It was memorable and interesting as a result… Worried about the web information alone.
The 50 best places to visit in Germany that Germans love
We departed from Bremen, the city of the fairy tale road, in the afternoon, and arrived at the town « Paderborn » after 3 hours of driving with a break on the way. To tell the truth, I don’t think it is famous at all. It is not on the guide book.
The reason why I came to this city is because it was introduced in the following website.
Since I’m traveling by car, I want to go to a place which is not so famous but actually famous! There seems to be a small old town surrounded by the wall which looks very nice on Google map. I’m looking forward to it.
In addition, the hotel for this day has already been arranged. This is because it is a small city and we are going to meet up with my parents who are traveling by another route. They were also able to take the train which arrived in the late evening, but we arrived before them, so we decided to go sightseeing first.
There’s a small square and a big cathedral, but… do you really want to go there, Germans?
When it came to sightseeing, there was no information but the aforementioned website, and I had no idea what I was searching for on TripAdvisor or Google, so I went to the city info, but it was already closed.
However, the map and pamphlet were taken freely, so I got it and started sightseeing.
However, there are only the central square and the cathedral in the city. The central square is not so interesting for sightseeing because it is a new town…
However, the cathedral was powerful. I’ve never seen this design anywhere else. It might have been worth coming just to see it.
Since it was a Saturday night, they were having mass. It’s often done on Saturdays as well as Sundays.
If you look hard enough, you’ll find that it’s old and has a few tourist attractions.
However, when I researched this city, I found out that it has an old history. Indeed, it has a splendid cathedral because it was a bishop’s palace.
Its history can be traced back to the Paleolithic period. Many remains from this period have been excavated in the surrounding area. In the Roman period, it belonged to the settlement area of the West Germanic people.
In the early Middle Ages, Christianization progressed under the rule of Karl the Great, and after the division of the Frankish Kingdom by the Treaty of Verdun, it became part of the East Frankish Kingdom in 843, and furthermore became the capital of the Bishops’ Commonwealth. Speaking of northwest Germany, there are many towns and facilities related to Christian culture in the early Middle Ages such as Aachen which I visited a few days ago, and this Paderborn was one of them. By the way, it seems to have been a member of the Hanseatic League.
After the Middle Ages, the city, like many other German cities, suffered damage during the Thirty Years War, and even further back in time during World War II, when 85% of the city was destroyed by Allied air raids on January 17 and March 27, 1945. In other words, what we are seeing now is a city that was rebuilt after the war.
There aren’t many tourist attractions in Paderborn, but I just found out that there are a few in the suburbs. I should have checked properly before I went at all. I should have gone slowly the next day. I should have taken my time the next day, but I could have gone to a beautiful spot I hadn’t planned to visit the next day. It’s a bad habit of mine, as usual, to visit a place thinking, « I can come back again anyway, » only to find out later when I’m writing a blog.
I walked into a random restaurant and it was a Greek restaurant (tears)
Eventually, after about an hour of exploring the city, we got word that my parents were arriving at their hotel and we decided to head back to the hotel as well. On the way, we booked a restaurant for tonight. There were no good restaurants near the central square, so we had a hard time to find a restaurant, but there was a nice restaurant street near the west wall of the city.
I thought this was a relief, but when I took my family to visit the restaurant again at the time of the reservation, I found out that this is a Greek restaurant…. It was written in German, so I thought it was a German restaurant.
There’s a Greek salad and everything… It looks delicious, so order it.
The beer was German and the wine was Greek. I accidentally said sweet, so I got some kind of dessert wine…. This was bad.
Although we honestly failed to choose the right restaurant, it was fun to eat with a large group. We had a great time talking about each other’s journeys so far. Time flew by.
明日はいよいよドイツ旅行最終日です。最終日はフランクフルトで音楽鑑賞が待っています。（続く）
