Unlike my last visit to Neuschwanstein, this time I got to visit other sights along the way, like the Linderhof Castle, and Oberammergau. And this time, I got to see the inside of Neuschwanstein, something that I don’t recall ever doing.

Schloss Linderhof was one of the three palaces built by King Ludwig II, and the only one he saw completed. Unlike his father who focused on governing, King Ludwig II preferred his artistic and architectural projects instead. The palace and its extensive grounds were designed to create an idyllic setting, complete with enchanting gardens, water features, and meticulously landscaped terraces. Ludwig drew inspiration from mythology and Wagnerian opera, incorporating themes of fantasy and escapism throughout the palace and its surrounding landscapes.

Along the way to Neuschwanstein, we stopped in a small town of Oberammergau, known for its artistic works. The reason that buildings have murals showing the crucifixion of Jesus Christ because the town is known for the Oberammergau Passion Play.

Käthe Wohlfahrt, a well-known German company selling Christmas themed items, also has a store here to join in the city’s woodcarving traditions.

Schloss Hohenschwangau was built by King Ludgwig II’s father and served as their family’s summer residence. It’s located near the picturesque location near lake Alpsee.

This is where every postcard picture of Neuschwanstein is taken: on the Marienbrücke, a bridge lookout. We walked around the area while waiting for our timed tour entry.

Luckily, the weather was nice, so we had an unobstructed view of the surrounding area.

Schloss Neuschwanstein embodies the visionary dreams of King Ludwig II, who aimed to create a fairytale castle. However, the castle remained unfinished upon the king’s untimely death in 1886. Today, Neuschwanstein stands as a symbol of Ludwig’s artistic and romantic ideals.

Unfortunately, it was forbidden to take pictures of the inside of the castle. I could only post existing content from the public domain. Still, one can still appreciate the interior of Schloss Neuschwanstein. Each room features intricate woodwork, ornate decorations, and vibrant murals referencing chivalry, mythology, and Wagnerian opera. The artistic craftsmanship and attention to detail within the castle’s interior serve as a stunning testament to Ludwig’s unwavering pursuit of beauty and grandeur.

See more photos of Schloss Neuschwanstein here

On our last day in Portugal, we drove back from Porto and stopped by Fátima, an important Catholic pilgrimage site. The town gained worldwide attention after three shepherd children – Lúcia, Francisco and Jacinta – claimed to have received apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1917. The apparitions took place in a field called Cova da Iria, just outside of the town. Since then, Fátima has become a destination for millions of Catholic pilgrims from around the world. The main structure within the sanctuary is the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary, which houses the tombs of Francisco and Jacinta. The exterior shows several paintings illustrating the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, while the interior of the basilica is adorned with marble and gold, and the altar is located in the apse, which is decorated with a mosaic of the Virgin Mary.

Many of the people I saw there came for the pilgrimage. Some people could even be seen walking towards the chapel on their knees to show their devotion. People like me are just there for the experience.

Outside the basilica is The Chapel of the Apparitions, which marks the spot where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared. Throughout the day, open-air mass is held, attracting large crowds.

There is a site nearby the sanctuary, known as The Calvary or Via Sacra (Sacred Way) which consists of a series of 14 outdoor chapels that depict the Stations of the Cross, a series of images depicting Jesus Christ on the day of his crucifixion, such as the Flagellation, and the Crucifixion. We walked along the whole path in the rain up to the Calvary.

Overall it was an enlightening experience. As someone who isn’t part of the faith, it was surprising to see many people so devoted to the religion. Considering that the visions occurred in 1917, it’s weird to think that even around a hundred years ago, people still took these visions seriously. I guess even in our modern age, people believe in weird stuff, so maybe it’s not so surprising.

See more photos of Fátima here

We flew into Israel from Tel Aviv and boarded a train to Jerusalem. I totally expected the Middle East to be pretty warm in February, but nope, it was snowing tiny little flakes in Jerusalem. If it weren’t for the Europe trip before this, I would have actually not brought any winter clothes, so I definitely lucked out there.

The Way of the Cross

The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is probably what Jerusalem is most well known for. The Way of the Cross (aka Via Dolorosa) in Jerusalem is what is believed to be the actual path that Jesus walked during his crucifixion – regardless of whether you’re religious or not, it’s still pretty cool to see. This was a key event in the establishment of Christianity. The crucifixion of Jesus is considered to be historically true even by non-religious scholars.

