Quite the Weekend

A lot has happened since I last wrote! Remember how I came home from the beer garden early and Mark stayed? Well I had a nice night that night….I updated this journal, packed up a few things, and then went to relax in the sauna. I got hot in the sauna so was laying out reading when Mark walks in. He says “Do you have our bag?!” I didn’t. I had left it at the beer garden with Mark. The bag has our passports, Mark’s MP3 player, and Mark’s Kindle. Luckily no money. Mark thought he had left it in the cab on the way to the train. After about 3 heart-pounding hours with the help from our professor’s wife and the nice hotel clerk, we located the bag with a cab company in Salzburg.

Now we had to figure out how to get this stuff back- we were due to leave early the next morning with our classmates. Our professor encouraged us to get the stuff immediately. We left even earlier on our own, took a 1.5 hour train to Salzburg, got a $80 ticket on the train because our train pass was only valid for the 2 hour train, got to Salzburg, met someone who noticed my Mizzou luggage tag and was also from Missouri, encountered a rude cab driver who refused to take us to the police station where our bag was, managed to get to the station anyway, rushed back to catch the train to Munich, and finally made it back to our starting point. Then we grabbed a quick lunch and hopped on a 3.5 hour train to Rothenburg to meet our classmates. We had to change trains twice on this journey, with only 5 minutes in between each. Stressful day. 7 hours on a train before 4:00, but having our passports and electronics back was priceless. Lesson learned: Don’t leave Mark in charge of our bags.

All of the stress melted away as we arrived in Rothenburg. Cutest. Town. Ever. This town oozed charm. Rothenburg is the main stop on a path known as the “Romantic Road.” It was indeed romantic.
Rothenburg was once one of Germany’s largest cities. The city’s heyday was from 1150 to 1400. It’s protected by a wall that goes all the way around the city. In the 1600s, the city suffered damage in the 30 year war and slipped into poverty. Unable to rebuild, the city is preserved as a true medieval town. The streets are all cobblestone. The houses are a scene from a picture book. Entering the gates, you feel yourself taking a step back in time.

We started by checking into our hotel. The city has no chains of anything- stores, restaurants, hotels…so ours was family-run, just like all of them are. It was adorable. It has 70 rooms so it is a legitimate hotel, but it felt more like a bed and breakfast. I was unable to get a picture that captured the room, but I did take this one out of our window:

We then set off to explore the town. Grandma gave me a Rick Steves guidebook that has proved quite handy. We did the self-guided tour from the book and learned about the history of the town. We learned, for example, that there used to be a moat leading up to the castle (which was destroyed and not rebuilt) and the wall. The door from that moat remains today. At that time, they had a curfew for all of their citizens to return inside the towns walls. If you missed curfew, you could still enter- but you had to pay a fine. Here’s me trying to fit into that 700-year-old hole:

We ended up in town center, which was very busy. This is a festival weekend- it’s much like Kansas City’s Renaissance Festival, only the entire town is the festival. And it’s actually a medieval town. So there were all these old-time people walking around, and there was lots of horse poop. Lots and lots of horse poop. Not a good mix with the cobblestone!

Last night we met up with our classmates for the Night Watchman’s Tour. This guy gives the tour every night, and it’s very popular. Rick Steves calls him the medieval Jerry Seinfeld. We laughed a lot and learned little trinkets of knowledge, like that the word “salary” comes from the word salt, because it was once so valuable that it was used as currency. Notice how cute the row of houses behind him are- the entire town is like this.

Today we had breakfast with our classmates and then hit the town. We went through the Crime and Punishment Museum, where we learned about ancient torture techniques. It was pretty dangerous to be a baker those days. Bread was a very important food, and if you messed it up, you could be put in a box and dipped in cold water. If you did something shameful, you had to wear a “shame mask” that made your sin obvious- for example, if you were gossipy, you had to wear a mask with big ears and a long tongue. Another way they punished people was by having them sit in the town center and putting their feet through this thing so that they couldn’t move. Anyone that walked by could tickle your feet, and sometimes they would put sugar on your feet for the goats to lick off. And if you created a drunken disturbance, you would be put in a cage in town center so that everyone could laugh at you. The museum was educational and fun.

We grabbed a delicious Italian lunch and then set off to look at the wall. It’s pretty cool; you can climb up the steps and walk around the perimeter of it, and you can climb up the towers and look at the villages below. Here’s a view of how the wall looks:

And here’s Mark sitting on a low part of the wall- it’s actually about 20 feet tall, but it’s built on a hill:

After this we walked around until it was time to leave. The thing that makes Rothenburg so great are the small things you come across like old people in love:

And random parks overlooking the villages:

We fell in love in Rothenburg- with the town and a little more with each other.

Tomorrow we go to Innsbruck in Austria- the Winter Olympics have been held here twice. Then we leave the class and go on our own to Interlaken, Switzerland. It’s finally starting to feel more like vacation and less like work/school!