Last weekend we met our friends Tiffany and Brenden in Hanover for the day. Brenden is an American in the management training program at ZF – he worked on a project at Dielingen (where Morgan works) for about 3 months at the end of last year but has since moved on to a new project in southern Germany. His girlfriend is German and lives in Goslar. Since we hadn’t seen them in a couple of months, we decided to meet up in Hanover for the day to catch up and do some sight-seeing. We took the train here and back; since it is within the same state (Niedersachsen) it is fairly cheap to get there – only €24 for two people round trip.
We started out walking by the old town hall and looking inside the Marktkirche. From here we walked through the old cobblestone roads of old town through the Marstall Gate to the flohmarkt (flea market) that is on the Leine River on Saturday mornings. We had a lot of fun looking around– their flea market is much better than the one in Osanabrück. I spotted a small painting that has a German looking house with mountains behind it that we picked up for €10 and after sorting through a huge stack of postcards that featured Osnabrück we found 3 to buy. They are all quite old (late 1800’s to early 1900’s) and were actually mailed, so I’m hoping Antje can translate them for us. We saw several other things that we would have lived (furniture, larger paintings, etc) but since we only had a book bag and had come by train we couldn’t get anything larger home. Hopefully next time we’ll take the car and spot some good deals!
On our way to Reimmans Eck for lunch we passed the Nikolaikapelle ruins and the Alter St.-Nikolai-Friedhof. The Nikolai chapel, which was built in the middle ages, is the oldest preserved building in Hanover. Today the graveyard is a park and the church ruins are a monument. Morgan had the Fifty Fifty- which is half kohlroulade and half rinderroulade and I had the Königsberger Klopse. My meal was a special Prussian meatball in a white sauce with capers and potatoes – which turned out to be really good! After lunch we took the U-Bahn to the Herrenhausen Gardens. We were a little early in the season, only a few of the flowers were blooming, but it was still impressive. The grotto, which was designed by Niki de Saint Phalle, was .. hmm, I’ll go with memorable. Her work isn’t my taste but it was still interesting to see.
We headed back into the city center to do a little shopping and then walked over to the New Town Hall to go up in the tower. You pay a few euros to ride the glass elevator up to the top of the tower. The elevator is actually pretty unique since the track it is on is curved and follows the arch of the dome. From the top there were pretty views of the old town, the park and lake behind the town hall, the Leine River, etc. By this time we were ready for dinner so we found a sushi place near the train station and then grabbed a drink at Jack the Ripper. In the bar we heard a ton of English (I think there must be a fairly large English/American population in Hanover) which was nice for a change!
