Mainz

Our house is one the corner

Mainz is our town. Well, it's a rather large city, actually. It has a beautiful downtown area with the architecture you think of as German. It also has lots of little Playmobil-looking neighborhoods and even very modern looking apartment buildings. We live in a pretty Playmobil neighborhood. Steep orange roofs, little bubbly cars, even plastic people with funny hair.


Mainz has bunches of museums, many of them Roman. The Romans apparently loved it here. One of the museums is under a shopping center. It's an old Roman agora, and the modern shopping center was built on top of it. You can go down to see the Roman one and come up and get gelato in the modern one. I haven't been to the museum yet, but I have gotten gelato in the center that's there now. :)

Roman Theater

One of my favorite juxtapositions is the old Roman theater at the end of the modern train station platform. You just walk down and there it is!


Mainz is on the Rhein, right where it meets the Main. We're about half an hour from Frankfurt. Most of Mainz is on the west side of the Rhein, but part of it is on the east side, as well. The funny thing is that the river is where the counties change. So, most of Mainz is in Rheinland-Pfalz (of which it is the capital), but some of it is in Hessen.


So, now that's out of the way. The day after Cologne, Jane, Marlin, Em & I went to explore Mainz. We only had a few hours, because they needed to get back to Nuremburg before too late.

Town square

The first thing we did was go to the Roman Ship Museum. It was pretty cool. They have found several partially disintegrated ships in the river, and they have them on display, along with a couple of reconstructions.We then walked up to the Roman theater by the train station.  After that, we parked downtown and walked around a bit. I showed them our town square (very pretty) and then we went to the Gutenburg Museum.

There was limited literature in English, but we enjoyed it all the same. There was a demonstration of the printing press that we attended. It was in German, but the lady was so expressive that we had no trouble understanding her meaning, even if we couldn't understand her words.

The Mainz Dom

Then we were hungry, so we decided to head back towards the center of town, and our own Dom.

Em & her huge bowl of shrimp & noodle soup

We showed them one of the oldest parts of town, where there is a pedestrian street. We found a little Thai restaurant that turned out to be delicious. They had an English menu!

After lunch, we drove them to the Frankfurt main train station, where they could catch a train directly to Nuremburg, instead of having to transfer if the took one from Mainz. Frankfurt is not fun for driving, and I eventually just had to let them off at a corner, because the signs that were telling us to drive one way to get to the train station just weren't getting us where we wanted to go. We could see the station, but not how to get there. Luckily, they just made their train, and Em & I headed home.

Emma says - I love my soup.