Day 288: Day off in Weimar

Since the Weimar WHS comprises of quite a few buildings, museums and so on, we'd originally allocated two days to get all the filming done. Or one and a half days, I suppose, since daylight hours are in such short supply at the moment. But we'd filmed 95% of what we needed yesterday, so just finished off a couple of things in the morning.

The main visit we wanted to make was to the Duchess Anna Amalia library, a beautiful Rococo library building in the palace. The Duchess in question was a big patron of the arts, and one of the driving forces behind the cultural goings-on in the city. It's one of the most impressive libraries in the world, with over a million volumes of old books and folios. An original Luther bible, an original Shakespeare folio and so on. Though a big chunk of the collection was lost and/or damaged during a fire in 2004, just weeks before the books were due to be moved to a new secure facility.

It's funny, you often read about devastating fires that happened a long time ago, but to see video footage of one happening so recently, and firemen in modern outfits spraying foam at stacks of ancient books - very sad. But we grabbed an early lunch around 11:30 at the Christmas markets, then headed for home where we stayed the rest of the day.

Headed out to the Christmas markets again for dinner - this time I had a kartoffelpuffen which is basically just a potato schnitzel covered with apple sauce. It was .. interesting. Though the banana dipped in milk chocolate I had to follow it up was excellent, as was the enormous chimney cake!Read more