King for a Day

Since the Christmas markets are such a big attraction here, we decided that the ones in Stuttgart and Esslingen weren't enough, and headed to another locally famous one: Ludwigsburg. This town is known for its beauty, especially the large, Baroque-style palace just north of the town square. Since I didn't know exactly where it was, I asked a nice lady at a drug store we walked past, who told me to take a right at the McDonalds and then a left at "The Snake"....huh? Since we'd had issues in the past with recognizing the German word for snake, I was skeptical that I had translated her directions properly. But, she wasn't kidding about the snake:

Once at the palace, it was immediately obvious that this place was HUGE! We found out later during our tour that there are nearly 300 rooms in the palace, of which we only saw 70 during our 90 minute tour. Unbelieveable. Apparently the palace was originally built by a Duke who wanted a small hunting lodge, but due to demands from his mistress it was expanded into an enormous, ornate, far-from-humble dwelling.

Our tour guide, Laura, was super. She was fun and told us lots of interesting facts and stories along the way. I'll try to hit all of the highlights... The first room we saw was a large open space that was used as an entranceway, and sometimes a dining hall. The ceiling had large crystal chandeliers and a natural-looking, open sky painted on it, complete with flying ducks. The room was designed with one unusual feature: If you clap your hands loudly, the sound bounces of the walls and echoes so rapidly that it sounds like the ducks are flapping their wings. Cool.

The next cool, albeit random, item we saw was a "lunch cannon". The King of Baden-Wurtemburg (who moved in after the Duke) was a large man -- like 400 lbs large -- who took his meals seriously. He had a device that was kept in the garden to signal lunchtime on the palace grounds. When noon-time arrived, the strong sunlight would be focused via a magnifying glass, which would then ignite a small amount of gun powder in a mini-cannon, giving off an explosion so loud that everyone at the palace would know it's chow time!

The last fun pictorial highlight goes to "The Mirror Room". This room was all gold and mirrors, all over the walls and ceiling. Really neat. Apparently only very special guests were allowed to experience it. Back in the day, mirrors were really expensive, so it was a real show of money to have a whole room decorated with them. Laura told us that the room used to also have a mirrored floor, but it was taken out because the ladies of the court complained that you could see up their skirts...hmm, that might've been intentional. ;)

There were lots of other neat stories, like how it was a privledge to watch the king get undressed at night, and how if you were too low on the totem pole the king would make you wait 6 hours in the foyer before he would come to greet you, and how the king had a private balcony in the palace church complete with a day bed in case the sermon was too boring and he wanted a nap...stuff like that. The rest of our pics from the Ludwigsburg outing can be found here.

I hope to get the pics from our trip to Prague posted soon. Until then, I'll leave you with my Mom's super cool, artistic photo of the smoked fish booth at the Christmas market in downtown Stuttgart.