The Way of the Cross begins with Jesus’ encouter with Pontius Pilate, the man who orders Jesus’ crucifixion. The Church of the Flagellation is built on the spot where Jesus was flogged by Roman soldiers before he carries the cross.

It’s said he falls three times during his walk.

Along the way, Jesus encounters several people (although some of these encounters are disputed):

• Mary – his mother
• Simon of Cyrene – he helps Jesus carry the cross
• Veronica – she wipes the sweat off of Jesus’ face, and so Jesus’ image was then supernaturally imprinted on the piece of cloth, now known as the Veil of Veronica
• the pious women – Jesus stops and gives a sermon

Eventually he makes his way to the location where he is nailed to the cross. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built on the spot where it is believed he was nailed to the cross, and his subsequent death.

This is supposedly the spot where Jesus dies on the cross (below)

He is then taken down from the cross and anointed on the stone slab below. Anointing is a ceremonial ritual where a person’s body is smeared in aromatic oil to introduce a divine influence on the body.

Finally he is laid to rest in his tomb.

Of course his body isn’t physically in there, because supposedly after his ressurection, he ascended to heaven.

The entire Way of the Cross and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was extremely crowded and people lined up everywhere to pray in all the spiritual locations, like Jesus’ tomb, the home of the Virgin Mary, the Stone of Anointing, etc. People even touched all the surfaces that Jesus was said to have touched and I could see them in deep prayer.

Western / Wailing Wall

In Judaism, the Western Wall is one of its holiest sites. The actual holiest site lines behind the wall, the Temple Mount, but due to restrictions, Jews are not allowed to pray there, and thus the wall became the place where Jews went to pray.

Some Jews go on a pilgrimage to the Western Wall, some spend hours praying there. If you look closely in the video below, there’s a fellow running in circles and singing while people around him are rubbing their beards against the wall.

The Temple Mount

The Temple Mount is a flat plaza built on top of four retaining walls (the Western Wall among them). Although Jews are not allowed to enter for prayer (e.g. praying, singing, or other religious displays), people are allowed to enter the area as tourists.

The Dome of the Rock is one of the Islamic structures built on the Temple Mount. Unfortunately, non Muslims are not allowed to enter. Inside the dome is the Foundation Stone, and has religious significance to both Jews and Muslims.

Yad Vashem

This is Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. The entire memorial consists of a museum dedicated to the history of Jewish persecution throughout Nazi Germany and the places it conquered.

The eternal flame honours the victims of the holocaust. In front of it is a stone crypt containing the ashes of the victims.

The Hall of Names pictured above contains the the names of millions of Holocaust victims. The shelves around the room contain the names, while the cone above display photographs of the victims. The people standing in the photo are all Israeli soldiers – Jerusalem had a huge police presence with a lot of them openly carrying assault rifles (I felt very safe). Even some men in public that I saw had buzz cuts – presumably they are/were in the military. A few days before we arrived, there was a terrorist attack where a driver rammed a car into Israeli soldiers.

This train car is an example of the cattle cars that Nazi Germany used to perpretrate the Holocaust.

The Garden Tomb

Some sects of Christianity don’t believe that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre contains the real tomb of Jesus Christ. They assert that the real tomb is actually elsewhere, which they dubbed the Garden Tomb

Outside Jerusalem’s old town

Because Israel has so many Jewish people, McDonald’s started a special chain that serves only Kosher food. Even though it’s kosher, it tastes the exact same as regular McDonald’s which is pretty amazing for what it is.

Oskar Schindler is famous for saving 1200 Jews during the holocaust. He is now buried in Jerusalem. Putting stones and pebbles on the grave is an ancient Jewish tradition to honour the deceased.

There are also a lot of stray cats everywhere! I didn’t see any dogs though, just lots and lots of stray cats everywhere. People must take care of them though because they all look pretty well groomed.

Photo album: here

Since members of the church are encouraged to do missionary work, some of them are assigned to Temple Square to work as tour guides. In the Visitors’ Center, there were many of them from different countries and the tour guides we got happened to be from Canada and USA.

The guides took us to the top of the North Visitors’ Center to show us an 11-foot tall statue of Jesus (picture from Wikipedia). While up there, the guides played a short audio clip about Jesus’s purpose and told us about their beliefs. Even though I’m not Christian, it was clear that they were quite devout and dedicated and such qualities are definitely admirable.

