2024 Christmas Markets Rhine River Cruise - Day 3 - Heidelberg, Germany
11 December 2024
The excursion for Heidelberg was another walking tour. They seem like the most common type of excursion on the river cruises, and it makes sense. We can walk off the boat, meet up with a tour guide, and step into the city for a guided tour by an entertaining, local guide.
Heidelberg is quite a bit bigger than Cochem (the town we went to from Koblenz) was. Cochem's population is about 5,000, while Heidelberg is a city of 180,000 people. The contrast was nice. Very small town, to pretty populated city.
The streets had a very German style to their layout and architecture to me. Kind of what I'd envision for an old town in Germany. Impeccably maintained, vibrant colors, and very clean buildings along cobblestone streets.
Heidelberg University has been a fixture in this university city since 1386! Our tour guide told us how, centuries ago, laws were different, and a person could get jail time for things like kissing in public or public drunkenness. In a university town, one can imagine these might be quite common. They were so common that a special Student Jail was built to house all the unruly hooligans. It is now a museum, but we didn't end up having time to visit it.
One of the things that took quite a bit of our time in Heidelberg was finding a place to mail our Christmas cards. Due to the Canada Post strike, we thought it would be nice to send cards from Germany. We located a stationary store that also had postage stamps and had a mail box near by.
We also stopped in a large, multi-story Christmas store with a huge assortment of ornaments and gifts.
It isn't evident from the photo's I took, but the store was very crowded, especially as we made our way toward the registers for checkout. Galina likes little German smoker dude incense burners, and they had quite an assortment at reasonable prices, so we got some for ourselves and for Christmas gifts. I think there are a variety of artists who make them, but Galina likes the ones from Käthe Wohlfahrt. One of ours is pictured below burning chocolate scented incense. Surrounding decorations by Galina.
Aside from being a university town, Heidelberg prides itself on the religious tolerance of the residents. There's a large church located centrally in the town that was, for a time, split into a Catholic half and a Protestant half. The door in the middle would let church goers go left for Catholic services or right for Protestant services. Our guide also told us Protestant Ministers would accompany Catholic Priests to Catholic services and vice-versa.
Given that, in many places, the majority of people were expected to be either Catholic or Protestant, and wars have been fought for the differences in beliefs and for power and control by one group or the other, this was pretty forward thinking of Heidelberg residents.
We had a quick walk through two Christmas Market. Nice, but not a main attraction for us in this city.
Overall, we enjoyed Heidelberg, learned a bit about it, and had a nice walk around the city.
We headed back to the boat to rest and prepare for our next port, Baden Baden.