A sunny day in Thüringen

Today I have spent most of the day in Thüringen, a region which formerly belonged to the DDR and which now lays in the centre of Germany. I have visited its capital (Erfurt) and its most famous city (Weimar).

Weimar is known in Spain (at least in my family) for the Republic of Weimar, back in the 20s of the last century. I did not know that it was also the hometown of Bach and that Goethe, Schiller, Listz and other illustrious Germans lived there. That may be the reason why it was so crowded today with tourists, most of them from Germany and trying to appear in all my photos. In my opinin, the city itself is not worth so much attention, but I am probably missing the German component of it (I do not have any special attachment to Goethe or Schiller, for example).

Beyond the famous statue of the two German writers (see picture), Weimar offers the visitor a very nice park around River Ilm, with Barroque houses surrounding it. As a Thüringen town, it is also a good place to taste the Thüringerwurst; in my opinion, the best one among all the German sausages.

Afterwards, I had planned to visit Erfurt, Thüringen's capital. To that purpose, I had to take a regional train, as both cities are just 25 kilometres away. But, after waiting for more than twenty minutes in the station, I have taken a train which was not directly going to Erfurt: it has stopped first in two other places, which I cannot even find in the map! For a few minutes, I feared to get lost just in the middle of Germany.

Erfurt has not given me a very warm welcomed. In fact, it was raining when I have arrived there. But soon afterwards the sun was rising again. Erfurt has a number of significant churches, but above all of them, are Dom St. Marien (the cathedral) and Severikirche (with the tomb of St. Severus, from the IXth century), both of them in Domplatz (see below). The Domplatz is really, really amazing and a very nice and lively place.Luckily, Erfurt does not only have churches. It has a fortress on a hill, which offers splendid vies of the city. Besides, the area around the River Gera is very nice, with some bridges and a lot of nice shops around. Erfurt is proud of having the largest built bridge in the world: Krämerbrücke, 18 metres wide and 120 metres long.
As both cities, Erfurt and Weimar, once belonged to the DDR, I have been able to admire some of the symbols from those years. Apart from the figures in the traffic lights, much more different to the ones used in Western Europe, I was especially happy after realizing that I was crossing the Juri-Gagarin-Ring.
In summary, it was a very nice and sunny day around Germany's centre. Let's see what I can write in the following days...