Our Monday evening in Wörrstadt was great. Nicole and Patrick cut up lots of fresh veggies and meats and we cooked everything right at the table with a small cooker. They call it "" and its a very popular way of having a group of friends get together and hang out because you can have as much or as little as you like. To our surprise, they had recently purchased a favorite card game of ours, Dominion, so we ended up playing quite a few games.
Tuesday morning we decided to drive down to the city of Heidelberg. Famous for its castle and bridge, it is a hotspot of American tourists due to the proximity of an American military base. Heidelberg is famous in the archaeology world for "Heidelberg Man," a small jawbone that shows to be evidence of the first people in Europe 200,000 years ago. In the 16th century, Martin Luther defended his 95 theses in Heidelberg, only to later be excommunicated by the Pope. The modern city is still fairly representative of what the city looked like before the war. The Nazis enjoyed a strong local support, and thus didn't seem to feel such a strong need to destroy the city. Upon being defeated by the Allies in 1945, the Nazis destroyed some of the beautiful structures of the famous bridge right before fleeing the town. The Old Town is quite nice and lined with old buildings on a long pedestrian street with lots of local stores.
We walked down this pedestrian shopping street down towards the open market and the most famous church in Heidelberg, the Heiliggeistkirche, or Church of the Holy Spirit. It's construction was started at the end of the 14th century and lasted for some 150 years. The inside is nice because its different from your typical church and has lots of red brick inside. The church is famous for housing both Protestant and Catholic services, even during the same years. The picture of the hotel above is a famous Hotel Ritter that was built by Carolus Belier in 1592. The building is still in use as a private hotel with 37 rooms that start in the 100's of euros per night. Our friend Nicole bought us some local chocolates in one of the small local chocolatiers. Deciding to put off the trek up the hill, we walked over to the famous Old Bridge.
It really was as cold as it looked. Fortunately, you can't see my feet but they were frozen standing in the middle of the semi-melted snow. It kind of formed a slosh and I decided not to wear my boots because I was expecting good weather for the Italy part of our trip. The Old Bridge has a nice view of the city and you see how picturesque the city is sitting in the valley. The tower in the other picture is one of the only things that survived the Nazis when they destroyed the rest of the bridge structures upon fleeing the city. There are some fun monkey sculptures on the edges of the bridge. As time was catching up with us, we finally turned east to head up the 260 foot hike to the castle.
Walking up 260 feet of steps that are covered in snow and ice is never a fun venture. The castle has existed in some form for 800 years. It has been destroyed by fires and wars as usual and in two cases, lightning strikes. The view from up there makes it easy to understand why the spot was chosen because it provides a great view of the area all around the city. There is a nice courtyard that was of course, covered in snow but apparently its a popular sun bathing spot for locals during the summer. There's a small fee to enter the castle grounds, something our friends told us was new. We paid and walked through some of the old buildings. There is an impressive exhibit documenting the castle and the old school style of pharmacies. There were shelves upon shelves of pots containing different powders and roots that were used for medicinal purposes years ago. After walking around the castle grounds, we headed back to the city. Fortunately, we called the restaurant we were intending to eat at later that evening only to find out they were closed. Forty-five minute trip out of the way saved. We ended up eating a cheap kebap meal and returned back to our friends' house for more board games for the rest of the evening.
I love the pic of the two of you together. :)
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