Day 281: Quedlinburg

Back on the move today! Left Hanover around 10am, sad to leave the nice apartment though it's in a bit of a funny spot. Couple of hours on the train to a place called Halberstadt, then another 90 minutes on the train to the little town of Quedlinburg. Had a minor disaster on the train, where it stopped for a while at one station and we didn't fully investigate why. Turns out the full-length train split into two separate trains with different destinations, and we were on the wrong one! Only figured out our mistake when the train left the station going back the way we'd come! But we hopped out at the next station, waited about 20 minutes for the next train heading back, then arrived back at where we'd made our mistake, and still had to wait another 20 minutes for the next train. Oh well, at least it only cost us an hour!

Quedlinburg is a very beautiful little old town, picture perfect with old timber-framed houses and classic styles, much like Bruges I suppose, but it's in a fairly out of the way place and thus doesn't get much in the way of tourism. Quite nice!

We walked the 10 minutes from the station into the centre of town and to our hotel, where we checked in with no issues. There's a couple of world heritage spots here, all from the same listing, and since we only had a couple of hours of daylight left we got stuck in to filming. The key things are the main square, the church, and the castle which we had a good look at - this area was foundational to the modern German identity as it's where the first Holy Roman emperors were crowned.

It's kind of weird to think about, but the Holy Roman Empire was technically an elective monarchy, where the death of the ruler meant an election where all of the princes, dukes, archbishops and so on could vote for their preferred candidate. In practice it worked much like a typical dynasty anyway, but it meant the royal court moved around quite a lot and wasn't situated in one place in the way French monarchs have basically always been in Paris, on the English in London. So Quedlinburg was once very important, but not anymore.

It was actually quite nice and sunny which we enjoyed, though definitely not warm! Got all of our filming done and were satisfied with our exploring, so we headed back to the room to relax. Later in the evening we ventured out to a burger place nearby that I'd seen; it proved to be a good idea since the burgers were very tasty!Read more