Passin' 'round Passau

the Vesta Oberhaus, overlooking Passau

Last time, I situated the lovely little town of Passau for you in its scenic (but sometimes precarious) position at the confluence of the Inn, Ilz, and Danube rivers. Now I want to show you around the town away from the waters.

As usual, we were given a great introductory tour by an exceptional local guide. This time it was Alex and he was not only knowledgeable and enthusiastic, but quite funny, too. Here he is showing us where he went to high school, and sharing some stories from his time butting heads with the Jesuits...

note the ever-present Viking lollipop

The buildings in Passau are just so pretty, with great decorative touches. Here's a couple...

And of course there are those towers...

But the smaller decorative details, naturally, are worth noticing, too...

Alex told us that this line of painted cobblestones, fittingly, leads one to an arts district...

The river banks that enclose Passau's Ecke are steep, and that makes for nice combinations of natural and man-made scenic shots...

These banks also allow for spectacular views of the city, like the ones I showed you last time. Some of those were taken by Henry after his climb up to the Veste Oberhaus that you see at the top of this post. And some were taken after his climb up the enclosed path to the Mariahilf (literally, "Maria-help") church on the other side of the Inn.

I've drawn a red box around the sheltered stairway. He took both of these climbs (and, yes, we were a little worried about his getting left behind since Tor was shoving off for our next destination before dinner! but he made it back in time, and avoided Viking chastisement) while I was exploring a less strenuous Passau attraction, which I'll tell you about soon.

While you wait, why not have a local brew?!

A heavenly audio-visual interlude

This lovely building is the Dom St. Stephan (or St. Stephen's Cathedral) in Passau, and it has a distinction among the [not much of an exaggeration] thousands of churches we visited on our super-trip.

We weren't just limited to visual delights in exploring this church; there were aural treats here, too, courtesy of Viking. An organ concert, played on this amazing instrument, was part of our Passau city tour...

This picture doesn't even show all of the pipes, and if you think it's kinda big, you're right! I've seen it described as both the largest and the second-largest pipe organ in the world. But whichever is right, it's big, and it sounds wonderful. We thoroughly enjoyed the concert, which also allowed us plenty of time to snap lots of pictures of the church's fabulously baroque interior...

Isn't that ceiling amazing?! 

Here's a shot that can give you an idea of the scale of the place. You're right if you think this voluminous interior provides wonderful organ acoustics!

I couldn't stop taking pix of the ceiling and its companion aisles and details...

...not to mention the centerpiece dome, over the altar, which you can see a little of in the shot just above. Here's a more direct look at it...

I don't want to slight the Dom's handsome exterior, although it is hard to tear oneself away from all that baroque splendor inside.

Details outside were interesting, too, like this inscription in memory of Passau's World War I dead...

The church is just a lovely addition to the "skyline" of this lovely town...

approaching the Dom down one of Passau's cute alleys

view from across the river on Henry's expedition

I'll finish up with Passau next time, with a look inside a fascinating and quirky museum. It's where I went while Henry was climbing the heights on either side of the town. I'm glad he took those hikes, which provided some wonderful views, but I'm also glad I opted for the museum. You'll see why next time.

A crystalline gem

What a delightful little museum this is! [Well, it's not all that little, considering the number of photos I want to share.]

I'm talking about the Passau Glass Museum, which I opted to visit on my free time in Passau, after the organ concert. It was such fun! So much gorgeous glassware, room after room after room of it. So many rooms we really had no idea how much further we had to go at any point. Fortunately, we were able to finish up, and see it all (although some of the later rooms got short shrift) without being late getting back to the boat.

As a bonus, the museum also offers exhibits of other quirky stuff, and in such quantities, that it made me think of it as a sort of mini-V&A. Quite a compliment, since that was one of my favorite London museums. Who knew I'd find a little duplicate of that delightful place in this tiny town along the Danube?!

example of V&A-level quirkiness: a room full of buttons!

I hope you don't get overwhelmed by the number of pix in this post; it was difficult to stop snapping in the museum, and it was almost as hard to pick out a reasonable number to show you. I'll start with some handsome pieces that commemorate places I've actually been...

Brandenburger Tor, which I saw in 2008 in Berlin
Tor means "gate," but I'm not sure about the dialect in which it's spelled Thor

der Dom zu Regensburg, which we'd just seen the day before

No matter what color or type of glass you prefer, there's plenty of it on offer here. Green and classic or green and art deco...

...red, exquisitely cut decanters...

