Duke's Excellent Adventure!: Dead churches make me talk to myself (Lübeck, Germany)

Thursday, August 16, 2012
Travemunde, and Lübeck, Germany

I was so blessed to have several days in Germany. This would be another one. Well, you see, as an opera student, you're required to take so many years of foreign languages. At Chapman University, all of us fell in love with our German teachers. They were just such wonderful women that really loved the music students, and they integrated their German program well with our music program. They would give us extra points for singing lieder in the classroom. We would even have a weekly Stamtisch on Wednesdays, which is where you all sit down and eat lunch together. And we would try our best to only speak German when we did that. So you see, going to Chapman in a way inundated me with the German language and culture, so to finally be there in the country for real is kind of an it's-about-time moment.

Travemunde is one of those sea ports that unfortunately gets overshadowed by the more popular city of Lübeck, which is nearby. Today, I escorted a tour group of people through the city of Lübeck.

Let's start with this big castle looking thingy.

I think all the tours in Lübeck start here.

Oh yeah, it was raining this day. Here we are with our umbrellas looking at scaffolding.

Yes, it's as exciting as it looks.

This is why we use levels when we lay brick.

Oops.

I bet whoever lay all that brick was drunk from visiting this place.
I mean, ever place that hangs a dragon outside their door has to be a tavern, right?

Let's say it is because I don't remember.

When you travel Europe, you can't help but see churches everywhere. To a Christian, this starts off as a really neat thing, until you realize how many of the churches are dead. They've been turned into museums, or potato storehouses (Soviet Russia), or worse, they're just in general disarray. As I traveled, and saw this occurring on a frequent basis, I thought of this verse:

Matthew 23:27
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

Now, I'm going to show you two pictures of a church I visited in Lübeck.

Now before you suggest that I'm just being poetic or over thinking this, our tour guide in her broken English actually used phrase "They just whitewashed the walls."

Moving on.

Let's just look at the whole city and once and call it a day.

Actually, let's go shopping.

Somewhere in Germany there is a J-Mart to make up for this, I'm sure.

My favorite part!

MARZIPAN! MARZIPAN! MARZIPAN!

Guess who has two thumbs and loves Marzipan! This guy!

What is marzipan? It's honey almond paste goodness.

The locals swear that this is the best place to get Marzipan in the world. The brand is called Niederegger. I bought a lot. I'm still eating it. I took pictures from different parts of the store to give a little feel of how big a place this is. Even if this was just a chocolate store, it would be huge, but since it's Marzipan that qualifies this store for ginormous status.