A Lincicum Infiltration

We've been a little behind on our blogging, but life rushes on. One of our December highlights was the visit of my sister Amy for just under a week. We missed seeing our awesome nephews Luke and Eli as well as their magnificent big sister Abri.

Here's Amy (with those Lincicum good looks!):


The first full day Amy was here we took the train to München (i.e., Munich), explored the city with its Christmas markets, and toured an amazing palace. Here's the famous 'Glockenspiel' on the city's courthouse (a giant Bavarian music box cum cuckoo clock):

One of the city's many striking churches:


A couple shots from the palace itself:


We thought this was hilarious:


The Christmas market at night:


We came back and found it had just snowed in Tübingen. Here's our building:


We spent the next day wandering around our own city, and I had the excitement of redeeming some birthday money for some of my favorite things - books! Thanks Leon! Here I am browsing...


And after buying (money apparently can buy happiness):


We toured the tower where the Romantic poet Hölderlin apparently lived for over twenty years, in the end finally driven to madness there:


After being so cold outside all day, we decided to come back and try Glühwein, a sort of spiced and heated wine that is a Christmastime speciality here in Germany. You can judge from our expressions what we thought:






We also had the chance to explore the castle in Tübingen, probably over a thousand years old:






Then we got on another train to explore a sobering memorial - at Dachau, the first concentration camp and a model for the others to follow. The day was bitterly cold, and as we wandered around the camp, our thoughts went back to the thousands of prisoners who braved the cold in mere rags. Looking at the exhibits in the museum, which was really well done, we were impressed by the sheer calculation of the camp - the little trenches dug to collect the blood from the executions, the pictures documenting the experiments taken by the SS officers themselves, the mixing of common criminals with the political and religious figures sent there simply because they opposed the National Socialist movement. This was the camp where Polish priests were sent, and over half of the country's priests perished here.








We walked away impressed by a sense of wanting to resist evil in the world. In the words of this monument, 'never again' should anything like this be allowed to happen:


The next day we recovered enough to make it to a choral performance of Bach in Tübingen's historic Stiftskirche. Overall, we had a blast with Amy. Come back and see us again?