Sunday 25 July 2010

Sindelfingen

Phew!

What a busy week I've had.  I went to to Stuttgart last Thursday - or, to be more precise, Sindelfingen, just outside Stuttgart, along with 6 students from school, aged between 14 and 17.

The aim was to take part in an international drama workshop with students from Germany, France and Poland - and hopefully I can post some photos of what we got up to.......

Now, I've been to Sindelfingen several times, and had always thought of it as a typically bland industrialised medium sized town - nothing of particular note.

But on the very first day we were treated to a tour of the Altstadt (the old town), and, hiddden away, were the glorious old buildings:







During the Middle Ages Sindelfingen was a weaving town, and therefore pretty wealthy.  These houses date back to about 1400 or so.


Although the world's biggest Mercedes-Benz complex is in the city, where aircraft were built during World War 2, somehow the centre of the town escaped the heavy bombing by the RAF unscathed, including parts of the original city wall.




St Martin's Church - originally part of a monastery, whose wealth subsided the creation of Tübingen university, about 35 kilometres away. It's an unusual church as although it's built in the Gothic style, it has a separate tower, in the Italian style - so has ended up as a German/Italian hybrid, in the Black Forest....


If you look closely, you can see how the end of the church joins the building next to it - originally one of the monastery buildings.


The strange cross shape in the centre of the inscription is the mediaeval way of writing '4' - it's half of '8' (the top half).... 


1 comment:

Diane said...

What an amazing place - lucky you. I have been thinking about doing a class at the Patchwork garden - do they do weekends at all? Incidendtly, we nearly stopped on our way home from Chatsworth on Saturday - I bet you were in then!!!