Germany Trip: Trier

I wanted to finish my posts about my trip to Germany by the end of January but, obviously, that did not happen! There have been so many other fun things to blog about that I have been neglecting the Germany trip posts. My new goal is to just finish them when I get to it :-)

Going to Trier was the first day trip we took while in Germany. Trier is Germany's oldest city and has the neatest Roman ruins! We started by going to Porta Nigra, the city gate. I really don't know much else about it besides that, but it was definitely quite old!

We then walked past the "House of the Three Magi". I haven't figured out how they knew that was where the three magi stayed, since no one knows who they were, so I'm going to guess it is just a legend. The entry door to the house was on the second floor and there would have been a wooden staircase going up to it. If the town were in danger the staircase would be knocked down so no one could enter the house.

We hit up the Christmas Market, of course, then went on to the St. Peter's Dom, which happens to be the oldest Christian church in Germany! This cathedral is also the home to the Holy Robe of Christ. We were not able to see it, but we could look inside the room where it is kept and see the box that it is kept in! :-)

As we went on, we then saw the Basilica and what we called the Pink Palace, but apparently it's actually called the Elector's Palace. The two buildings are connected and were quite a site! There wasn't a lot of foot traffic around it, so Dad ended up setting up his tripod and getting a picture of the 4 of us :-)

Across a huge garden and beyond the city wall, was the Imperial Baths. They are all in ruins now, but a little shop/museum was set up as the entrance into the baths and we could watch a little movie on what it would have looked like. It was still neat to be able to walk through the ruins and the tunnels and experience the vastness of it. I also tried to delete some old pictures while we were there. Between my lack of knowledge about my camera and trying to hurry to get as many pictures as possible, I accidentally deleted every picture I had taken so far while there. Talk about a sinking feeling in my tummy! I've relied on pics from my Dad for these posts :-)

After the Imperial baths, we took a nice walk to find the Amphitheater. We could see where the people used to sit to watch the events, which was the grassy areas. We were also able to go below ground, under the amphitheater. It was all very neat. You could almost imagine the crowds back in Roman times filing in to see the gladiators fight.

We walked back toward the city to see if we could find where the Thermal baths were. I think we must have walked past them and went around, then came back and finally realized that there was a building built around them. No wonder they didn't stick out! All the stone was white in these baths. There were also strange pieces that didn't seem to fit in and it turned out that a building had been built on top using the baths as a foundation at one point. (The building around it now, was more for protection and it created a kind of museum as well.) So the pieces that didn't fit in were not actually from the original baths.

That's about it for Trier. (We were quite busy while we were there!) Check out the slide show!

To learn more about Trier, Germany visit Rick Steves Germany and Austria 2008 book preview.