Aachen

The weekend of June 6th, we decided to take a day trip to Aachen. There isn't too much to do in this city, but it's a very old and typical European city, and it was close enough to take a day trip easily enough. It was about 2 and a half hours to get there, and we ended up arriving at the Aachen Hauptbahnhof (Main Train Station) at about 11:45. After getting there, we spent about a half hour looking for the tourist information center, since it was all the way in the center of town and the main train station is usually at the edge of town somewhere. The first place we ventured to visit was the infamous Lindt Chocolate Factory of Aachen. Unfortunately, when we got there, we discovered that they don't ever offer tours. There seemed to be some kind of big company party there that day, so we got turned away as all the other Lindt people got to go in to whatever big thing they were having.














After the Lindt factory, we wandered up and down some of the small streets of the city. We found an interesting fountain that had a bunch of strange statues of what looked like beggars. We observed these for a little bit, and then moved on.











The streets were really cool, very narrow with cobblestones and tall shops on either side. We found a small restaurant and ended up having this interesting dish made from a cow's upper thigh that apparently is extremely popular in Bavaria.



















That afternoon we made our way to the big attraction of the city, the giant cathedral that was built by King Charlemagne in the late 700's AD. This cathedral has a museum of treasures and had these strange chalices that have capsules containing some of Charlemagne's bones and hair. It was kind of weird, but they were all perfectly intact and turned into this really funky shrine. We took a tour of the church, where we saw the stone on which somewhere around 10 different kings were crowned. The church was one of the biggest I'd ever seen and really well preserved. After that we wandered around the city for a while in the afternoon, took some pictures, grabbed some baked goods at one of the local bakeries, and eventually headed home.