Next, the guides took us to the Salt Lake Tabernacle to see the pipe organ.

Then the guides asked us, “how many pipes do you think there are?” Me, not knowing anything about organs, merely counted the ones I saw on the surface and naively said, “maybe about 30”. It turns out I was off by several orders of magnitude. The answer: 11,623.

The building was built to house meetings for the church and was used for the LDS General Conference, but the church grew so large, that the occupant capacity of the building was exceeded. After that tour ended, we visited the newer and larger conference center.

We got a tour of the inside and it was massive with 21,000 seats. We were told that to play the church organ, the organist would have to have a PhD in that field.

The roof of the building had a beautiful view of the Temple Square and had a nice garden full of many varieties of plants.

Lastly, there is the temple itself. Unfortunately, it is not open to the public as it is sacred and there are strict entrance requirements. But at least it looks nice on the outside!

That concluded our tour of the Temple Square in Salt Lake City and then we made our way to the airport and flew back to Vancouver.

Link to more photos

Now that I’m not occupied by episode after episode of TV shows, I can finally catch up on my blog rather than keeping a queue of all the things I want to blog about. In my attempt to go somewhere new every weekend, I chose to go to Freiburg im Breisgau last Saturday.

I woke up early in the morning at around 5 and got ready to leave the house at 6:30.  I probably woke up my landlord’s family downstairs from the running water while I showered, but I unfortunately, I can’t really do anything about that.  I figured leaving an hour early to meet up with my friend at a train station that only takes half an hour to get to should give me quite a bit of flex time. Half an hour seemed like a lot to me, until I saw how long I had to wait for my train.  I waited a whole twenty minutes for it.  The worst part about the wait was that I never charged my iPod.  I stood around and silently waited.  Kind of like watching grass grow.  Although in retrospect, I could have left the house a little later, but at least I wouldn’t miss my train.

After meeting up with my friend, I we patiently waited for the train.  From the corner of my eye, I saw something tiny moving around on the tracks.  An animal?  It was a mouse, or a rat.  I don’t know the difference.  I tried my best to catch a picture of it while it zipped around and underneath the train tracks.  It kind of felt like playing that old N64 game, Pokemon Snap.  If this was Pokemon Snap, I would have gotten a low score for that picture.

The train arrived at around 7:30 and it would stop at Karlsruhe.  On the ride there, my friend and I just talked while looking looking out the window.  After we arrived in Karlsruhe, we had to wait a half hour for our connecting train.  The moment I looked out onto the station platforms after stepping out of the train, the sight instantly reminded me of the City 17 train station in Half-Life 2 (everything reminds me of games doesn’t it?)

While walking around the train station trying to kill time, we found a place that sold 5 Berliners for 2 euro.  Although called a Berliner, it clearly has nothing to do with someone from Berlin.  Despite the misleading name, Berliners are a pastry that is like a European version of a doughnut (never ever call it that).  It’s got sugar on top and jam filling on the inside.

After boarding the connecting train, I talked to my friend about how long train rides were.  I don’t know if it’s because English attracts attention, but a random stranger sitting across from us started talking saying how it is perfectly normal for train rides to take a long time.  Since he was German and probably didn’t get a lot of practice with English, he spoke to us with a heavy accent.  He started talking about how sometimes people will commit suicide by train, which causes trains to stop in the middle of nowhere and everyone on board is forbidden to get out.  The weirdest part of it was that train suicides were seasonal.  According to him, more people commit suicide by train in the summer.  After speaking to him a little more, I found that even some Germans read manga.  I didn’t know that manga was that popular.  I even saw Dragon Ball manga translated in German in a bookstore.

Two train transfers and three and a half hours later, we arrived in Freiburg im Breisgau.  According to Wikipedia, it’s the warmest place in Germany.  As usual, the first thing we do upon arriving at a new place is to look for a map to find the tourist information center to get a map.  I had already looked up what sights to see the night before, so all I needed was a map to tell me how to get there.  Even without the map, we could both see the tower of the Freiburger Munster standing tall above every building in its vicinity.  All we needed to do was head in that direction.

