This I’m typing this in Strasbourg which looks to be fantastical; we just got here and I want to out and play and I am getting sooo behind on this blog and I want to catch up, so this will have less commentary than I had hoped.   

We are staying in Schifferstadt, a small suburban town in Rhineland-Palatinate. It has a population of about 20,000 and is so clean and orderly, so un-rundown, that I thought it must be a new suburb sprinkled with Disneyland-like buildings (to add character, perhaps). Maybe something like Walnut Creek or San Mateo in California with faux mission-style buildings, then I realized that the City Hall – shown above –  was built in 1558.

1558!  62 years before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, 397 years before the Plymouth City Hall was built (and I’ll bet the Schifferstadt City Hall is in better shape). Our hotel, shown below, was probably built about the same time – although the rooms are very modern – and the town is a mix of very old, semi-old and contemporary.  The closest big draw is Speyer that has a magnificent Romanesque Cathedral. It is, by far, the tallest Romanesque building I have ever seen and its simplicity is almost zen-like. Under the church are various tombs including a king’s tombs, called Kaisergräber, a name that Michele and I found particularly charming.  We visited the Maulbronn Monastery which was a Roman Catholic Cistercian Abbey but, when the local ruler became a Protestant, he nationalized the seminary and church. It is now liberal Lutheran (whatever that means). The original monks were sent from Bourgogne, France in 1156 and built the Romanesque Church but, by the end of the century, they changed the attached construction to a Gothic style (one of the first in Germany). The conversations about the change must have been interesting: “This is a very nice church but sort of old-fashioned. Back home, in Bourgogne,  we are now building in the Gothic style, takes less stone and looks better.” “But we have 50 years invested in this style.” “Yeah, sure,  if you want to be old-fashioned….”. The crucifix, by the way, is carved from one piece of stone (both Jesus and the cross are one piece).   We finished our last day in the old city of Besigheim which was founded in 1459.