October 2014 ~ Libby and Tommy go to Europe

Sunday, October 12, 2014

Arg!

8:28 AM Posted by Libby 1 comment

Hello! No, we haven't forgotten about blogging. We are in Amsterdam staying at a place we found on Air B&B, at which the internet is horrible! Like, super slow and spotty. So that's why we haven't written a post in a few days.

Since being in Amsterdam we have done a city walking tour, a bike country tour, the Van Gogh museum, the Rijksmuseum and a canal tour. We spent pretty much the whole day at the Rijksmuseum but luckily they had free wifi so I was entertained with my iPod while Tommy moseyed through the museum!

We have one more full day before heading home. There is one more museum that we want to go to. Once we get home to reliable, fast internet, we will write a monster blog post with pictures! Hope you all are having a wonderful weekend!

533

1:28 PM Posted by Tommy 2 comments

We arrived in Köln, Germany (Cologne) yesterday. We are staying in a studio apartment that is less than a 5 minute walk from the cathedral. It's pretty nice being so close to the things we want to visit.

We decided to have dinner in a brauhaus both yesterday and today. A brauhaus is a beer hall and the main beer in Cologne is Kölsch. Once you sit down, a waiter brings you a little glass of beer; you don't even have to ask for it. Once your glass is empty, they bring you another, until you tell them no more. You'll see on the picture below that each glass is supposed to be .2 liters (about half a pint in the US).

Last night for dinner, Tommy decided to be adventurous and order the pig knuckle (ham hock). Here is the before and after of his feast:

It really could have been dinner for 2!

Today we visited the cathedral and the Roman-Germanic Museum. The cathedral is amazing. There had been a church on that site since about the 4th century, but it wasn't until around 1248 that construction on the current church began. Cologne cathedral became a stop during the Middle Ages for pilgrims because it was in possession of relics from the Magi (We Three Kings). In 1164 Frederick Barbarossa (King of the Holy Roman Empire) conquered northern Spain and took the relics from the city of Milan. Archbishop, Philip von Heinsberg, transferred the supposed bones of the Three Magi to Cologne. Money generated by the pilgrims provided the funds to start building the cathedral to house their relics. Our guided tour allowed us to see the shrine more closely than everybody else!

The reliquary was made in around 1200 and is made of gilded silver, jewels and enamel. Here are some other pictures of the inside of the cathedral.

Some of you will remember from our England trip blog that we cannot resist a tower tour. Well, would you believe, Cologne cathedral has a tower tour?! We climbed the tower on the right hand side, all the way up until it starts to get really pointy.

There were 533 steps and we climbed 332 feet high. Here is what we could see from the top:

Some more of the outside:

iPhones don't do well at night with the front facing camera

The Roman-Germanic museum had a ton of Roman artifacts but very little in the way of English explanations. There were some amazing mosaics:

the museum was actually built around this mosaic floor. this mosaic is in it's original position

Tomorrow we make the last leg of our trip. We're off to Amsterdam!

Hold on to your butts. . .

4:37 PM Posted by Tommy No comments

Today ya'll get a two-fer! Yesterday we took a river cruise down stream to St Goar (That's "Sankt Goar" in German, and pronounced "Sahnkt Gwhar.") St Goar sits below Rheinfels Castle. Today we rented a couple of bikes from the hotel, and rode them to a town called Bingen. On the way back we came across a castle that was accessible from the bike/foot path we were using and decided to explore it.

BAHKH-ah-rahkh

1:51 PM Posted by Tommy 1 comment

We are now in BAHKH-ah-rahkh. Go ahead, say it. Bacharach. I feel weird pronouncing it like that, but people don't know what you're talking about if you say Bak-a-rak. Same with KOHKH-ehm, Cochem.

We didn't write a full blog post dedicated to our Burg Eltz experience, because it was more frustrating than enjoyable. The walk to Burg Eltz from Moselkern was very pretty. It reminded us of walking through Whatcom Falls Park. On the outside the castle is enchanting.

However, the inside of the castle was a very different story. This is the mob, I mean "line", for the castle tour. This is once we had already pushed, and shoved--literally--our way to the door where the tour starts.

This situation really soured the castle experience for us.

The restaurant/hotel that we stayed at in Cochem had Mexican food on their menu. We decided that we needed to try it, being as how we love Mexican food. It was...different. It tasted fine, it just didn't taste anything like the Mexican that we'd had before. They added things like mushrooms and pineapple in burritos, and raisins in enchiladas. Tommy's enchiladas had raisins in them. I picked a burrito that didn't have anything odd in it. It took me a while to be able to place the vaguely familiar flavor of the ground meat in my burrito. But I figured it out! It reminded me of church lady "mexican" casserole. There wasn't any familiar Mexican flavors like cumin, chili powder or oregano. It tasted like some kind of tomato sauce on the meat. So there you have it. A German take on Mexican food!