Thus far, the Freiburger Munster is the most amazing work of church architecture I have seen, inside and outside (The only place that I think could be better is the Sistine Chapel, but I haven’t been there yet). I would describe it, but I’m terrible at descriptive writing.  Good thing is that a picture is worth a thousand words!

After walking around inside for a little bit, I came across a set of statues in front of a window set up in a way that a group of statues were all looking at the body of Jesus Christ.  When I was looking at these statues, it happened to be around noon, and the sunlight shined through the window and I could see the glare.  It seems as if the scene was designed this way: to have the Light of God shine down.

Walking around some more, I came across a statue that looked suspiciously like Chancellor Palpatine of Star Wars (there’s my nerdiness popping up again).  Who knows, maybe George Lucas got inspiration from this and found an actor that looks like the guy in this statue.

On our way out, we learned that we could visit the church tower.  Despite the popularity of the church tower, there was no elevator (makes sense, since the church is quite old) and had a set of the narrowest spiral staircases ever seen.  Two people could barely pass through each other.  One wrong step would cause one to tumble around and around down to the bottom and bring other people along in a human snowball.  Luckily for me, that did not happen, but it sure was tiring walking up all those steps.  At the top, we had a semi decent view of the town.  I say semi-decent because of the maintenance that was going on.  For three weeks in a row, every main attraction in each city I went to was under maintenance.  There was the Heidelberg Castle, Bebenhausen Abbey, and now this.  In addition to being able to look around town, I also saw the mechanism for the church bells.

On our way out of the cathedral, we smelled a strong scent of bratwurst and because of that, I decided that’s what i was going to have for lunch.  I guess my lunch was like a European hotdog (I have no idea what they call it).  They took a bread roll, cut it in half and put bratwurst and onions inside.  Like everyone else, I added ketchup and mustard.  I don’t think I can go back to eating regular North American sausages again after eating bratwurst.

A unique feature of the city is that water canals run through the town.  Upon first sight, one would think they were some sort of sewage system.  Known as Bachle, they were once used to provide water for firefighting and feed farm animals.  It is said that whoever steps in one must marry a Freiburger.  Around the town are a set of gates.  One of them, the Martinstor, has now been desecrated by McDonald’s.  How they managed to put their brand on such a historic structure is beyond me.

In the city is also a trail that leads up to the mountain, Schlossberg, for a view of the town.  I believe there was also public transportation that took the lazy folks up there.  As if the stairs at the church bell tower wasn’t even enough, we were now faced with yet another seemingly endless set of stairs.  We’d look up the mountain seeing how much further we needed to go every now and then.  Once we reached the top, we realized that it wasn’t really the top.  There was yet another set of staircases leading up.  It’s just that we couldn’t see it before we got all the way up.

On our way home, I came across a vandalized billboard on the side of the street.  The vandals had drawn a Hitler mustache on the peoples faces.  I found it kind of amusing since that doesn’t really happen in North America.  Not Hitler mustaches, anyway.

 On the train ride home yet another random stranger talked to us.  Except that the stranger this time wasn’t German.  He was an American who had just arrived in Stuttgart to work.  Like us, he spent his weekend traveling.  My friend and I were talking about gun control at the time when the guy started talking to us.  Apparently in his state of Virginia, one has the right to shoot someone in self defense to take someone’s life when their own is in danger.  He even told us a story about how someone he knew shot at a guy sneaking around suspiciously in their yard and how a friend of his has a license to carry a concealed weapon around.  It felt kind of nice to hear North American English again.

At the train station, while waiting for a connecting train, a third random stranger started talking to me.  Three in one day.  That has to be a record.  This time it wasn’t because I was speaking English.  This time it was because I’m Chinese.  A Turkish looking fellow looked at me as he walked by pushing a cart of luggage.  He looked at me and said “ni hao”, which is hello in Mandarin.  I was so surprised that I didn’t know how to reply, all I did was smile back in appreciation.  I guess Chinese people are a rare sight around here. 

For some reason, on the train ride home, the train stopped suddenly in the middle of nowhere.  I was reminded by the German fellow I talked to earlier about train suicides and I hoped that it didn’t happen.  Fortunately, it wasn’t anything serious and the train continued on its way after a few minutes.  After a nice day of sightseeing and hiking around, I got home and rested for the next day, which I spent uploading photos, blogging, and random household chores.  Sounds like quite the opposite in excitement compared to the day before.

My photo album for Freiburg im Breisgau