Lübeck

We went to Lübeck on Saturday. We being my roommate Hua-Chen, two of her friends (Anna and Wei-Ming), Carolyn, and me. It's a nice place. The center of the city is an island and is very small. Only about 1.5 km from tip to tip. It took us about 4 hours to get there on the Regional Express. Our first train was late but we were able to make the connection anyway.

I had torn pages out of my guidebook on Lübeck and Anna had a Lonely Planet Germany guidebook with her. But even between the two of us, we were still a little disoriented when we got out of the train station. That's when we saw a group of elementary school kids on a field trip. They were all wearing yellow hats. So we decided to go in the same direction as they were. This turned out to be a pretty good decision since they lead us right to one of the gates of the city. I'm not sure if the city center is actually an island or just surrounded by a moat. All the streets leading to the island had gates that once actually defended the place.

We walked around a bit and saw a church or two before we stopped for lunch by the Rathaus (Town Hall). We all had sausages and such. It was pretty nice out at the time. We also saw this pool thing with hand powered paddle boats. The kids look like they're having so much fun. We were all very jealous.

After lunch we walked around some more. We went to St. Peter's, St. Mary's, and St. Jacob's church. We also went to a cathedral and a medieval hospital that looked really depressing. The picture with the people on the slide of Hua-Chen and Wei-Ming on Noah's Ark. Very cute play structure.

Since the place was so small, we also got to walk around some of the residential streets too. It was pretty quiet once we got off the main streets. We met a cat sitting by a door. It was definitely not a stray and came towards us. We pet it and then Anna gave it a small piece of ham. It was very happy and followed us for a little while.

Lübeck is the marzipan capital of the world. We went to the most famous store and got some marzipan. They had them in every shape imaginable. Carolyn and I also got marzipan ice cream. It was all very good except that at this point it started to rain really hard and got cold. It's too bad I didn't take any pictures of the store. But I got souvenirs!

Here's a model of the island. For those of you who are into city planning or have taken 11.001, you can pretend that's Le Corbusier's hand. Except of course, this place was nothing like anything Le Corbusier would've built.

It was a fun trip. Pretty relaxing since we didn't do too much. It was a good day trip.