Wanderung 32

Overnight our ship had sailed upstream to dock next to old town Passau. When we awakened, outside our little cabin window we saw a pretty row of old houses on the opposite side of the river.

We spent the morning on a guided walking tour around the Old City area of Passau, and it was really quite impressive. The narrow cobblestone streets were tricky walking, but we were surrounded by quaint old buildings on either side. The architecture was Baroque due to fire having destroyed most of the old city buildings in the 1600s.

The high point of our walk was the cathedral on top of the hill in the center of the peninsula. The interior furnishings were lavish, as I expected in an old Roman Catholic Church, and much fancier and with more gold gilt than the local church we had visited the day before.

We curled back down the central hill to the city hall, which had interesting old frescoes painted on the front. Curiously, a building housing a dance hall was located directly across the city square from it.

Then we walked through a lane dedicated to artist workshops, where we saw some rather interesting store front displays of various kinds of artwork (painting, sculpture, ceramics, weaving...). So after returning to the ship, we set out again by ourselves and explored the artist shops on that lane more closely. We were both attracted by a shop making and selling hand-painted porcelain. The proprietess was a charming artisan who expained that the city offered these old street-side business sites rent-free to encourage the artists to establish businesses, which would in turn attract tourists. But the downside of the location was that the low-lying Old Town area was predictably flooded every few years by the Spring waters converging on the confluence of the three rivers in Passau.

After much debate , we settled on two egg cups for soft boiled eggs as we have those every Sunday morning, something of a tradition at our house. My egg cup is actually embedded in a small plate with the motto "Carpe Diem", while Monika has one that is circular and has three fish in different colors symbolizing the three rivers that come together in Passau: the Inn River, the Ilz River, and the Danube River.

Then we walked slowly out to the tip of the peninsula where the three rivers of Passau flow together, admiring the abbey and fortifications built on the opposite shore. The confluence shows clearly the difference between the milky water of the Inn River, which comes from the glacier fields in Switzerland and has a milky color (far left); the Danube, which has a clear, dark bluish color (middle); and the Ilz, which is a smaller local river that comes through evergreen forests and thus has water stained by tanin into being almost black in color (far right).

But once we reached the tip, we had to turn around and head back to the Tor as our ship was going to leave Passau and spend the afternoon cruising down the Donau (English: Danube) River.