Spring Break!

The first Sunday of Spring Break I began a road trip in Northern Germany with my parents and cousin, Annie. First we stopped in Köln so I could give them a short tour. Then we stopped in Münster on our way to Bremen to eat lunch and walk around the town a little. Münster is historically an important city because they signed the treaty that ended the Thirty Years War. When we got to Bremen we checked into our hotel and were surprised that it was futuristic themed, which was really fun. Then we walked to the Altstadt. By the time we got there it was dark out, and since it was a Sunday evening it was eerily empty. The old buildings were stunning, and we walked around the maze of the old town for a little before going into a pub for dinner.

My parents eating in Münster

Walking around Muünster

Futuristic hotel lobby

Bremen at night

            On Monday we walked to through Altstadt to the water to find a place to eat for breakfast. We found a great place where we could sit outside in the sun on the water and help ourselves to an unlimited buffet! After we ate we walked along the water where all the ports are. Bremen actually has the second busiest ports after Hamburg. We found an area with a bunch of little alleyways with shops and bakeries. Then we went back towards the center of the old city to see all the beautiful buildings we had seen the night before in the day time. We also saw the bronze statue that represents the characters from the Brother’s Grimm fairytale, “The Town Musicians of Bremen.”

City center

Walking to the Altstadt

Walking along the water 

Alleyways with shops

Brother's Grimm statue

I found a shop in the city that had a TV screen in the window advertising Otto Bock’s below the knee prosthetics. I went in hoping that I could ask them a little about what customers look for in a prosthetic, what they like and dislike about current products, and what concerns they have about them. (For those of you who do not know, we are working on a project this semester designing a new below the knee socket for Otto Bock.) I went in and explained that I was a student working on a design for a prosthetic for Otto Bock and asked if I could get some information. It was a bit difficult to explain my situation because the people working there did not speak English. When they finally understood that I was wanting to know about prosthetics they called someone there who they did that. It turned out that customers come to this place to have their prosthetic fitted or refitted and then leave. The person working there explained that they didn’t actually have any prosthetics there and they could not really give me information about them. Oh well, it was worth a try.

Ottobock place

Next we went to the science museum in Bremen. This turned out to be one of my favorite things that we did. It was an interactive museum divided into 3 exhibits: earth, mankind, and cosmos. It was really fun and interesting because the museum was entirely made up of interactive activities and visual things. There was also a “play ground” outside where everything was related to physics. We didn’t see this until after the museum closed so my cousin and I climbed around the fence to check it out. It was super fun! I wish we could have gone back when everything was running.

Outside the science center

Science playground

Tuesday morning we ate at a crepery where authentic local Bremen-dwellers actually eat. Then we drove to the second largest city in Germany, Hamburg! Hamburg is an interesting combination of nature and big city, old historical and new cosmopolitan, and rowdy Reeperbahn and more millionaires than any other city in Germany. We started our walk around the city at the beautiful lakes with walking and biking trails around them. On the edge of the lake nearest to the city center are crowded terraces with cafés, shops and office buildings. Between the lakes and the ports is the Alsterfleet, left over from Hamburg’s former canal system. Next we went into the rathaus, which was rebuilt after a fire in 1842. Then we climbed to the top of the Church of St. Peter. It was quite a bit higher than it looked from the outside and there was no elevator. And it got hotter and hotter the higher we climbed. The rooms on the way up had little bits of history about the church. It was also rebuilt after the 1842 fire, and they had a picture of how it looked beforehand. There was also a huge crumpled metal sphere that had fallen off the top of the steeple a long while back and was replaced. After the climb we ate a picnic in a grassy park outside. It was a beautiful sunny day and the park was crowded with people laying down and enjoying the weather. Next we went into the Church of St. Jacob and saw an incredible 1600’s pulpit and organ. Then we went to the Warehouse Quarter, with the world’s largest continuous warehouse complex. The ground around the canals was actually flattened in order to build warehouses all along it. Then we went back to the lake and ate dinner at a restaurant on the water.

View of city hall from church of St. Peter

Lunch outside the church

On Wednesday we got bikes from our hotel and biked all the way around the lakes. We saw many really nice houses in this area. Then we biked to the warehouse district and went to the Miniatur Wunderland, which is the world’s largest model railway. The first room had models showing the history of Hamburg, and the rest of the exhibit depicted different parts of the world today. It was really intricate and cool and we especially liked seeing what they thought America looked like. It basically showed the wild west, Las Vegas, and Florida. Next we went to the ports and walked around along the water and in the little shops. My dad and I enjoyed the immature humor that one of the boats was called “Grosse Fahrt,” which is not a very appealing name for English speakers. We biked to the St. Pauli district and spent a long time trying to find the Beatles “shrine” and the Star club where they got started, but it apparently closed down last year.

