First day trip: Lübeck

All week long I was trying to decide whether or not to do my day trip to Lübeck this weekend.  Well, I decided to go for it, and I'm happy to say it was a good choice.  Even though I'm worn out.

Lübeck Hauptbahnhof (central station)

I took the train there and back.  It takes about 40 minutes from Hamburg on the RE, which is interlinked with the Hamburg train system (this was really nice because my semester pass for the Hamburg transit covered half the trip there, and I only had to pay for the second half of the distance, which was 4.50 Euros each way).  Train travel is so nice--the seats are comfy, and the ride is so smooth.  It was my first time doing the actual train, not the subway, in Europe, so I had a good first experience.  :)

Holstentor Gate

It was really cold in Lübeck today!  Probably in the 40s, but the air was damp and there was very little sun except for an hour or two in the afternoon.  I was cold from the minute I got off the train, and I wasn't really warm again until I got on the train back home.

Lübeck is fairly small, at least the central part of it, and to be honest, it can get boring pretty quickly because there isn't a whole lot to do there as far as famous landmarks.  But I did a lot of drawing, which took up pretty much the whole day.  I just sort of wandered around and looked at things.  The center of the city is very old.  It was a medieval city founded in the 1100s, and many of the buildings in the town still have the medieval look to them (though I'm guessing that most of them have had at least some restoration or repair done).  So far this is the oldest city I think I've ever been to.  There are a lot of extremely narrow streets, like the pictures I've seen of Dutch cities.  I kept thinking I was in Holland, because there are canals surrounding the city center and the houses are tall and very narrow with those flat façades full of windows.  The old buildings are all of brick, and some have these neat black glass bricks on their outsides too, for decorative purposes.  Two of the original city gates are still standing, and they are both really cool, especially the Holstentor gate with its two turrets.  (The turrets on the Holstentor gate and on some of the church towers are visibly leaning--kind of scary!)

The city center is on an island with a double canal around it, and the island is a gently sloping hill.  You can imagine when you're there how it would have made a great fortified city in medieval times.  Lübeck's primary purpose wasn't a fortress though, but a trading center.  It was in the Hanseatic Trade League with Hamburg and a couple of other cities.

Since I like old churches, I spent the majority of my time wandering around from one church to the next.  Like most European cities, Lübeck has multiple churches.  Not all of them were open, but I visited four: St. Petri, St. Marienkirche (St. Mary's Church), which is the most famous one, St. Jakobi, and the Lübeck Cathedral.  St. Petri, the first one I went to, was I think under restoration and was really empty and boring, but the other three were super awesome--especially the Marienkirche.  I had to pay a little entry fee for that one, but it was totally worth it.  There was so much to see in there.  Lübeck was bombed by the RAF in 1942, and the Marienkirche and Lübeck Cathedral were both badly damaged.  In the Marienkirche, you can still see the half-melted church bells embedded in the broken stones of the floor, where they fell when bombs hit the southern spire.  It's crazy to think of what it must have been like when those bells came crashing down from 200 feet in a shower of fire and shells . . .

Exterior of Marienkirche

I found it really interesting to see the different architectural and decor styles in the churches.  The Marienkirche started out as a Romanesque cathedral but was redone as a Gothic cathedral in the 1400s.   There is still a lot of brick-and-plaster decoration though, not stone like in French Gothic.  The inner space is just so unbelievably huge!  And it had so much to look at--artwork, info about its history, a memorial for WWI, a side chapel with "memento mori" images of Death coming after mortals, etc.  I spent probably an hour there, looking at everything and drawing stuff, but then I got so cold that I had to leave.  (Those kinds of big churches seriously become giant freezer boxes when it's a cold day.)  Actually, that was kind of my method all day long: go to a church, draw until you feel like you're about to turn into an ice cube, and then go outside and walk around to get warm until you find the next church!  Anyhow, I liked St. Jacobi a lot because it was very Baroque and also had a lot of cool features, like the Marienkirche did.  There was a big, fancy organ in the back and also a memorial to some sailors who had died in a shipwreck in the 1950s.  Lübeck Cathedral was really cool too, but it was the weirdest of all.  It was built Romanesque, and even though it was converted to Gothic, it still retains a lot of Romanesque elements, like heavier and more rounded arches.  And it has carved wooden statues and gilded altarpieces at the front, which are definitely medieval.  But then all the other elements are from pretty much every century up until very recently.  There are Baroque crypts on the sides, Renaissance stuff here and there, and modern elements added too.  The chandeliers don't even come close to matching!  In this picture, you can see the time span it covers: medieval statue of the Virgin & Child on the left, a Renaissance pulpit with a Baroque stairway leading up to it, and an organ designed and installed in the 1970s!

I also made sure to find the shop for the famous Niederegger marzipan.  Lübeck is the legendary original producer of marzipan, and I have to say, the stuff at Niederegger is really, really good.  You can feel the texture of the ground almonds in the marzipan, and it has such a delicious almond-y flavor. The store was chaos--so many people inside, since it's right in the middle of the main shopping drag (not to mention Easter is coming up!).  It was incredible how many ways Niederegger can dress up marzipan.  They have it in every shape or form imaginable: marzipan castles, marzipan pigs, marzipan dinosaurs, and even a chocolate-coated eel made of marzipan!


One other cool moment: Outside Niederegger, there was a father and son playing xylophone duets.  I'm not talking a kiddie xylophone, but the real-deal ones with every note in the scale.  The kid couldn't have been older than 11 or 12!  It was awesome.  I dropped 50 Euro-cents in their bucket.

It started to rain about 5, so I gave up on my last drawing and went home.  Boy, am I tired!  Being cold all day really drains your energy . . . at least when you're from California like I am! 

Parting shot: Marzipan-Aal . . . nothing says "I love you" like a gift of an eel made out of almond paste.