Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

After a night across the French border in Colmar, we are now back in Germany. We're staying for three nights in the Novotel Freiburg am Konzerthaus and we're very happy here. After only ever seeing Germany in the winter, we thought we might finally see it in the sunshine, but it was not to be - it was cloudy and rainy the whole time.



Freiburg is another place we could see living in, even more so than Bern. It has lots of great shops and cheap restaurants, shiny new trams, and a very nice Gothic cathedral with a market outside.






Some Romanesque bits survive from the original cathedral, including these fine sculptures at the entrance to the south choir aisle:





We also visited the free Augustiner Museum, which has some nice late medieval art:




Today (Thursday) turned out to be a religious holiday on which all the stores were closed, which I wouldn't have expected in Germany. It is Corpus Christi (aka Corpus Domini), a Catholic festival celebrating the body of Christ. Probably because it occurs in springtime, it is traditional to decorate churches and shops with flowers and trees as part of the celebrations. There are also processions down the streets (we only caught the end of one of them), extra church services, and religious banners hanging in shop windows.


We've had a nice variety of cheap meals while in Freiburg, including warm German food from a grocery store deli, Thai food at "Thai Chi", Chinese takeout from "Onkel Wok", and delicious Middle Eastern chicken wraps from "Euphrat" enjoyed at an outdoor table (above).

More pictures of Freiburg on Flickr.