So, we've been hosting visitors for a few days - it's Christmas Market season, after all!
A quick warning about the pics in this post... I'm having some difficulty splitting the pics into their correct locations, so some of the pics might not match where they're at in the blog. Sorry. If you don't approve, please shoot an email to my managing editor.
Matt & Barb are the founders of the Knoxville Packer Backers, the club we've been watching Packers games with for the last few years (until we moved to Germany). We've talked up German Christmas markets to them, and they decided to come over and experience the splendor for themselves.
The flight from the states is an overnight flight; planes leave the states in the late afternoon or early evening, and arrive here the next morning. Their flight landed at around 8:30 Tuesday morning - the boss worked that day, so I picked them up at the airport and brought them home.
We didn't have anything planned for the first day - they took a short nap, then we took a walk around our local town.
We went down and picked up the wife in the afternoon and headed downtown to hit up the markets in Frankfurt. They'd both been to Frankfurt before, but it was a few years back, and they hadn't been during Christmastime, so the markets were something new for them.
The next morning, we got a bit of a late start (on purpose, to try to get them over the jet lag hump!) and headed out wandering for the day. First stop was our favorite little tourist town, Rüdesheim.
Lucky for us (and our visitors!), the town and markets were open, and, owing to the early time and visiting on a weekday, they weren't crowded at all. We had a quick lunch and hopped on the tram to the top of the mountain. Matt & Barb enjoyed the view of the Rhine River from the top of the mountain, I think.
We left the base and drove into the city, as the markets there are pretty impressive... and as we all know, the wife's favorite restaurant is underneath the City Hall building. But first, more Christmas Markets!
There are a couple of different market areas in Wiesbaden, we wandered around one of them for a little while, then headed down to the restaurant for dinner. After dinner, more markets, then home.
Day three was more of the same... just kidding. We actually went somewhere we've never been before. We left the house and drove up to Aachen, which supposedly has some of the best Christmas Markets in Europe, and is located very close to where Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium intersect.
It took us a while to find parking, but we finally found a place to stash the car and walked the 2 or 3 blocks to the main area of town, in a big circle around their cathedral and town hall.
When researching, I found a few interesting things about this part of our trip.
Aachen was what Charlemagne considered his home city, and he shared the monarchy with his brother. The brother died in 771, making Charlemagne the sole king of the Franks. There was a lot of political infighting at that point in time; luckily Charlemagne was able to court favor with the pope.
After celebrating Easter in Rome with the pope in 774, Charlemagne traveled back up to Aachen. Upon his return, he turned around and marched his armies south, to depose the king of the Lombards in northern Italy.
He began construction on the cathedral around 796. In the year 800, he was crowned the first Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
Matt, Barb, and HRH (remember who that is?) stepped into the cathedral to look around and take some pictures. After they checked out the cathedral and we circled back through most of the markets, we got back into the car and headed to Cologne.
We got to Cologne and parked in the hotel's underground lot and got settled into our rooms... then went out to explore the markets. Cologne's Christmas Markets are world famous, and there are 12 of them spread around the city. Our explorations only led us to 5 or 6 of them, as the others are out toward the suburbs.
The markets have different themes; one is traditional, one surrounds a purpose-built ice rink, one showcases chocolate (more about that one later), one of them highlights gnomes...
A quick aside: I didn't know about Matt's thing for gnomes. Now I do, and thanks to the power of the internet, so do all of y'all! We had to spend some good quality time in the gnome market, so Matt could take lots of pics and stimulate the local economy with some gnome souvenirs.
The next day started out with.... more markets! We found the remaining markets around downtown Cologne, and walked over to the Chocolate Museum, which has its own Christmas Market. We did the tour of the museum, and had some gluhwein at the market afterwards.
We walked back over to the cathedral (stopping for lunch along the way), and took a tour of the cathedral. This was my third tour of the cathedral (all with different guides), and each guide covers different information during the tour. Our first tour, the guide talked mostly about the architecture of the cathedral; the second tour guide was a specialist in art history, so we learned quite a bit about the art around the cathedral and the histories told in the stained glass windows. This time, the guide talked quite a bit about the symbolism within the mosaics, showing us details that we hadn't noticed before. It seems like the guides are given a list of a few items that they have to go into detail on (the Gerhard Richter window, the reliquary of the three kings), and are given quite a bit of latitude on what and how they cover other information.
We also briefly stopped by the Cologne cologne store - the world's oldest eau de cologne and perfume factory. We loaded up and headed home after all that touristing.
Matt specifically asked about "antique stores," so the next morning we headed out to check out some.... 'flea market' type places. We found a couple around Frankfurt and he managed to introduce my darling wife to another place to pick up some of her "treasures." Thanks, Matt.
Seriously, not actually too bad. Big parking lots where people spread out tables and tarps, laying their wares out for perusal. The wife found a stein at the first market - we paid €8 for it, exactly what the gentleman was asking. A few minutes later, she found a picture she couldn't live without (in the same area). He wanted €20 and accepted €15 when offered. I personally think that giving him €8 for a dusty old stein softened him up, but at €23 to make my wife happy, I think it's a good deal.
We were hungry afterwards, so we found a nearby restaurant for lunch... and immediately gave up that plan, as traffic approaching the market area was a nightmare. We picked another restaurant (that was further away from downtown) from online reviews, specifically to get away from all of the traffic.
Wonder of wonders, the restaurant we ended up at turned out to be perfect! We managed to find a parking spot immediately in front of the door, which is unheard of around here. The sign over the door was a bastardized picture of Bucky the Badger - quite a coincidence, taking into account that our visitors had lived in Wisconsin - and remember, these folks are the founders of the Knoxville Packer Backers. There were American license plates all over the walls of the place, and while being an authentic local place, the waitress spoke English fluently - she even confirmed that she was a native Frankfurter. We asked about the name of the place, and she told us that her dad's nickname when he was growing up was "Dachs" (which translates to "Badger"), and that when the place opened up more and more people had referenced items with Bucky on it, so he (the dad) just leaned into it. Quite an endearing place, and we'll probably take more of our visitors there in the future.
That afternoon, we were trying to find a local market, and ended up in Bad Homburg, one of the closer suburbs to our town. They set up stalls in the pedestrian section of the town, but the big draw for us is the traditional market set up in the town castle. That's still a weird concept to me - that local towns simply have a castle that their town sprung up around. We enjoyed that market last year (our first year finding it), and it didn't disappoint this year either. Quite traditional, and populated almost exclusively with locals. Matt said that this particular market was a good call as a bookend to their whirlwind trip.
They took off the next morning, and we're preparing for our next set of visitors. Watch this space - we've got a couple more entries over the next few weeks!
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