Chocolate Marzipan

The Lübeck people make marzipan but they always put chocolate in it, which wins.

The old town of Lübeck is a World Heritage Site. They made a canal along the Trave river, forming an island containing the town. The wall is gone, though two gates remain. It is pervasively architecturally cute. It was one of the first places bombed by the Allies in 1942, but it has been pretty much reconstructed. Virtually every house has a facade in front of its steep rooflines which is stairstepped. Even modern ones generally make reference to the idea. Almost everything is brick. The goal is to “see the seven towers”, which are on five churches (two of them have two towers each). Two of them were closed, but we spent awhile in St. Mary’s, and the Lutheran cathedral. St. Mary’s had an interesting astronomical calendar, listing eclipses (solar and lunar) visible from there starting at 2000 and illustrating the extent of their totality. Another small church we stopped in had an interesting exhibit on the Lübeck Martyrs, three Catholics and a Protestant who rebelled against the Nazis and were executed. We went up the tower of St. Peter’s for a view, and you could tell the orientation signs in the four directions had been there awhile: the tape covering up where the eastern one said “DDR” was coming off. Lübeck had been in West Germany, right on the border: the other side of the river was the Russian sector.