...Silberglas...

...or blue...

...classy...

...riotously baroque...

...or amusingly modern...

...it's all here. (Or, if they've left any out, it can't be worth seeing!)

We even got a little preview of one of history's most recognizable (at least in this part of the world) celebrities, Sissi, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary. It's not too surprising, since Passau is right on the border with Austria and before we were finished with dinner that evening we had crossed over into the second country of our cruise.

The first, large gallery of the museum (which we foolishly thought was the whole thing...joke's on us!) is populated by dozens of these rather creepy Sissi manikins, all wearing items from her famously vast wardrobe. Not sure what it has to do with glass, but as we found out later, anything Sissi is ok to be displayed, anywhere. 

More about Sissi in a few posts, when we arrive at her major stomping grounds, Vienna. It's just down the river!

museum window looking out at the Danube

Passau an der Donau, etc.

We arrived at this lovely little town around breakfast-time on Monday, and although we spent less time here than at any other stop, it was one of our favorite places. And I took enough pictures for four posts anyway!

Our docking location was perhaps the best of the whole cruise (except for Budapest, which will be finishing up my Europe2017* posts in a few weeks)...

It was not only very close to the sightseeing highlights to be shown on our tour, but also next to a nice little park, named for the town's most distinctive physical feature. 

The park is at the Dreiflüsseeck, or "Three Rivers Corner," the tip at the confluence of the Danube, the Inn (which gives Innsbruck, Austria its name, quite a bit upstream, and the Ilz). Our guide (who was also one of the best of a very stellar group) explained not only the rivers' traditional colors (blue, of course, for the Danube, green for the Inn, and black for the Ilz) but also made sure we knew the German genders for each. Which I appreciated learning, although, as he remarked, it doesn't really make any sense. (In case you want to know, it's die Donau, die Ilz (both feminine) and der Inn (masculine). Don't you just love inexplicable language quirks?!)

We weren't the only boat on the river(s), either; if my memory serves, this guy was coming down the Inn toward the confluence. Had he come all the way from the Alps?

To begin our tour, we crossed the park and walked just a little ways up the Inn riverbank. This striking medieval landmark gave us a good foretaste of sights to come...

With all this water around all the time, it wasn't surprising to learn that Passau was particularly in the bullseye during the massive 2013 Danube flood. There's an amazing picture of the area near our dock in this contemporary news article.

Our guide, Alex, showed us this record of high-water marks which demonstrates that 2013 wasn't completely an anomaly, but it's almost at the top of the chart:

he wasn't really this shy; you'll see more of him in the next post

On our way back to the boat for a lunch to fortify us for afternoon explorations, I snapped this cute model of the city and its landmarks...

that's our stately Tor in the background

Henry ventured the furthest afield in the afternoon, and was able to get the spectacular shot at the top of the post, as well as this one, both from across the Danube...

Next time I'll show you more of this wonderful town, from closer vantage points.

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*I (rather belatedly) realized that I wanted a way to easily peruse all of the posts from our 2017 super-trip, and so have gone back and retroactively added a Europe2017 label to all of my posts, and will be sticking that tag on subsequent ones. Should you ever want to see them all at once (including Wordless Wednesday posts), just click on this label in the list on the right.

Spires (and more) in Speyer

This time, just as in 2017, some of the stops along the river that we weren't expecting to be highlights turned out to be just that. On the Danube, Passau is a great example of this phenomenon; I'd never even heard of it before we got our cruise itinerary, and it turned out to be, possibly, my favorite city on the trip. Speyer, Germany, was a similar nice surprise. (Although for folks who know more European history than I do, it's obvious Speyer is a lot more famous than Passau!)

The highlight-within-the-highlight was of course the Kaiserdom (Imperial Cathedral) that you can see behind the cool statue of the pilgrim above. I mean, when a slew of Holy Roman Emperors are buried there, and construction on it was begun in the eleventh century, how could it not be a highlight? You can read about its very colorful and interesting history in the Wikipedia link above, but we were mainly entranced by its beautiful appearance...

the Dom as we approached it from the river 

gorgeous stonework on the eastern side

more amazing stonework on the north side;
our guide told us this is the result of more recent restorations

and of course...the doors!

The interior was also impressive, as these enormous structures always are:

It also offers a variety of unusual items in a little side chapel: some very highly decorated relics. This one might be—supposedly—a bit of the "True Cross." "Kreuz" means "cross"; sorry, but I didn't take a photo of any informational signage. It's attractively displayed, at any rate.

