On the second day we explored Leipzig. I discovered that my cold was not quite gone and thus my head felt as though it'd been packed in cotton wool the entire day.



On the little plaza in front of the opera we discovered this statue taking a selfie:


We were awestruck by the new parts of the university, which had not been finished when Crocky was here last:


Our first stop was the Nikolaikirche, site of the peace vigils that preceded the Monday marches during Germany's peaceful revolution.


Beautiful ceiling:



I wish I had brought one of the flyers they had which said that the reason why the peaceful revolution remained peaceful because the Stasi members sent to fill the chuch to keep out demonstrators listened to the Beatitudes Sunday after Sunday and were thus influenced by the spirit of Jesus Christ. It's very unusual to me Northern German Christian to see divine involvement stated outright.

Our next stop was the Thomaskirche- obviously, given that I'm travelling with a church musician. Here's a statue of Bach with flowers in memory of his birthday.


Nave with the romantic Sauer organ.

While we were there the organist practiced on the other organ, the Woehl or Bach orgarn.

There was also a plaque commemorating Luther's 1539 pentecost sermon in this chuch.


It also has a lot of Baroque art depicting horrible calamities, like this one:


Obivously there was only one lunch location we considered:

Which had a surprisingly good and quickly served lunch menu consisting of Sauerbraten.

After which we headed to another chapter of Germany's history, the Museum in der Runden Ecke and the School Museum.

I especially enjoyed the pile of cassettes used by the Stasi to record phone conversations, for which they also used confiscated tapes they'd found in the mail, a lot of which were tapes of German Christmas carols. This has personal significance to my family because my grandparents attempted sending Christmas carols to relatives living in the East three times which never made it there.


The School Museum had fascinating insights into the Jewish Carlebachschule's staff in Nazi Leipzig, and the Jewish teacher Gertrud "Hermine" Herrmann especially sticks in my mind.

She was Saxony's first female Jewish teacher and one of the last two teachers to keep the Carlebachschule running until it was closed in 1942. She and the children she looked after in a Jewish home were deported and probably killed together. A short German biography can be found here.

In the afternoon we travelled South.