Wednesday July 1, Mainz, Germany

Huge breakfast buffet included at the hotel. I get the feeling that this standard business hotel breakfast in Germany was pretty upscale compared to something similar in America. Different yogurts, meuslix, breads, cheeses, cold cuts, fruits, and hot breakfast with eggs, sausage, roast tomatoes, and more. My tummy was a little funny afterwards. It might take a few days to adjust.

We watched some European MTV and made our plan for the day.

I went to the LandesMuseum in the morning. It’s one of the oldest museums in Germany. It had a small collection of art from Roman times to the present. The major display descriptions were in German and English, but most stuff was just in German, so I just looked around. Then I came back to the hotel to get Jon and we walked to a nearby restaurant for lunch at an indoor/outdoor café with a funny statue. He got the traditional Schnitzel. I went for something light –potato and salad.

Then we hauled butt downtown to catch a walking tour of Mainz. We had a nutty old German dude leading the tour in German 70% and English 30%. We saw some town squares and he showed us pictures of how Mainz was 80% destroyed during WWII. We saw the Dom, a 1000 year old cathedral, that wasn’t bombed during the war. We went to the old town with Bavarian houses from the 1400’s. We ended in the St Stephen’s Church with stained glass by Marc Chagall. He worked on it up until his death at 98 years old. Then we walked down to this cool fountain where they celebarate their own version of Mardi Gras on 11/11- the fool’s day, because the fool breaks the 10 commandments. He said it’s a tradition to wash out your empty purse in this fountain on Ash Wednesday as a superstition for riches later in the year. The tourguide had some weirdness. He kept asking us if we believed him. At one point he asked if I was Catholic, to explain something about the church, and I said no I was Jewish and he said ,oh ,sorry. At the end of the tour when we thanked him, he kept apologizing for having to translate and said he hoped we found some small entertainment in the tour.

After walking around in the heat, we stopped for an awesome icecream sundae of course. Then back to the hotel to shower and nap.

After the nap we walked around town and found a lovely dinner spot right on the square where the Dom Cathedral was. We had a leisurely dinner at the very European 8:30pm and got home in time for one episode of the wire. When we went to bed at midnight, we weren’t a lick tired. But we both laid there, eyes closed, until we fell asleep a few hours later.

Tomorrow we’ll hopefully get the GPS issue fixed and take a drive to explore the small towns and castles along the Rhine nearby.