Day 5 (part 2): It got a little Creepy

After spending the morning exploring the castles, we decided to go back and check out a few things in Füssen.  There were a couple of sites in the town that we hadn’t seen yet.  This included the Füssen museum and the high castle that stood over the city.  First up was the museum!

The Füssen museum might have been a really awesome thing to explore, but there were a couple of small problems.  First problem was that all of the exhibits had descriptions in German, which makes sense because we are in Germany.  We had an English booklet that described the exhibits but they did not match the exhibits so we spent most of the tour confused.  That problem was dwarfed by our second problem.  The museum was really dark, and my wife and I were the only guests touring all of the exhibits.  The part that gave us the creeps was a “chapel” that we walked into.  After walking in, my wife immediately started freaking out.  We were distracted because we were looking for a point of interest in the chapel, a famous group of paintings depicting the Dance of Death.  It was pointed out in Rick Steve’s book so we urged ourselves past the creepy metal grate that sat in the middle of the floor separating the back room from the front room with the altar.  I didn’t think it was that bad until I realized how cold it was in there.  My wife noticed a dehumidifier humming in the corner and the ominous grate in the floor, which we quickly realized was a crypt!  After catching a quick glimpse of the painting, we quickly crossed back over the crypt, which is from the 8th century, and ran out of the chapel.  Luckily we didn’t find out until later that the cross in the chapel actually had a piece of bones from the town’s patron saint, St Mang.

After quickly scurrying out of the chapel, we made our way around to some more interesting things in the museum.  We found out that Füssen in well-known as lyre makers.  That lead to them producing violins and other string instruments.  Lets just say, we went through that part pretty quickly too.

Then we went off to see Castle #3, though it wasn’t really a castle compared to the others we saw today, more like a fortress. It is called the “Hohes Schloss” or high castle in English.  This one really had some interesting features including a very interesting art gallery full of some really cool paintings.  Almost everything in there was biblical or from history of the town.  This helped us learn more about what they believe and what the town was about back in time.  Also, the walls the castle was painted with a lot of faux architectural details to make it look like there was more too it than just a wall.  It was interesting after seeing castles with those actual features.

After all of this exploring, we were hungry!  So naturally we looked up some highly reviewed places and of all things, we found….an Italian Pizzeria.  Seriously, of all the places to eat that is what we really wanted.  Some good comfort food and it was really good!  The pizza may have been some of the best I have ever had!  The server was also just a joy!  We wanted to sit outside even though it was cold and he kept giving us a hard time for it.  But we were determined to enjoy the small town cafe feel so my wife ordered an Irish Coffee to warm up.  There was even someone who was at the restaurant that worked for a tech company in Palo Alto way back in the day!  He introduced himself and it was fun talking to a German that lived at one point around us!  This was a great way to end our time in this little Bavarian town.  Happy to move on to Munich tomorrow!  So much more exciting history to learn!