To Lubeck

Up and out early-ish considering that we were on holiday. Breakfast in the railway station after buying the tickets.
Oh My word! What a fantastic system is operated by the Germans to buy your ticket. We have all heard about the efficiency they have for organisation but i was so impressed.
Piccadilly Manchester, chaos, queues and frustration.
Hamburg, smooth, quiet, efficient and pleasant. Even for non German speakers.

You walk into the ticket Lounge. Open plan, clean, seats, information boards. 18 desks and most were manned. You take a ticket from a machine at the door. Your number goes up on the information board.
Now you can sit down and read a book or check your emails for a few minutes until its your turn. The information board tells you which desk to go to. Simple and stress free.
A very nice person, who speaks English better than German she says, deals with the request for a small group ticket to Lubeck. All done with a smile and a joke about coming with us. Very cheap tickets too.

The train is at the platform and we have 10 minutes to spare. We find a seat and realise we can actually see out of the windows, there are no cans or dirty newspapers littering the floor and the seats.
The train is spotless. The info strip tells us we have 8,7,6 etc minutes left to departure. Spot on time the train pulls smoothly and quietly away. Its quite busy too considering the time of day.

There are only 2 stops on our journey and exactly on time we arrive at Lubeck station. An old station with lots of charactor.

The Hanseatic city of Lubeck is located on the River Trave and because of its Gothic architecture is listed as a Unesco heritage site.
We were here to walk around the old city which is enclosed by the R. Trave. Its basically an island, and to have a look around the markets.

Walking away from the station we found a free street map which confirmed we were heading in the right direction. The first building you see of the old town is the Holstentor Gate. A stunning building with 2 leaning turrets, built in 1478. It’s now a museum.

Holstentor Gate 

Holstenor Gate - other side.

Salt storehouses.

Heading along a busy shopping street we were befriended by a local lady who had heard our English conversation and asked us if we were staying in Lubeck. Her English was excellent, we found out that she was an English language teacher in a local school. She kindly told us all the nice places to visit and the whereabouts of interesting things for tourists. We chatted for about 10 minutes and then departed as we approached the market place.

The market place with the Rathaus (town Hall) behind.

The Town Hall is an incredible building. Construction started in 1226 and finished in 1308. The turreted view above was added in 1435. We were unlucky not to get a tour around the interior but we had to wait an hour.

One of the things the german Lady had told us to do was to go to the top of the Gothic St Petri church which we did. Luckily there was a lift to aid the ascent. It was extremely windy and biting cold at the top. We didn’t hang around too long. The views are wonderful and i’m glad we got up there. In summer i can imagine it being quite wonderful.

Below are a few shots taken from the top.

St Mary’s Cathedral

Town Hall Square

Outside St Mary’s Cathedral we found this amusing tale.

Lubeck really is a lovely town with its quaint narrow streets, wonderful architecture from many periods throughout the ages and it’s river banks. It’s also famous as the home of Marzipan but unfortunately we didnt get to try any. Having strolled round for quite sometime the bitter cold started to get through our layering system.

Anna above (she’s the one on the left btw) suffers with her knees and we had done quite a bit of walking over the last few days. We decided to head back to Hamburg before it got dark.

Lubeck’s quaint streets.