Easter Long Weekend in West Germany

In Germany, the easter comes with two hoildays. Good Friday and Easter Monday. So for this 4-day weekend, a coworker of mine (also a Canadian) and I drove over to west Germany to visit Heidelberg, Trier, and the Mosel Valley and Rhine Valley. We hit awesome weather all weekend, which was great.

Heidelberg is a university town which has a really nice castle overlooking the city. Unfortunately, the students were gone for a long break, and were replaced by tourists (mostly German tourists). Heidelberg on Google Maps

The castle:


A view of the city from the top of the castle:

A bar that Mark Twain used to drink at when he was a student in Heidelberg (according to my guide book):

We took a quick trip to Luxembourg to get some gas because their gas is taxed lower than Germany. We still payed 1.10 Euro/L (instead of 1.30 Euro/L in Germany). Yeah, gas is expensive!

Trier was the first Roman city north of the alps, or something like that. It has a pretty well preserved gate, which was part of a wall that used to surround the city. It's about 2000 years old. Good thing we took a guided tour around the city. Otherwise, I'd have no idea what I was looking at. It was converted into a church a long time ago, which is why the right tower is missing. When Napolean came around, he saw the historical significance of this building, and ordered this building to be restored to its original state. Trier on Google Maps

A typical European style square. They had fruit stands setup in this square.

One of the many many churches in Europe. There's a whole story behind it, but I forgot most of it already. The right tower is larger than the left tower because the bishop (who used to have the highest power in the city) in this church got into a pissing contest with the locals, who built a taller church because they were fed up with the Bishop. So the Bishop ordered the right tower to be built higher.

Here's a picture at the ruins of an ancient public Roman bath, with the tour group. Here, they had heated baths for people to relax and enjoy. I'm impressed that the Romans figure out heated water and internal plumbing 2000 years ago.


A photo of Trier from my hotel room.

The house where Karl Marx was born.

Here's a shot of a section of the Mosel Valley. There are a whole lot of these small towns scattered along the Mosel Valley. Notice all the vineyards along the Mosel Valley. The amount of wine grapes they grow in that area is ridiculous! We must have drove 80km down the Mosel, and all the land along this valley were setup to grow wine grapes. I think this is the major wine region of Germany.

Check out the ridiculous places where they grow these grapes.

If you look closely, you'll see a castle on top of the hill on the other side of the river. There's a ton of castles along this river. A few of them are restored, and have people living in it. A few of them are just ruins.

We stayed in Frankfurt after going through the Mosel and Rhine Valley. Here's a shot of the skyscrapers of Frankfurt. It looks just like a "North American" city, so it wasn't as interesting as the European style cities and towns that I've been to.