DM and MM's Germany 2007 Diary

Day 17 - Würzburg

Monday, 7 May, 2007

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07:50

After check-in yesterday, we had a brief rest and I took the opportunity to have a shower to wash off the grime of the day of sightseeing and travelling. Then at 18:30 we met my aunt Jenny and her husband Gert, who we'd arranged to meet here in their home town of Würzburg. They took us out to dinner to a Greek place, Restaurant Knossos, just across the road and down a bit from the Residenz. Jenny was prepared to walk the few blocks, but Gert herded us into his Mercedes to drive - which took a significantly greater distance because of the various one-way streets. Michelle got a baked eggplant, zucchini, and cheese dish, while I had fish for the first time in ages. Both came with huge salads and a mound of crispy fried potato slices. None of us could finish the entire meal.

While eating, we discussed the various interesting aspects of Germany we've been experiencing. I mentioned how everyone seems to eat ice cream for lunch, and Jenny said no, that's just a dessert, after eating the lunch. And that most Germans have some cake for afternoon tea. And of course, there's the huge meal portions, and lots of sausages everywhere. I said it was amazing how more Germans didn't get fat. Jenny said, "Oh, those don't make you fat! It's all the junk food the young people eat nowadays that makes people fat."

We organised a plan for today over the meal. The Residenz offers guided tours in English at 11:00 and 15:00, so we will hit the 11:00 tour, then have a bit of a walk around in the gardens, then go over to the town centre to meet them at their favourite cafe at 13:00, from where they will take us up the hill on the other side of the Main River, to the castle to have a look around up there, and then to see the "little church" where they got married, which they said is very nice inside - we suspect this is a joke and it may be a huge cathedral or something.

During dinner I commented on how green the German countryside looked, and Jenny said it was too dry - they hadn't had rain for five weeks! The farmers would be in trouble if they didn't get some soon. Of course, compared to Australia, where the grass is all yellow and brown, it still looks nice and wet.

At the end of the long and relaxed meal, Jenny ordered ouzo, and I volunteered to try some for the first time. It was very liquoricey, but not unpleasant at all. I think the taste stayed with me until I brushed my teeth a couple of hours later. They insisted on paying the bill despite my attempts to do so - it's hard to argue with someone who actually speaks the same language as the waiter. Jenny also insists on doing a load of laundry for us, to save us the couple of hours in a laundromat that we'd need otherwise.

After returning us to our hotel in the lingering European twilight, we went for a short walk to the Residenz to take some night photos with the tripod. Michelle got a take away hot chocolate from an Italian place across the street and I got a gelato cup with blood orange and lemon as we walked to the Residenz. After photos, we came home again and turned in for the night.

08:35 Breakfast, Hotel Zur Stadt Mainz

Muesli without chocolate!!! Sliced strawberries, orange segments, cherries, peach halves, all in separate bowls. Yoghurt in plain and strawberry. Three other cereals if you don't want muesli, with smaller jars of bran and nuts and other additional toppings. Four types of jam. A big basket of assorted bread rolls. Five types of sliced meats. Smoked salmon. Hot sausages of two different types - weißwurst and another. Assorted antipasto stuff: tomatoes, mushrooms, artichoke, olives (two types), asparagus spears, gherkins, yellow chiles, prawns, prawns and asparagus mixed together. Twelve types of cheese, and that's just on the cheese board - there's also feta in a bowl of brine and six other types in cream cheese packets in a basket!

22:58

It's been a long day - in some ways relaxing, in others tiring. We got up and enjoyed the amazing breakfast here at the hotel, then left to book ongoing train trips for the remainder of our holiday. We decided to head straight to Cologne and spend two nights there to see the famous cathedral, then head to Bingen and spend our last two nights there, cruising down the Rhine during the day and returning by train the same evening, and then going to Frankfurt airport straight from Bingen. We got tickets to Cologne and Bingen, but the best trip to Frankfurt airport was a local train for which we couldn't get advance tickets.

We walked to the Residenz via the main shopping area in town and got tickets for the 11:00 guided tour in English. While waiting for it to begin we perused displays in the ground floor carriage court area about restoration work on the building, showing how much care and detail goes into restoring and preserving the fresco paintings and stucco work. Unfortunately, photography were strictly forbidden in the interior of the building, so I had to restrict my photo taking at this wondrous place to the exterior.

The tour began in the ground floor reception room, which our guide entertainingly told us was painted by some local artists in the impressive style and colours we could see, depicting scenes of revelry and so on amongst cherubs and classically styled people. When the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg saw it he was so unimpressed he fired the artist and hired Tiepolo from Venice to do the entire rest of the building. Walking up the grand staircase, we admired the first of Tiepolo's work: the great ceiling fresco showing the four continents (Europe, Africa, Asia, America) paying tribute to the Prince-Bishop (modest guy) in one of the world's largest single-piece ceiling frescoes - some impressive numbers of hundreds of square metres - it was huge and very impressive.

Then we emerged into the White Room, a large open chamber that led into the largest room in the Residenz, but that was completely covered by scaffolding for restoration work. We could barely see a few patches of the faux marble columns. The guard let us into a series of rooms along the southern wing of the upper floor, each more elaborately and ornately decorated than the one before, until it culminated in the Mirror Room - a room entirely panelled with mirrors on every piece of wall space and partially on the ceiling too, separated only by thin gilded mouldings and baroque ornamentation. Some of the larger mirrored surfaces were painted with anonymous portraits of ladies' faces on the back of the glass. The effect, even with electric light instead of the multiple pinpoints of candlelight, was simply jaw-dropping. We've certainly seen some amazing palace rooms on this trip, but this was on a whole new level of mind-blowingness. The glass wasn't perfect - you could see warps and waves in it. It had actually been reconstructed to look like the original glasswork that had been destroyed in the bombing of Würzburg in 1945. Thankfully, photos of the room and one piece of mirror glass that had been pried off the walls had allowed the reconstruction, which was only completed in 1987.

The guided tour over, we did a self-guided walk through the northern wing, where most of the rooms had been destroyed and not fully reconstructed (as opposed to the south, where much had actually survived intact - except for the Mirror Room). One room was a bedroom, where Napoleon had spent the night once. The guy sure got around - he seems to have spent a night in every building we've been in.

Done with the interior, we went out to examine the gardens at the rear of the building. A formal garden, with hedges and flower beds and statues occupied a comparatively small area, bordered by arched walks covered with trellises of grapes and curving slopes leading up to a higher level that formed a containing wall at the far end. Over the top of the wall, which was broad enough for paths and lawns, were wooded gardens beyond with paths leading between dense groves of trees in a less formal setting. It began raining fitfully while we explored the garden, but never got heavy. We returned to the front of the Residenz and went into the attached Hofkirche to see the ornate decorations in there, especially since Jenny recommended it and said it was almost the church she and Gert got married in.

Once done at the Residenz, we walked back to the main Marktplatz area, where we were to meet Jenny and Gert at 13:00. We got some bread rolls on the way for a quick lunch - some light, airy cheese sticks each plus a doughy ham stick for me and a seedy roll for Michelle. When we reached the Marktplatz, I was so impressed by the red exterior of the church there that we went in for a look at the funky blue stained glass over the altar before heading into the cafe, ready to find Jenny and Gert.

They were sitting at a table at the back having coffee. Michelle got a cappuccino and I got a slice of black forest cake and some water. The cake - which I'd been dying to try here in Germany - was really only different from black forest cake at home by virtue of the fact that the layer of cream on top was about four centimetres thick. Still, it was good.

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