A Trip to Germany - Monschau

This small German town is just amazing. I have seen many of the German towns, there are lots of beautiful ones among them but this one is surely worth seeing. It is located in the North-Rhine-Westphalia district of Germany, not far away from Aachen just on the borderline with Belgium. Actually if you drive a car from Cologne, you will have to drive through a piece of Belgium, a couple of kilometers of unused land. Looks pretty funny.

The town is located in the national park Eifel which is really beautiful with it's forests and rocky mountains. The city is hidden in a narrow valley of a small mountain river and even the road to it is a curvy serpentine that makes a lot of fun to drive if you have more than 100 hp under the hood.

If you arrive with a car you will notice that there is no possibility to park your car for free and it shouldn't amaze you. The city is for a long time a point of high tourist interest. And a large commercial parking lot is never empty. Well, large is quite exaggerated, it has about 200 places to park in, but the traffic is quite vivid. And at the bus-parking I've never seen less than 5 buses. People more often come to visit this city with a tourist-guide, though I prefer to roam freely, seeing something special, non-pop.

When you get out of the car you will see a cliff with a castle on the top of it. After leaving the car for a couple of Euro for the whole day, you walk the only road that seems to lead into the town-center. It is narrow and curvy and after a hundred meters becomes medieval. You will see the houses that seem to be very old, much older than you could see in other places of Germany, but those houses have a very fresh look, they seem to be well-cared and tidy. And this creates a wonderful image of a really medieval town preserved till our times.

The street will lead you through the numerous restaurants, cafes, souvenir-stores to a square, which in the summer time is a large cafe and then the road will lead you either back or somewhere up with a steep climb. Don't be lazy and don't say you've had already much today, climb it, it is worth doing. Because you will see a beautiful sight of the whole city. You will see the castle, all those small houses crowded in an unbelievable order, built sometimes odd and funny, having some features of the Holland architecture. At the top of the climb there are ruins of some old-looking building, or piece of castle, but it is not worth climbing. Just get seated at the small observation ground and if you are a photographer or simply fan of taking pictures and have a good camera with zoom, you will spend minimum half an hour there.

The view is just amazing, so are the people living there and the tourists. They are all calm and easy. There is no panic, hectic and any rush, everything is going nice and easy here. Just like in a fairy tale. A German fairy tale. By the way, I did not find a single food store there, only restaurants and cafes. I definitely don't understand where in this small town that is perfectly observed from that view ground can hide a food-store. The locals are probably all millionaires and eat only in restaurants or they have to drive to the neighborhood towns to buy food.

To get to the castle you would have to get down from the cliff you are now and climb another and to tell the truth, I wasn't impressed by the castle really much. So I would suggest you to have a lunch in a cafe or restaurant, have a walk through the specially equipped walking paths in the local park (again those who have cameras will spend much more time there than expected) and head back to the parking lot where a glass manufacture and shop is located. If you have luck, you could see how they make those masterpieces of glass, they arrange live shows several times a day.

But to tell the truth, I am very glad to live not far away from this town, because it is impossible to describe, you must see it yourselves. And even more, I was glad to see this town several times and I would be glad to see it again.

Iuri Tarabanov writes about interesting travel experiences. His travel site is http://www.travelime.com

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