Mannheim - A Surprise Visit

I have to confess that Mannheim wasn't on my original travel plans but as I have said, I don’t like planning too much because things usually changes on the road. So I have to say how flexible people are, I managed to inform Nina at Sun evening that I thought to visit Mannheim and sent a text around 7am that I will be in Mannheim within 1,5 hours. Still I just had time to walk to cafeteria enjoying a coffee and she was already arriving to pick me up. I was so embarrassed because my lately lack of sleep caused me the effect of falling  sleep(or then my brains were just running slow) almost in every place where we stopped to down for a while moment… 

After all we didn't spend that times in Mannheim itself, only to see those few most important tourist sites. First was the castle in Mannheim, which actually mostly are at the use of university. That is one thing I like that mostly of European universities are still on those old buildings… Not like Tampere University built somewhere around 1950’s / 60’s. Another interesting fact about Mannheim and its castle, the city has been built around it in a way that it should be possible to see the castle from every main street of Mannheims city. Another monument is the water tower, 60 meter high building completed in 1886. 

We took the S-Bahn to get to small medieval town Heidelberg. Ride was about 20 minutes, again for me it was 20 minutes of struggle to stay awake, I failed. Town was much smaller than Munich but I think there was much more tourists in Heidelberg than in Mannheim. So far it seemed that sun had also find its way to central Europe so even that day was lightly rainy, it was very warm… On that heat first we trembled our way through the city streets and on a way Nina pointed me a Christmas shop that was open all year around. The main point of the city was (also) a castle. We climbed up around 300 stairs to the hill where castle was located. Up there from viewing platform all over the rest city, beautiful view. German is not only beer drinking country since they have also own wine production, Riesling wines for example. My guess is that on that castle they have had quite good wine drinking “parties” few hundreds year before. The guess is based on the size of the wine barrels that were called “The Great Barrels” … One barrel had capacity of 190 000 liters.

For dinner both of us (especially me) were that tired that decided to cook something simple for dinner, we ended up for doing pasta salad and of course enjoy a bottle of German Riesling wine. I learned in Ireland that Nina is good for baking stuff so for dessert we bought some red currants and she made mini pies out of those, yum! Long day outdoors, good dinner and bit of wine… I was ready to collapse into a bed and truly slept like a baby that night, and at the morning after I felt ready and fresh for new adventures.