Today, we wandered all around the quaint medieval town of Heidelberg. In fact, almost every single one of my blog posts could be described with "today we wandered around the quaint medieval town of ______". But I digress.
Heidelberg is actually much less quaint in the morning. The nice little market streets and squares are no longer pedestrian only, so we kept almost getting run over by cars. (Heidelberg is especially less quaint around 11:00pm when you are trying to sleep and people are shouting outside your window on the ground floor). Also, at 8:00 am (and 8:00 pm) the bell on one of the churches just goes nuts, ringing and ringing and ringing for no apparent reason. Apparently those times are a big deal round these parts.
Darcy and I found out there was a segway tour of Heidelberg, which we were very excited about. But we also discovered that the tour was full, so we could not go on it. It was a big disappointment, and we are hoping to do one in Paris (we didn't even realize it was a thing you could do).
Instead, we walked around old town a bit, and did a bit of shopping (Darcy wanting to buy things and me making a grouchy face). Then we headed on up to the castle on the hill. To get up there, you have to take a funicular (which is a cable car). I suppose you could walk, but only crazy people would do that (we saved our crazy walking for later in the day).
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| From August 12 Heidelberg |
At the top, we wandered around the castle, which was awesome. It got knocked down by some wars, and also by a lightning strike (?!?) but that really only makes it look better. Furthermore, the castle is way up on a hill (the best sort of place for a castle to be) and provides an excellent view of Heidelberg from above. There is only one thing better than walking the streets of Heidelberg, and that is viewing it from above.
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| From August 12 Heidelberg |
Inside the castle itself, there is an enormous wine barrel. Not enormous like someone would have trouble lifting it, enormous like most people could not fit it inside their house. From this I have deduced that the Germans like to drink. This and the 2 Euro bottle of Merlot we saw in the grocery store.
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| From August 12 Heidelberg |
After exploring the castle (which was very confusing, because the only signs were in German and we didn't have a map), we went back down the hill, ate lunch, and then walked over the Heidelberg University, which is so famous it appears in the Total War series of video games. It is also the oldest university in Germany, being established in 1386. Pretty sure that most of it was built after that, but there was a very old looking bit, so we took a picture of it. But mostly, it looked like any other university, with some students and professor type people sitting around talking and reading and such. Except the university people looked more annoyed than usual because their place of learning is also a tourist attraction.
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| From August 12 Heidelberg |
After we finished with that, Darcy, Chris and I headed up the Philosopher's walk (Philosophenweg), which is where academics of yore would walk to ponder life's mysteries, and probably also to engage with illicit substances. For some reason, these philosophers decided that what they really needed to do was walk up a huge hill while they were thinking. On the one hand, the views from the top were absolutely breathtaking. On the other hand, it must have been hard to think about life's mysteries when you were exhausted from dragging yourself up a hill.
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| From August 12 Heidelberg |
After we finished that epic trek, we headed back to the hotel, ate some food at an Italian Restaurant (yeah, in Germany) and here we are blogging.
Heidelberg is a spectacular town, similar to Bruges in many ways, but without nearly the lineups. Of course, everything here is German instead of Belgian, so the architectural styles are different, but the sort of idea of the town is similar. Really, Bath, Bruges and Heidelberg are very similar kinds of towns, in different countries with different histories, and built at different times, but the common theme is the old city preserved more or less as it was, with the expectation that tourists will come and give them money to see it. For these cities, this has worked splendidly.
Bath was important culturally a few times, first for the Romans, and later for the Victorians. Heidelberg has been the home to several Germanic leaders, and the university has been a centre for learning for many centuries. I don't know anything about Bruges aside from what I saw, but none of these cities are particularly special historically or culturally. What's important about them now is the way they were preserved (in the sense that they were). I am extremely curious to find out why these cities were preserved, and have become tourist centers, whereas others have not. All three continue to be real cities, with modern stuff on the outskirts, but the interior old towns have stayed the same. It makes me wonder.
Anyhow, here are some pictures from today. I haven't mentioned it, but in a couple of picture displays, I have included some pictures from Mom and Chris's camera, and Darcy takes pictures with mine quite a bit. So if you see a nice picture, I probably did not take it. Anyways, despite my best efforts, the date/time stamps on the pictures do not line up, so they are a bit out of order. Typically, mine come first, followed by mom and Chris's. And now, the pictures:
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