Of digging and building and glögg

Goslar is a remarkably pretty town and there are two reasons for that.

The first reason is that people have been mining the hill beside the town for over 3000 years. Tin and silver in particular made this a source of extrémeme wealth for a lot of people through the ages.

We went for a walk through a forest, highlighting Christmas trees in their natural habitat, to get to the mine, which closed as a working operation in the 1990s and is now a museum. I’m a bit of a sucker for decaying industrial sites so even without the layers of history it made for an interesting visit. Unfortunately the only way underground was on a long tour in German, which just didn’t seem practical.

Goslar, by the way, has proved to be the exception to the idea that all Germans speak English. Jennifer and my scrappy German is getting full run here as virtually no one speaks anything else.

It was probably not unrelated to the mining wealth, that the Holy Roman Emperors chose to make Goslar their favored stopping point in their peregrinations around an empire that had no capital. In the middle of the 11th century the Imperial Palace in Goslar was the largest non-Church building in Europe. After Holy Roman Emperors went out of fashion the palace went into decline, but it was beautifully restored about 150 years ago.

At about 4pm it starts to get really cold, given added spice by being very early morning to our jet-lagged minds. So that was a good point to buy Jennifer a new hat from a stall in the Christmas Market.

This evening we went international. We had dinner at a Yugoslav restaurant where the waiter was delighted to find that I was half Croatian. Then we had Swedish glögg for desert in the markets.