Digital Wanderer

We live as long as we fly

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Germany — 7

2008-01-14

The next day we headed to Heidelberg, which is located on the Neckar, a tributary of the Rhine.

A historic red stone church building with a tall bell tower and a clock rises over a European city square. Pedestrians, a parked car, and market stalls at the base of the temple are visible in the foreground.

For some reason, I liked the city. Maybe because of the shopping street Hauptstrasse, which has plenty of curious establishments. For example, there was a shop selling multicolored tinctures stored in huge flasks - very much like an alchemist's lab; which is exactly the point.  Distracted by the sights,  I wandered off quite far, and had to run back to catch the bus on time.  Luckily, my sense of direction in unfamiliar places, while not perfect, is tolerable, especially when there's a mega-landmark in the form of a long main street and a river flowing parallel to it.

A massive reddish stone bridge with arches and a large statue on the parapet crosses the river. Several people are strolling across the bridge against a backdrop of forested hills under a gray sky.

What city this was, I only managed to figure out by the name of the restaurant on the left.

A group of tourists poses on a cobbled street of an old European city against the backdrop of colorful historic buildings and a church tower visible in the distance.

The city had the coolest (according to the guide)  half-ruins of a castle bearing the same name as the city, which we went up to on a funicular for a couple of euros. Should have walked it, didn't cross my mind right away.

The ruins of Heidelberg Castle, built from reddish stone, with a tall clock tower on the right and forested hills in the background.

Little gate.

Bottom-up view of a semicircular arch made of reddish stone with rectangular openings, under which is a vaulted ceiling with a hanging metal lantern.

Looks like a barrel, but actually it's a MEGA-BARREL, one of the largest in the world. It has a diameter of several meters, we went up a little staircase on one side of it and came down the other. Making such barrels is very hard, and this one is not only huge, but also ancient, it's over 150 years old. Not that it's of much use, though - it started leaking very quickly, a few decades after it was made. Repairs prolonged the agony only for a short time.

The end face of a huge wooden barrel in a stone cellar, decorated in the center with horizontal carved beams with decorative mascarons and columns.

Looks like a lock.

Top-down view of a river with a dam and stone towers, along which residential buildings line up on the opposite bank at the foot of a dense green hill. In the foreground, the tiled roofs of city buildings and a fragment of an old stone wall, partially covered in greenery, are visible.

The castle also had a free museum of apothecary art, but we looked at it on the run, just like many other things during the trip. Unfortunately, the driving always takes a very, very long time. That's why one should spend more time on each attraction. But then you'd either have to see fewer of them, or allocate more time for the whole trip, and that's tough, because then the wondrous gets old.

An elderly man in a light-colored lab coat stands next to a vintage copper distillation apparatus in a room with stone walls. A complex system of copper kettles, pipes, and a black metal stove base.

We went down on foot already, and this cat sat contentedly on a pillar, paying no attention to the crowds of tourists. Funny that the windows are peeling, you don't see that too often.

A young girl with long hair is petting a ginger-and-white cat in a red harness, which is lying on a brick pillar with a mailbox against the backdrop of a house.

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