Leipzig, Germany 2017 🇩🇪 – Michael and Pam's Travels

Travelled: 171 kilometres from Brandenburg to Leipzig in Germany

Visited: Brandenburg and Leipzig

Stayed: Parklands on the canal in Leipzig, free no service. N51.32764, E12.35641

We go for a final walk around Brandenburg in the morning. It’s more about Pam’s morning walk than looking for Brandenburgs highlights.

Germany

Hopefully you can tell from the map Brandenburg is surrounded by water. Being built on a series of canals, creating islands in the making.

Construction on the Dom or Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul commence in 1165. Its Gothic renovation was completed in 1465.

Some street art and gardens in Brandenburg.

An interesting tower in Brandenburg. Once part of the Mill Gate and City Walls. Inscribed 1411.

Saint Katherine’s Church in Brandenburg. This huge Protestant Church was consecrated in 1401. Sorry about not being able to provide a photo with better perspective, but the streets are narrow.

A quick look inside Saint Katherine’s, the brickwork particularly around the columns is an unusual tone.

Anyway we get back to the Hymer, give it a quick service and say goodbye to Brandenburg. Its the A9-E51 most of the way. That’s 3 lanes in each direction sometime 4. Which means the fast movers are out there, so we keep to the right lane as much as possible and hope for the best as the black Mercedes and BMW do there thing at 200 kph +. To pass the time we are listening to some ABC podcasts I downloaded onto a stick.

Leipzig is a city and we roll into the afternoon traffic. The city has reminders of its GDR past, almost everywhere we look, tram tracks and cobble stones prevail.

Germany

I found a free parking spot in the P4N data base, so we head there first. A 15 minute walk to the centre of Leipzig on the edge of the canal, no parking restrictions.

We are parked only a few metres from the canal, so we go for an orientation walk along the canal and around the park.

Given the time of the year the gardens of Zetkin Park still have a wonderful display of flowers 🌺.

Too late to go into Leipzeg today, so we call it a day and settle into the Hymer for the evening. You may have heard the German Elections are on this weekend, and something is happening outside the Federal Court building. Its only about a kilometres across the park. Don’t know what was happening but there were 50 or more police cars surrounding the building and helicopters continually over head till long past our bedtime.

But to our surprise, there was no surprise and we have a very quiet evening on the park.

So we start our walk to the city centre through the park again. In inappropriateness of this statue in the park made it worth a photo.

Saint Thomas’ Church in Leipzig. Johann Sebastian Bach was the musical director and Cantor here for 27 years.

The alter at St. Thomas, Bach’s gravestone takes pride of place.

See the Commonwealth Bank have opened a branch in Leipzig.

Not sure what this impressive building once was, but it faces the market square.

The view across the square looking north.

Love the look of this building left standing alone (due to the demolition around it) on the backstreets of Leipzig centrum. The Riquet coffee house, note the heads of elephants over the front doors.

Saint Nicholas’ Church in Leipzig, it also claims a strong connection with Bach.

The main Alter. Saint Nicholas is a ‘no-photo’ church unless you pay €5, which wasn’t going to happen. So just a couple of sneaky photos.

Lastly the amazing vaulted ceiling of Saint Nicholas. Note the Rococo style fronds on the top of the columns.

The last thing on our list for Leipzig is the Stassi Museum. The Stassi where the GDR secret police. Set in a building that was it’s original headquarters. I didn’t take any photos as it was all a bit dark in a series of small rooms. But in short the role of the Stassi was to suppress dissidents and anyone thought to be passing information to the west. This was the boom industry during the cold war and leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. They employed 15,000 agents just in the Leipzig area. Anyway it provided real insight into the paranoia of the communist regime.

Footsore from a long walk around Leipzig we head back to the Hymer and get set to continue our travels south through Germany.

Michael and Pam

Edited with BlogPad Pro

Leave a comment Cancel reply