The continuing account of our weekend trip to the northern German cities of Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck…

We arrived in Lübeck early Friday evening.  We stayed at the very nice and reasonably priced Hotel Lindenhof, which is conveniently located halfway between the train station and the Holstentor, and which we highly recommend.  The old part of Lübeck is located entirely on an island in the Trave River, and the Holstentor is one of the four original gates in the city wall.  It’s one of the iconic images of the city, the other being the seven huge church steeples rising from five medieval churches.  This is not a very big place… you can walk around in the island in an hour.  Why would any place need that many huge churches?

Friday evening and most of Saturday we just wandered around the city, where one street is cuter than the next.  We went into several of the churches as well as one of the oldest hospitals in Europe.  Like Bremen and Hamburg, Lübeck has a beautiful and elaborate city hall with a pub in the basement which has a funny story.  There is a little statue of a devil seated next to the nearby Mariankirche with this story:  When the people of Lübeck started to build the church (which is now one of the largest in the country), the devil thought it was going to be a drinking hall and pitched in on the construction effort.  The construction went quickly, until the devil realized the actual purpose of the building and tried to tear it down.  The people convinced him not to by promising to put the drinking establishment under the town hall next door.

We also stopped at Niederegger, world-renowned maker of marzipan for over 200 years, and stocked up on presents and a few things for ourselves.  Marzipan, if you aren’t familiar, is crushed almonds mixed with sugar into a kind  of soft paste that can be shaped and colored to look like little fruits and vegetables or animals or whatnot.  Joe got himself a little devil like the one outside the church and did eat it, but plain marzipan is a bit much and I find it infinitely better covered in chocolate.  A picture of me with the big devil is below.  Tune in tomorrow (or whenever our internet at home is fast enough) to watch Joe cavorting with his marzipan devil.

I was hoping to be able to take a boat trip down the river to Travemunde, a resort town belonging to Lübeck on the Baltic Sea.  Unfortunately, that will have to wait for the next trip, but we did take a boat tour through the harbor and around the island, which was a relaxing way to end the afternoon before heading back to Hamburg and the train home.