And this is what the Dom looks like from the other end of the pleasant pedestrian avenue of  Maximillianstraße...

...where there's another Speyer architectural highlight...

This is the Altpörtel, or Old City Gate (ironically, not as old as the Dom, with construction having begun in just the 13th century). As you can see in this link to the Speyer tourism office website, you can't go up into the tower, but we wouldn't have had time for that anyway. We just enjoyed passing through its cool archway, and, especially, admiring its unusual clock:

Our guide explained (and you can read about this in the tourism link) that the large face only gives you the hour, while the smaller one tells you which quarter of the hour you're in. It seems like it would take people twice as long to figure out what time it is in this arrangement, but I guess they weren't as concerned with exact-atomic-clock-time in the 18th century, which is when the clock was installed.

Henry, as is his wont, did some extra exploring on his own, and toured this church, that the rest of us only looked at from the Gate:

St. Joseph's Parish Church, of much more
recent vintage, but still impressive

Another handsome church that we glimpsed but didn't have time to explore, was this one, the Dreifaltigskeitskirche/Trinity Church:

In addition to these monumental structures, we got to see some of the more intimate side of Speyer, as our guide (one of the best of many good ones) walked us down a cute little alley. Along the way we saw signs that some buildings had been the homes of guild members in the past...

we were assured this wasn't the birthplace of the former Chancellor,
but rather the site of a craftsman who might have been a barber/dentist
(note the pliers!)

We learned of another custom that was unfamiliar to us (and we saw it often elsewhere after learning about it):

The chalk-written symbols here signify that this house was "blessed" by the three Wise Men on Epiphany this year: the letters stand for Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, and of course there's a star. What happens is that groups of people go around singing carols at this time, and if you give them a donation of some kind, they "bless" your house for the coming year. (I suspect this place might need a blessing: the horseshoe is hung upside down! At least that's what I'd always been told, but this website says the "wrong" way makes sense and also works. You learn something new—and sometimes many things—every day, especially when travelling.)

Just strolling down the Maximillianstraße to get back to the river* was enjoyable and interesting. For example, we saw these tiles laid into the cobblestones of the street. The Jewish family that owned the building so marked was forced to flee ("flucht") in the late 1930's. Seeing these markers reminded me again how well Germany has dealt with the terrible parts of its history, in ways that I would hope we could eventually match.

And their younger generation is providing inspiration in Europe's current crisis as well. These young ladies were performing on the street to raise funds for Ukraine:

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*Since I usually sing Viking's praises throughout this blog, for parity's sake I need to mention that this day's touring did begin with a hiccup—although it was remedied in almost perfect Viking fashion.

We were supposed to make a brief stop in Mannheim, a large city a bit downstream from Speyer, and then continue on the river, while having  lunch and some onboard entertainment as we sailed, until we reached there. Well, the brief stop got elongated rather alarmingly, due to "technical issues" that were never explained (we suspected some sort of covid problem, although it could have been a docking slip snafu). 

Which wouldn't have been so bad, had they just told us, "Go stroll around Mannheim for a few hours while we sort this out." But instead, possibly because they didn't know how long we'd be held up, we just had to twiddle our thumbs on Alruna for quite a while (which, to be sure, is not the worst place to have to do this, and of course we had a wonderful lunch). Eventually, they did tell us we could go explore the city, and gave us a nice map, but told us we needed to be back in an hour to catch busses to Speyer.

fruit tree in glorious bloom near our dock in Mannheim

So that's what we did, although we couldn't see too much in the time allotted, and there was some stress when we had a little trouble finding our way back to the river (you'd think it would be easy!). Mannheim is an interesting place, with some very scenic architecture, etc., and it would have been nice to have had more time there.

Jesuit Church that we didn't have time to visit

a pretty impressive academic quadrangle at the University of Mannheim,
with tourists for scale

I didn't notice, until I was going over things for the blog, that there is a Schillerdenkmal (Schiller memorial) not far from the river. Since the dude was one of my favorites back in the day when I was a German major (which I abandoned before graduation) that would have been nice to see. 

Oh well, a minor glitch in an otherwise fabulous day on the Rhine. We made it to Speyer on time via the busses, and the shipboard entertainment (the interesting and informative "nautical talk" that goes into all kinds of interesting river- and ship-related topics) was re-scheduled for that evening. When we finished touring Speyer, there was Alruna waiting for us, technical issues resolved and ready to take us further upstream, and into a whole different country! Stay tuned.