Lübeck: Because Marzipan

Our first trip to Lübeck, another Northern German city near(ish) to where we used to live, was actually in February, before Italy 2012, but apparently I just never got around to writing about it.  We went again in May 2012 with Paul's family but I have no pictures from that trip!  

This is all just an apology mostly to Paul's family that my post about Lübeck only has us in the pictures.  So...sorry Paul's family...  but maybe seeing these ones will help you remember things.

ANYWAY, we went to Lübeck, a city famous for a couple things.  It has seven incredibly tall church spires, is a UNESCO World Heritage site for having really nicely preserved examples of Brick Gothic architecture and just being ...super old, and for inventing marzipan* (which, if you have spent any time in northish Europe around Christmas, you get that this is a big deal).  

Holsten Tor, one of the old city gates, is on the German 2-Euro coin

Would you like some marzipan peaches?  Or marzipan potatoes?  Or marzipan carrots?  Perhaps to make some marzipan stew?  And on and on and on...

Well, since we were in the land of marzipan, we had to buy some.  So we bought an amount proportional to how much we actually enjoy eating marzipan...

So, the real great parts of Lübeck then, to us at least, aren't so much sugary-almond-paste-related but rather more old-old-churches and old-old streets related.

What's so surprising is that Lübeck suffered from a lot of bombing raids in WWII and even though some of the big churches were completely gutted, the spires all stayed up...as unstable as they were.  You can still see a lot of lean on many of those towers and the steel supports that have been added since the 40s to keep them up.  In one church, there was a great memorial to the destruction of the bombings and violence of WWII where they left the main tower bell exactly in the same place it fell and shattered after a raid.

Finally, Lübeck is famous for its little gangs or medieval side-streets that still can be explored.  They all wind back into inner courtyards where, a lot of time, you come across little gardens surrounded by tiny, awesome houses.  I wish I had more pictures of what the hidden inner-workings of the gangs looked like, but we felt too bad taking pictures of what were essentially people's front yards.

But that didn't stop us from taking pictures of entrances!

My final story from Lübeck comes from the second time we ate at the Schiffergesellschaft (say it.  I dare you.) - a restaurant/pub built in 1401.  I told Paul to order anything from the menu and I'd share it, completely trusting his sanity.  Imagine my horror when he said that he wanted the Aale in Gelee.

What. the. heck.

I just gasped and practically yelled, "WHAT?!  Nooooooo. What?  Really?! ....noooooooo..." and he was like, "Yeah!  Sounds good!"  And since I had told him I would share anything he chose, I was totally cool with it (That is not at all the truth, I don't even know why I typed that lie.)

After the waitress left I was like, "Paul!  Do you know what Gelee is?!  It's ASPIC!  Eels in ASPIC!" and then I watched as the color drained from his face.  Because he had thought it was eels and some kind of fruit jelly (gelee/jelly)!  And darn it but that waitress totally did bring Paul exactly what the menu said - Eels in Aspic, nicely preserved in a little french canning jar.

And he actually ate the entire thing.  (I. did. not. eat. one. bite.)  I think at that point it was all about preserving his honor.

So, that's the end of my Lübeck review and since we ended with the Schiffergesellschaft restaurant, I will leave you with this final restaurant ad from our visit.

You're very welcome.

*So, the story goes that there was this really bad famine and the only food the people had was a bunch of sugar and almonds (oh no! how horrible!  Actually... I can think of a much worse situation than having huge amounts of sugar laying around but...we'll just go on).  So, someone figured out how to make sugary almond paste that could be shaped and dyed to look like loaves of bread.  Everyone loved it way more than real bread.  And they lived happily ever after.

But also...marzipan was more likely invented in Persia hundreds of years earlier so....yep.


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I'm counting down the days until my third anniversary of living in Europe by recapping trips that I never got around to highlighting.  You can see the list of trips (and links to them as they are written) here.