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stevenpiziks) wrote2019-10-11 01:53 pm
More Heidelberg
MORE HEIDELBERG
After finishing Darwin's family research at the Heidelberg University library, I joined up with the students for a nice tour on a solar-powered boat down the river. We coasted by wonderful old houses and flats that dated back hundreds of years. And we visited the baboon on the bridge. The main bridge in Heidelberg has always had a statue of a monkey and two mice on it. No one knows why. The animals have been destroyed (by accident or design) several times, but they always get replaced. The baboon is . . .er. . .obviously male, a tradition of the bridge baboons. The baboon is holding a mirror because reasons, and if you touch it, you’ll be in for money. Touch the mice for fertility, and the baboon’s fingers for good luck. In older times, you touched the baboon’s male attributes for luck, but that’s changed in more recent times.
I also visited the Lutheran church in the center of the city. European city churches are always huge, echoing, vaulted spaces, and this one was plainly done. The Catholics go in for heavy ornament, but the Protestants are more plain. They go for while walls, an uncovered blocky altar with a few carvings on the corners, and wooden chairs instead of pews.
This particular church let you climb the tower for a two Euro donation. I paid it and headed up, up, up a one-person spiral staircase. This took me to the choir loft, where I found a touch of whimsy—a three-foot-tall Lego figure of Martin Luther, holding a plastic quill and brandishing his list of theses.
To continue, I had to cross the loft to another spiral staircase that went up, up, up to another loft with a tiny chapel in it that included for unknown reasons a life-sized crucifix. (This was a Protestant church, remember.) I crossed to yet another staircase that went up, up, up, up and UP. The ceiling came down so low, I had to crouch. And then I was through a small iron gate and on a balcony that ran round the top of the church, just below the bells. The entire city of Heidelberg stretched out far, far below. The Ruin looked down from above, and the mountains lay in the further distance. It was magnificent, and it’s what I love doing most in Europe.
Back downstairs, I bought some fantastic German ice cream and window shopped until it was time to go home.