Germania
So, I've been ignoring the LJ updates for a while, so I figured I should post a little more about this years Trip to Germany, post clusterfuckery. Ellen's brother and his wife had rented this large van to drive to Salzburg, and with that being out of the picture, but happily not costing us 150 Euro, we took two more smaller day trips.
The first was to Konigstein, which was an impressive hilltop fortress about an hour or so from Dresden. The area around Dresden has lots of small, sparse mountains and large hills which tend to be topped with a kind of cliffed dome like Pilot Mountain, and the Germans, bright people they are, put a fortress up on one of them, and you could see its bulk looming from miles and miles away. There wasn't much space made for parking in the 1400s, you had to park down below and either walk up to the castle or take a nice little train. We could see a whole horde of cheap bastards huffing it up the mountain in subzero C weather while we had a pleasant train ride. The main gates were an impressive demonstration of nested defenses, as we went through two smaller gates before making the 10 minute walk through the primary one. By this point, I could no longer feel my toes. The fortress had a little medieval market, which was essentially a retro Christmas market. At this point, we had learned that it is best to eat and drink something hot, and we'd be warm for the rest of the day, which proved true every time we did it. The snow was heavily set on everything, and I wandered around with some wicked big icicles. There were a lot of little mini exhibits scattered about, and it wasn't always easy to find them, till we realized what "Ausstellung" meant ("Hey look Ellen, another Ausstellung!). The Fortress had a huge 500 m deep well drilled in it, which they'd covered with plexiglass you should get dizzy staring down into its depths at the silver dollar of water down below. There were several exhibits of various weaponry and examples of how the place would have looked to a Saxon prince, though to be honest, it all paled to simply looking out at the snow covered landscape from the walls, where you could see for miles around.
The next day trip was to Bautzen, the city of towers. As you can imagine, it had over a dozen towers, and it seemed a little like the sort of show room Sauramon or Sauron would look around when they were looking to buy a summer house. It was also home to a group of Slavs called the Sorbians, who still spoke their own language. All the street signs were in German and Sorbian, which was cool, and I definately saw a little more Slavic bent to the architecture than I expected. Sadly most of the towers were closed, so you couldn't climb up them, but since Christmas Eve was only a few days away, city was fairly quiet, and combined with snow made it very peaceful. The bulk of the old city is on a large hill near the River Spree, which was mostly frozen over, and there were lots of old scenic pathways around the outskirts of the old town. We didn't get a chance to have Sorbian food, since not all the restaurants were open, but there was pretty good German food to be had. They also had a Matthew's Gate, which I appreciated, and got my picture taken with, and a leaning tower, which did not lean particularly much, but that was necessary for it not to fall down.
Next I'll talk about the rest of our time in Dresden, and how the Dresden Green Diamond is impressive.
The first was to Konigstein, which was an impressive hilltop fortress about an hour or so from Dresden. The area around Dresden has lots of small, sparse mountains and large hills which tend to be topped with a kind of cliffed dome like Pilot Mountain, and the Germans, bright people they are, put a fortress up on one of them, and you could see its bulk looming from miles and miles away. There wasn't much space made for parking in the 1400s, you had to park down below and either walk up to the castle or take a nice little train. We could see a whole horde of cheap bastards huffing it up the mountain in subzero C weather while we had a pleasant train ride. The main gates were an impressive demonstration of nested defenses, as we went through two smaller gates before making the 10 minute walk through the primary one. By this point, I could no longer feel my toes. The fortress had a little medieval market, which was essentially a retro Christmas market. At this point, we had learned that it is best to eat and drink something hot, and we'd be warm for the rest of the day, which proved true every time we did it. The snow was heavily set on everything, and I wandered around with some wicked big icicles. There were a lot of little mini exhibits scattered about, and it wasn't always easy to find them, till we realized what "Ausstellung" meant ("Hey look Ellen, another Ausstellung!). The Fortress had a huge 500 m deep well drilled in it, which they'd covered with plexiglass you should get dizzy staring down into its depths at the silver dollar of water down below. There were several exhibits of various weaponry and examples of how the place would have looked to a Saxon prince, though to be honest, it all paled to simply looking out at the snow covered landscape from the walls, where you could see for miles around.
The next day trip was to Bautzen, the city of towers. As you can imagine, it had over a dozen towers, and it seemed a little like the sort of show room Sauramon or Sauron would look around when they were looking to buy a summer house. It was also home to a group of Slavs called the Sorbians, who still spoke their own language. All the street signs were in German and Sorbian, which was cool, and I definately saw a little more Slavic bent to the architecture than I expected. Sadly most of the towers were closed, so you couldn't climb up them, but since Christmas Eve was only a few days away, city was fairly quiet, and combined with snow made it very peaceful. The bulk of the old city is on a large hill near the River Spree, which was mostly frozen over, and there were lots of old scenic pathways around the outskirts of the old town. We didn't get a chance to have Sorbian food, since not all the restaurants were open, but there was pretty good German food to be had. They also had a Matthew's Gate, which I appreciated, and got my picture taken with, and a leaning tower, which did not lean particularly much, but that was necessary for it not to fall down.
Next I'll talk about the rest of our time in Dresden, and how the Dresden Green Diamond is impressive.