Today we made the hour and a half train ride to Bacharach. The town itself is pretty small but very quaint. This is our hotel, Pension im Malerwinkle. It's right on the medieval town wall.

The walk into town is short and follows a little stream. We hoofed it up to one of the towers along the wall for this view:

Picture of the local Protestant church, a ruined Abbey, and the Rhine river

Closer look at the abbey ruins. I think it's beautiful.

We walked along some vineyards

For dinner we had schnitzel at an odd little beer garden that was in the shell of a carousel. Our waitress was a young-ish gal who was super sweet and asked us several times if we really did like our dinner. It was good!

For dessert we went to this other tiny, tiny restaurant that we found on Trip Advisor. All the reviews talked about the to-die-for apple strudel. It was pretty good, I don't know about to-die-for though.

I think tomorrow we are going to take a river cruise to St. Goar. We hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

A valuable lesson

12:44 PM Posted by Tommy No comments

Today we took a river boat cruise to Beilstein, about 1 hour away from Cochem. The cruise was beautiful and we even got to go through a lock. There were vineyards on the hillsides just about the entire way. The morning was foggy and the air was crisp and smelled good.

looking back on Cochem from the boat

into the lock

through the lock

Beilstein!

Once we got to Beilstein, we followed the cobbled roads up and up and up to the ruined castle, Burg Metternich. The castle had beautiful views.

view from the castle

view from the top of the last standing tower of the castle

Other than the view, the only other interesting thing about the castle was the cafe (the actual castle isn't much to look at). Their menus didn't have any English, so I decided to be adventurous and order the Erbsensuppe. Unfortunately for me, erbsensuppe turned out to be split pea soup. I do not like split pea soup. But on the upside, I now know what erbsensuppe is and I shan't order it again! A very valuable lesson. Tommy was nice enough to trade with me.

After we were done exploring the castle (it was pretty small), we headed back into town. We found the old synagogue. Apparently, in 1840 about a quarter of the population of Beilstein was Jewish, which has since declined. The building that housed the synagogue was build in the 1300s.

the synagogue

narrow street

cute little town

Beilstein could only be visited by boat until 1900. The town has one bus stop and one mailbox. It's very tiny and very quaint. Tomorrow we are taking the train to Moselkern and hiking to Burg Eltz castle!

We found real Leavenworth!

2:14 PM Posted by Tommy 2 comments

Ok guys, look at this. This is the view from our hotel room!

We get the river view and the castle view. The castle you see before you is Reichsburg Castle to be precise. More on that subject in a minute. If you will allow me one small moment of griping though. The hotel we are staying in costs more than we wanted to spend, but we had a really hard time finding somewhere to stay in Cochem. Also, the town center is over below the castle. It's about a 15-20 minute walk to the "main drag" as it were. There is a bus stop close by, so we'll probably take the bus sometimes. We've also run into a location where "WiFi provided complimentary" is a bit more complicated than advertised. And I (Tommy is talking here) am frankly sick of this happening. We get 30 minutes complimentary per 24 hour period. Three zero. So we are paying for unlimited internet, 3 € a day. Oh, wait. It's more complicated you say? Yup. This is PER DEVICE. Yup, another internet scrooge here in Germany. /Rant

Cochem is pretty much everything you would want a German town to be. There is a river, castle, half-timbered houses and wineries on the hillsides. The castle even has a winery.

So, we arrived in Cochem around 12:30ish. The train station is about 10 minute walk fromus than the center of town is, so we took a taxi from the station to the hotel. After we were settled in to our room, we made the trek into town. We got some lunch (chopped up bratwurst and pomme frittes) and stopped at the tourist information building and asked about the buses, river tours and Burg Eltz castle (we'll be going there the day after tomorrow). All of the seemingly helpful pamphlets we were provided ended up being in German, so we ended up looking up some of this information on the internet afterwards.

We decided to hike up to the castle. Rick Steves' Germany guide book describes two walking routes: A scenic route and a huff-and-puff route. We took the scenic route which had us huffing-and-puffing anyway!

The commanding Reichsburg

Part of the trail leading up to the castle. The whole walk smelled a lot like home.

The "scenic" route took us around the back of the castle

the view after we made it to the castle!

The castle isn't "historic" in it's current state, save for a single tower that dates back to its original construction, but it's quite resplendent in all it's "castely" glory. What we see today was built sometime after 1868 when a rich German, Mr. Ravené, bought it for 300 Goldmarks. In 1689 the castle was destroyed by French soldiers and was a ruin until the rich man bought it and restored it. In 1942, MR. Ravené's descendants were forced to sell the caste to the Nazi's. The castle is now owned by the town of Cochem.