Day two of my Germany trip was spent in Kassel, the centre of the German Fairy Tale route. The city itself looked very modern, very different from the smaller villages we had visited the previous day. This is because during WWII may of the buildings were destroyed and after the war, they did not restore/rebuild. Kassel, if you look at it on a map, is truly in the centre of Germany.
In the morning we headed to Wilhelmshöhe Park (website currently only in German, but Google Translate does a pretty good job), reputed as Europe’s largest hillside park with 240 hectares extending into a nature reserve. It has a large variety of trees (over 600 types!!). I’m not sure why they call it the largest hillside park though – maybe its because it over looks the city?
We first headed to the Löwenburg (literally Lion's Castle) which is a replica of a medieval castle. Apparently there is a museum inside, but we didn't go. We just wandered around the castle and its gardens.
We then headed to main icon of the city of Kassel, the Herkules Farnese. This too is a replica with the original in Naples, Italy.
Looking up the Herkules Monument (on the rare occasion of sun)
We walked all the way to top for a view of the city. It was a loooooooong way up. Some 500 steps later, we were greeted with this:
I was so exhausted by the time we got to the top. We couldn't really see anything. The city was too far away and it was overcast. The Herkules at the top was under construction (I'm starting to notice a trend of everything being under construction around Europe), but it did leave the impression that it was big. You look up from the base and the statue (and scaffolding) is all you can see.
In the summers, there is quite an elaborate water display, with water traveling down from the Herkules monument, through various waterfalls, before reaching a fountain at the base of the hill. The water comes from natural sources (rain and melted ice) and is diverted to the nearby river Fulda after the display. We were one weekend too late to see the water show.
Teufelsbrücke (Devil’s Bridge) - one way for water to travel down the hill
After our walk in the park, we headed to the Brother's Grimm museum (only in German) in Kassel.
When we arrived we saw so many people dressed up and then we realized it was a wedding party! Apparently its quite common for the museum to have a wedding take place there. The museum was mostly a collection of artwork of the stories collected by the Grimm brothers. A lot of it was in German and it was fun trying to guess which story the artwork came from. I soon realized I didn't know much about these fairy tales! There was also a section dedicated to the lives of the two brothers which was pretty interesting. Most things in this area were explained in English as well so we weren't just wandering around. The weirdest section of the museum was dedicated to manga! They had artwork on display from a manga that is based on the stories. The manga was for sale in the museum shop but was only in German. The museum also had a temporary display of musical instruments. In one room there were tons of violins. I saw one that looked a lot like my brother's. I started telling my friends about how my brother's violin is of German make and mine is French... and they just looked at me. I stopped talking about it pretty fast >.<" We weren't allowed to take pictures, so I don't have anything to show.
We spent the remaining part of the day wandering Kassel's shopping streets and sampling local foods. It was a pretty good day.
For more pictures, click here.
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