Today we visited the fourth largest city in Bavaria: Regensburg. Unlike many of the cities in Germany during WWII, Regensburg did not suffer much damage. Although a military plane factory was nearby and was destroyed, the city itself did not lose as much of its existing buildings. This was the reason that we got to see a slightly different looking city that Augsburg due to it having many more buildings dating pre-war.
Upon arriving in Regensburg, we walked over a large stone bridge after going past three parallel rivers/canals. The city itself had a lot of color, and we met our tour guide under a large painting of David and Goliath.
During our tour, the guide explained the significance of the sporadic tall towers around the city. These towers were essentially a display of wealth, and sometimes used by traders to store their goods in and potentially for defense. She also said that it was common to have a small chapel on a floor, and sometimes living quarters. That being said, it also was not uncommon to have multiple empty floors, meaning that sometimes these buildings really were purely for display. They were almost always attached to the actual home of the family. I thought it was pretty funny that they built big towers just to show off.
The tour guide then took us into a courtyard that was used for concerts or plays. There were doors to get into the courtyard and when they were closed, you could hear essentially no noise from the city outside, which I thought was super nice. We also walked down along the river and got to see the stone bridge we crossed on the way in. The guide said that the bridge took 11 years to complete, which in that time was pretty impressive. We also saw one of the oldest sausage restaurants in Germany, which was originally the kitchen for the workers on the bridge.
After the tour, we had a few hours of free time to explore on our own. We went to a small restaurant and got shawarma, which was super cheap and very good. Afterwards, we went and got ice cream. Then we went up through a massive department store, where me and Evan found out that we can no longer hula-hoop. We somehow stumbled upon a rooftop balcony that had a pretty cool view of the city. Afterwards, we went inside the cathedral, which was another beautiful building. While some of the cathedrals tend to look similar, something that stood out to me in this one was the complexity of their stained-glass windows. The massive windows had so many tiny pieces and I couldn’t even imagine how long it all took to assemble.
After we left the city, we made our way to a monument called Walhalla. On the way there, our bus driver had a slight mishap and annihilated a road sign. Luckily, we still made it there unscathed and hiked up to the monument. The building was massive and resembled Greek architecture. The inside was basically a museum of busts depicting famous Germans, which was awesome to see and find the ones we knew. A large group of us walked down the 400+ steps on the other side to go see the sheep that were below. We also unfortunately had to walk back up, which tired me out more than I expected. Time to start doing cardio again when I get home. We headed back to the bus for the roughly two hour ride home, where we will spend some time working on our projects and hopefully get another good night of sleep. Tomorrow, we are going to the Neuschwanstein castle, which is one of the things I was most excited about for this trip. I can’t wait!
