Boppard

We got back on the boat and made our way down to Boppard.  Boppard has a beautiful river walkway, a Carmelite Church, towers dating back to the Romans, and a fascinating history.  It's also the first time that I'd ever eaten Turkish food.  YUM.  Seth ordered for us in Turkish.  That was fun. Apparently, this city is the wine country center.  Everyone that we talked to asked how our wine tour was going.  It was pretty funny.  One of the store keepers was taken aback when we didn't accept his peach schnapps offer (that was it St Goar though).

My Mom was done, so my parents and Janelle took the train back to Mainz and Jer, Seth and I wandered.  We went to the church and saw from the street the Roman tower that they took apart and rebuilt in 1900 so they could put the railroad through.  

 

This city's past is really interesting.  They've dug up artifacts from 13,000 years ago during the Paleolithic time period.  Since then it's belonged to everyone and no one.  It was Roman, and when the Roman's withdrew to protect Italy they granted the area their independence.  They were independent, then given to Trier, given back their independence, occupied by Swedish troops, occupied by the French, given to Prussia, occupied by the US soldiers and eventually given to Germany after the Nazi regime. The Nazi's had burned the synagogue, killed or deported the entire Jewish population, closed down nunneries and a monastery.  They were bombed during WWII and the US had built an emergency bridge from one side of the Rhine to the other here in Boppard.  Even though that's just from the 1300s till now, that's quite the turbulent history.

 

 

This is Saint Severus's Church.  Built in the 12th century and redone in the 15th.  People kept looking at us funny while we took this picture.  Ends up that the fountain is fairly odd and we were sitting on part of it.

This is the Karmeliterkirche (Carmelite Church).  It used to be a monastery built in the early 1300s.

 

I misplaced the picture of us eating our gigantic calzones with Turkish doner in them.  We thought that a calzone each would do us.... I think one would have done all three of us.  It was pretty funny when we opened the boxes and saw them.  We then got on the train and made our way back to Mainz, where Dad had a couple of memories triggered when he saw the Mainz train station.