31 Juli-- Day 37

Hi! Okay, so ... 5:15 in the morning, I haul myself out of bed and schlepp with 4 other people to the Fischmarkt. Basically, it's a big open air market, but there's people eating these weird baguette + fish messes, and the fish stall people are waving around fish and yelling intelligible stuff. There were surprisingly large amounts of people in their 20s there, who were clearly still drunk from the night before, and decided that it would be more fun to come tothe morning flea market than to go home and face a hangover when they woke up.

The fish

The market

There was stuff other than fish though-- fruit vendor.

After the fischmarkt, we hurriedly got ourselves to the train station, and got on the train to Lübeck. Completely unremarkable journey (we all fell asleep) and when we got there, we stored our luggage at the train station lockers. Unfortunately, it was raining, so people were whining the whole time. It's positively beautiful there though-- it cleared up later in the day!

Lübeck was originally a huge port town-- they were able to get all the stuff from the north, and the old city part is actually an island in the middle of this river. They used to have these huge huge gates at every bridge on to the island, and boats boats boats everywhere. The merchants had the most power, while the Church got angry about that. Now, only one of the big gate remains, and it's actually sinking a little into the marshy ground. They have all these house facades from different eras, and a particular house layout to make it easier for merchants to inspect their wares, heat the house, store stuff, allow their family somewhere to live. Pretty interesting.

The cutest gate I've ever seen

We did a tour, and looked at a bunch of churches (Lübeck has like 6 different church spires or something... but some are double-spired churches). They also have a positively magnificent Rathaus, while the merchants were so rich. Here's part of the inside of the Rathaus:

Inside of the Rathaus

After our tour, we headed to this restaurant, that's supposed to be the fanciest pub or something hahaha. Pretty much everybody ordered fish, and everything tasted absolutely excellent (though I didn't eat the fish. Gross)

Can't see too well, but our restaurant was shaped like a ship.
We were sitting on the benches that people sit on on ships.

Along with being a bumpin port town, Lübeck was also the home to Thomas Mann. Unfortunately, all we learned was that it was the home of Thomas Mann, and that in some book he describes life in this very town. I still have no idea who he is... maybe I'll google that. Sometime.

One of the churches had an elevator you could take to the top, so here's a view of the town

Lübeck from above

Lübeck, in my opinion, is that they are the makers of Niederegger Marzipan. Yum yum yum. So they had a huge shop, where we dutifully bought some marzipan. There were so many different types. It's sold all over the world though, so it was nothing special to buy any in Lübeck. After that, I walked around part of the island, checked out some boats, and then we sat in another sort of open air place in front of the Rathaus, where there was music, cafes, and food stands.

Boat boat boat

When we went to catch our train back, there were all these police officers in the train station. There were like 30, all in full uniform + bulletproof whatnots, and there were 2 dogs too (one of which was not well train,-- it barked at everybody and jumped at me. They said my frozen face of horror was actually pretty funny... I think I lost a year of my life). We were hoping that thye were tehre to catch some sort of criminal who was arriving on a train. Instead, they were there to make sure that drunken soccer fans didn't cause too much trouble. They did. Somehow all these soccer fans were crammed on our first train towards Berlin, and they were being gross and stinky and drunk and hung over and crowding the entire train. Such a good thing we had seat reservations. Made it back to Berlin, exhausted, did some homework (i know...) and went to sleep.