Miniatur Wunderland

By the ports

Biking around the lakes

Biking around the lakes

We biked back to towards our hotel through a beautiful big park in the middle of the city. We passed by a cool looking building and went to see what it was. It was an old music hall, so we went in to find out if there were any concerts that night. It turned out that the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain was playing, and that sounded just too weird to pass up! It turned out to be really fun! They were great performers and made a lot of jokes and played popular songs. It was a really interesting show!

Music hall

The next morning we drove to Lübeck. Lübeck is a medieval town that was capital of the Hanseatic League and has one of the busiest ports. The old town is an island completely surrounded by water and still has beautiful medieval gates leading in. Our hotel was once a warehouse. It looked out over the canal near the Holstentor, the fortified gate leading into the old town, built in the 1400’s. We wandered around the town through the medieval houses and cathedrals. We stumbled upon a puppet museum where we met a voice actress who came here specifically to see this museum, which is the biggest puppet museum in the world. It was really interesting to talk to her and learn her story. On the other side of the old town was the castle gate, which defended what was once the only way into the city.

Holstentor

We walked to the market place, which was busy with food carts and other vendors. It was enclosed on two sides by the huge town hall. We went in the town hall hoping for a tour, but the man at the desk said we had missed the last one. He said we could come back tomorrow, but the tour was only given in German. We started to leave, a little disappointed, and he stopped us and said that he could quickly show us the most impressive room there. So he brought us into a beautiful meeting room with paintings on every wall. He explained the history of the room and told some stories about it. The town hall was built in 1250 and was the meeting spot for not just the town of Lübeck, but the entire Hanseatic League. Each of the paintings represented a significant characteristic of Lübeck. There were two door ways entering the room, one about a foot and a half taller than the other. He told us that when the room was used as a courtroom, if the defendant was found guilty he had to walk through the short doorway (with his head down) and if he was innocent he could walk through the tall one with his head held high. This short tour was perfect because we got to hear the stories from someone who was clearly very proud of his city and its history, and who was excited to share it with everyone.

Infront of our hotel in Lübeck

Marketplace and City hall

That evening we went to a small bar and listened to a musician play traditional German music. There was no place to sit so we just listened to one song and then went to the Sailor’s Guildhall for dinner. This was an old seaman’s tavern that is now a restaurant, but maintained the look and feel of the ancient tavern.

Friday morning we went back to the market place for breakfast outside in the beautiful weather. Then we drove to Lüneburg on the way to Goslar. We decided to take a scenic route instead of getting on the autobahn and it was definitely worth it! Lüneburg is an adorable city full of red brick buildings that gained its prosperity almost entirely on salt mining. Once we got there I realized that I had seen an old salt warehouse along the water in Lübeck with a sign saying “Zalt aus Lüneburg.” We walked around the city and went to the top of the water tower for a good view and then headed to Goslar.

Coffee on the busy pedestrian streets of Lübeck

Lüneburg

Goslar looks like it came straight out of a Brother’s Grimm fairy tale. The town got its wealth from silver mining and was therefore made an imperial city, home to German kings and emperors until 1253, when it joined the Hanseatic League as a free imperial city. On Saturday we walked around the shops of the city and saw the old palace. We also saw the clock bells in the city center go off. Little figurines went around the clock explaining the city’s mining history. Before we left, we went to check out the old city gate.

Palace

Clock in center

Old city gate

Our last destination before returning to Bonn was Kassel. We parked the car at a huge palace (Wilhelmshöhe) on beautiful castle grounds and then hiked up the hill to the old medieval castle (Löwenburg) and took a tour of the inside. We found out the story behind the castle and got to try on armor. Afterwards we had an amazing dinner at the Orangery (a beautiful building from the 1700’s) and then headed back to Bonn.

On Sunday we dropped off my cousin Annie at the train station and then drove to Brussels for a short visit with Alice. We ate traditional Belgian foods and saw the major highlights of the city and then went back to Bonn and spent the evening with my host family. That night my parents drove back to Frankfurt to spend the night there before their early morning flight. It was a perfect week and I missed my family as soon as they left.