Thuringia

After the Round of 16 games there was the first break in games since June 9th, so I decided to try and do some touristin’ around Thuringia, the state where Erfurt is located. My first stop was on my way back from Hanover to Eisenach. In that town there was a castle called Wartburg where Martin Luther, the guy who broke up the Christian religion hid out after he was ex-communicated by the church. It was a really nice castle and from what other people have told me there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of castles all over Germany.
was interesting as well. I’m Lutheran by religion so it was interesting to learn more about the man.

A cool sight was also the study where Luther translated the Bible from Latin into German that
After taking a day off to just rest, on Friday I decided to tackle a long hike. The hike was named the Gothenwanderweg which was named after Johan Wolfgang von Goethe who was a famous German writer as well. The 12-mile hike started in the town of Ilmenau, about an hour by train from Erfurt. From there the hike went to a small town call Manebach and then continued up a mountain and then went ever further to a town called Stuzerbach. I ended up getting lost in Ilmenau finding the hike so I figured out there was no way I was going to walk the whole walk so I only walked about half of it.

The first part was great, walking in a loop through some deep forest, around some big rocks and ended up walking down to Manebach. From there though for over an hour it was a straight up-hill climb to get to the top of the mountain. That was really hard and was very strenuous, but finally I made it to the top and it was a nice reward. There was a tower called the Kickelhahn that put you above the trees and afforded awesome views of the Thuringian Forest everywhere. And also there was a nice German restaurant where there was some good German food.

The funny thing was this hike was supposed to be one of the more famous hikes in Germany, but the whole day I had the whole trail to myself. The reason? Of course the semi-final of Germany against Argentina later in the day.

From there I took a short-cup back to the town of Ilmenau to try and watch the game. When the game was on the whole rest of the town was empty, besides places showing the game. It was funny cause it was a Friday afternoon at 5 pm but the main street of the town was almost completely empty. I found one place to watch outdoors but it wasn’t that great a location and wouldn’t have made great photographs so I decided to head back to Erfurt to (hopefully) catch the end of the game and capture some Germans celebrating there.

One the way back the train was really delayed and the only updates I got of the game was some school kids on a trip listening to the game on a radio.

I barely made it back to Erfurt in time to watch the penalty kicks, which Germany ended up winning.

Afterwards the party in the streets was much larger than the last win. It was a lot of fun.

But that was my last night in Erfurt, I had to pack up and get ready to head to my home base for the next few weeks, Berlin.