Today we visited two towns/cities. In the morning we arrived at Wurzburg on the Main River. It is known for a big fortress on one side of the river but we went to the residence of the Prince Bishop of Wurzburg. I must admit to thinking,'Why would we want to go and look at a bishop's house?' but this was the most palatial residence ever. Wurzburg used to be a country apparently and the prince/bishop was in control for the last 1000 years. They had to be a priest and from a noble family, but they were elected, like the pope. It was decorated more than almost anything we have seen yet, but nothing religious, which is pretty funny since it was a bishop's house. We got some ideas for decorating our entry. His was a little bit different as just his entry staircase covered over 600 sq metres. He wanted everyone to know how important he was. This palace was huge and only one person ever lived there. I guess his many servants lived there too. Apparently they never had a bath becasue they were scared of water, so they just wore lots of perfume and make up to cover the smell and dirt. The only problem was the make up was made out of lead and they didn't live very long.
In the afternoon, we went via the autobahn to Rothenburg, a medieval town which was just magnificent. It has a Christmas store that it about 4 stories high with very expensive ornaments. Heaven for Sue. Hell for Adrian and Granddad. They have a speciality called a snowball which is a pastry which we had to try but it was very ordinary. It tastes like stale cardboard with icing sugar on it. It is surprising because most of their cakes are wonderful. Adrian took his 1000th photo today. I bet you cant wait to see them all! There was a medieval torture museum in Gothenburg. It had some great ideas. They had a cage that they used to put a baker in and dunk him in the river because he didn't have enough dough in his bread. After this treatment, he made his loaves larger, but still got dunked because he was wasting dough. Poor guy. It was a lovely sunny day despite cloudy beginnings.
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