I had to cut a city from my plans. It was a fairly small city, with very little to do, but I still think looked nice and could have been interesting. The main attraction would have been a museum, but museums all across the country are closed Monday and there just wasn’t enough else to justify going there, it was the city of Hameln, home of the story of the Pied Piper, with museum, statue, and an old abbey in the town, along with a city tour guided by the “Pied Piper”. Oh well.

So instead I went to my next planned city of Kassel. No more old medieval villages, at least for a little while. Early research into the city led me to believe it was another small town, with only one main attraction, but I was quite wrong. Deciding to look into it one more time, revealed a LOT of things to do, so I will be spending quite some time here. Unfortunately, most of the attractions here are also museums, so I could get very little done today, but it was nice to relax, and go down the main shopping boulevard. Went through shop and store after mall after shop. Major electronics stores, small gift shops and the like. There’s two medium sized shopping malls, and another very large multi floor store all within just a few minutes of walking between each other. The main shopping street leaks to near a major parked so I walked around there for a while and then headed back.

Fun (or not so fun facts):

“During World War II, Kassel was the Headquarters for Germany’s Wehrkreis IX, and a local subcamp of Dachau concentration camp provided forced labour for the Henschel facilities, which included tank production plants. The most severe bombing of Kassel in World War II destroyed 90% of the downtown area, some 10,000 people were killed, and 150,000 were made homeless. Most of the casualties were civilians or wounded soldiers recuperating in local hospitals, whereas factories survived the attack generally undamaged.”