Reform in my schedule, hello (Lutherstadt) Wittenberg

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It was sad saying Auf Wiedersehen to Berlin, but fortunatly in German that expressing means "till next time". The ICE to Lutherstadt was not too bad at all, just 40 mintutes. Tomorrow I am off to the once again growing city of Dresden. The city here looks like everything is being built, the castle church is being fixed up still, the church is being fixed up, Luthers house as well is being fixed up. The reason is in 2017 the 500th anniversery of the Reformation will be happening thus the work needs to be done early. Looking on the outside of the church it is understandable. Oddly enough, until 1993 the Soviets had a "western" outpost here in Lutherstadt Wittenberg (it is important to know the difference between "Wittenberg" and "Lutherstadt Wittenberg"). In the house of history (which I do not think was worth the money to see, because staff members follow you into rooms awkwardly and do not wear any clothes distinquishing them as such) they had pictures from the time the soviets came along ith pictures of their base in the city. The theme of that museum is to put one back into the DDR era and see what normal homes were like under communism.

I did get a good walk around the city though, the Luther Garden isnt much, but they planted 500 trees, one for each of the 500 years since the start of the reformation, each labeled with a small plack in the park. The Luther Oak too is something worth a few minutes of you time, off a round about one can see a tree Luther planted, quite large and nearby a well that the Lions International built. There all all kinds of little shops but oddly nothing "touristy" which is refresing. The town square was nice with the statue of Luther looking off from the Rathaus in the background. Something I found a lot of here was the small brass bricks to people killed in the Holocaust, quite a few from the town squar and Jüdenstraße (I do not know if that is why it got the name "Jewish Street").

I was excited to see my first "Army Shop" here, not the prices. They had lots of cool aritifacts from the DDR, WW1 and WW2, right down the street from Lutherhaus. Lots of helmuts, uniforms, even old weapons you could buy.

Sadly, by the time I made it to the church and house, they had been closed, so I will have to check them out tomorrow before I go to Dresden, it didnt help any that the man who runs the hostel didnt show up until 13.15, 15 minutes after check in. But until construction is completed, the employees questioned whether it was worth really going inside, a lot blocked off sadly.

Tschüß

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