Heidelberg

The first thing you see as you get out of the train station.

I visited Heidelberg yesterday. As happened on a Saturday six weeks ago, I missed meeting the people I was going to visit the town with. Except this time the missed people lived in Heidelberg, so by the time I missed them, I was already there. (They've been having email trouble, so I think the last two emails before I sent, which had my cellphone number amongst other things, never got there.

So I did what I usually do, which is explore by myself. I got a Heidelberg card, and went to the castle.



In the Schloss they have a museum - a strange one to have in that location - for the history of German pharmacy. There are some interesting exhibits:

Preserved newts. These were meant to be dipped in chocolate, a la Spirited Away. (Another cartoon that I was too scared to watch in full, the other one being Finding Nemo.)

Cranium Humanum (with wig)

I did the touristy thing, which is take lots and lots of photographs.

The castle is so old that all the glass in the windows has fallen off or been stolen. Here's a look through one of the open windows.




Guards. Lions.

Trying to get a better upskirt look at one of the guards.

Due to the increasing number of tourists, authorities are now building a parking lot in the middle of the castle.

Statue of king with ice lolly.

I left the castle. The tourist office told me I could go up for free (since I had a Heidelberg card) with a ski-lift to a higher place with an even nicer view, but when I tried, I could only find machines that sold tickets, and no official around who could give me a free ticket because I had a Heidelberg card. I figured I didn't really care, so I left the castle, and went downtown again.

The first thing I saw was the Romany Holocaust Museum (that's not its official name, but is what it is), which I've posted about separately.


After seeing the Karzer (where I took pictures too poor to post, even by my standards), I saw the German Packaging Museum, which mostly seemed a tribute to a German pencil manufacturer (Schwan-Stabilo) that I'd never heard of but is apparently quite famous. It invented the pencil with white lines on hexagonal edges (a manufacturing error that they were very worried about before they realized it was a valuable branding technique) and the edged highlighter (whose shape came from a frustrated designer thumping the putty he was designing the new nib with).

It's a tiny museum, and for some reason they were busy preparing for a wedding reception in it later that day (even the woman at the desk didn't know why the wedding couple had made this choice - neither of them worked there), but had some interesting non-pencil related exhibits.

Shop window, circa 1900. Click on it to enlarge, and you'll see the cans of Maggi soup!



Colgate through the ages