D is for Deutschland

Nearly getting to the end of our holiday posting!

Next up is a whistlestop tour of Germany. We started at the foot of the Romantic road and worked our way northwards through Bavaria.

First stop was Fussen - a lovely town at the foot of the Alps within sight of Neuschwanstein. These cool stone pillars sat outside the tourist office, with the stone tops spinning about as the water sprayed up and outwards. Are they fountains or sculptures?

The big monastery of Fussen. Strangely, most of the apparent masonary decoration and columns were actually painted on the walls, in quite a convincing 3D manner...

The church also had the same painted on architechtural features. And there was even a Rapunzel tower for Char...

We spent the night in Nordlingen - a medieval walled town with a perfectly circular town wall still completely intact. It is situated on the rim of a huge meteroric crater, which was used for a training ground by the Apollo astronaughts due to its apparent resemblance to the moon's surface. It looked like normal German countryside to us though!

We then continued to Dinkelsbuhl - another charming walled medieval town, although they were all starting to look very much alike at this point.

A speciality of the region were the Schneeballen (snowballs) made of a crusty baked dough and coated in sticky things like chocolate and toffee. Not easy to eat!

Then it was Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber. The medieval walled city theme was still charming enough, and Char got to meet some interesting characters...

We also paid a visit to the Medieval Criminal Punishment museum in Rothenburg - quite an astonishingly vast collection of torture implements and similar paraphenalia.

This chair doesn't leave much to the imagination...

And the mask on the left is a shame mask, put on a miscreant to encourage people to poke fun at him. The mask on the right is a creepy executioner's mask.

After spending the night in Wurzburg, we headed across country to meet up with Char's penfriend Alexia in Cologne. On the way we briefly stopped in Frankfurt, visiting the Main Tower for a spectacular panorama.

Then we arrived in Cologne and met Alexia for a grand tour of the city...

...including the spectacular cathedral (huge and impressive even for us cathedral-weary travellers through Europe)...



...some delicious Kaffee and Kuchen...



...and a visit to the home of Eau de Cologne, 4711.

The shop contains a fountain of pure Eau de Cologne - as we found out after dousing our whole hands in it, thinking it was only water!



The sticky-hot weather made these shops a godsend!



We then moved onto Dusseldorf where Alexia lives. A nice city without major landmarks but still a fun place for a night out...

This is the local Frank Gehry creation on the waterfront:



And we then went and sampled the local breweries for the delicious local beer...