We decided to take a day trip to the nearby city of Kassel. Kassel is home to the UNESCO world heritage site Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe. This is a huge park that was built in the 1700's combining nature and achitecture. We caught a train that morning and headed off to Kassel.
This is me about to depart from the Marburg. I am holding my cup of tea I bought at the station. The train ride was only an hour and relatively cheap. Our train ticket even included a tram that took us directly to the park. This was super helpful because I think we ended up walking about 7 or 8 miles that day. The park is the largest hillside park in all of Europe, second largest in the world. It is also 590 acres. This translates to a lot of walking uphill. Here I am at a large lake towards the front of the park.
Of course there is a castle on the property. In America castles are super exciting but the more time you spend in Europe the less exciting they become. We literally passed about 8 castles in our one hour train ride to Kassel. This one has been turned into quite a nice art museum. We decided since we had such good weather we would come back in the Winter and do the museum.
Here are some cool things we came across while we wandered the park:
I know I just said castles were boring but this one was really cool! 2 castles in the park! They only did tours in German so we just took some pictures and moved on.
The main attraction in the park (I know right- 2 castles is not good enough?) was this large water feature that had a copy of a Greek Hercules statute.
Usually there is water running down the main part into a big fountain but it does not run on Saturdays apparently.
It was an epic stair climb up but the view was really nice. You could pay a couple Euros to go up into the building at the top but I was tired of stairs and opted to skip it.
After that we caught the train back to Marburg. We were pretty tired and decided that we would rather eat out instead of cook. We ate at a little cafe across the street from the Marburg Cinema.
The next day we headed back to the botanical garden. We knew there was some event going on but it was unclear to us what that was. And since Sundays are kind of a dead day we decided to go check it out. It was even crazier than the flower market. It was basically a large petting zoo of farm animals with hundreds of people there. Most of these people had their little kids with them. I enjoyed looking at all the animals but Eric was less ecstatic and kept referencing how he needed coffee. I did catch him petting this sheep.
I thought it was fun and we got to see some cute animals.
There was also a cow drawn wagon you could get a ride in. We skipped out on this, Eric didn't seem as pleased with the cows as I did.
We also ran into Eric's advisor in the parking lot. He was there with his family, he seemed surprised that we came to the event... We didn't stay too long but it ended up being a nice afternoon.
Auf Wiedersehen!
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