had gypsy performers and I would love more than anything to say they were amazing! Unfortunately, I cannot say that… they were… meh. Now we didn’t linger too long at any one stage so I’ll withhold judgement but I’ll just say what we saw didn’t make us want to linger. The tents and shops however had flowers and food galore and this was right up my ally! We got back to the location where the bus was to pick us up, and the walk that we thought would have taken a while we made with 40 min to spare…. So, we walked back and got pastries and coffee. On the way back we stumbled across another stumbling stone, something we saw a few days before in Regensburg. There is a man that if you pay a small amount to and tell him the address of any Jews that were removed from their homes during the holocaust he will go to the address and place these stones out front of the property as a reminder of the past and the lives effected or lost. He calls them stumble stones because he wants you to stumble across them and to cause you to stumble mentally and remember the past.
Not more than 200 yards from the stumble stones we popped a squat and ate our pastries before boarding the bus and going back to the boat. This time we had to go just out of town in kind of an industrial area and so, because I think the view in the very “dock” looking area was rather unappealing (as we heard many people on the bus grumbling “they don’t show this in the brochure”) they greeted us with ice cream with waffle cones! As we walked back on the boat we got our pick from four different flavors and they gave us a healthy scoop in a cone coming off the gangplank.
Erroll & Alex's European Honeymoon Trip! 