Last weekend we decided we didn't want to see every weekend pass us by while we were lazy and did nothing. So yesterday we put our new plan into action and as the weather wasn't on our side we decided to visit the town hall for a guided tour. We have tried to do this on a couple of occasions already but it is always sold out. So yesterday bright and early we went online and booked our tickets.
Unfortunately that turned out to be more trouble than it was worth almost. When we had booked, we wrote down the reference number and trotted off down to the town hall for three pm when the lady on the door wanted to know where our ticket was. We gave her the reference number (or tried) but she had no list and insisted we had to have a ticket. (This wasn't printed anywhere on the confirmation email - we even double checked last night). So following a mad dash to the tourist office and back and a conversation with the woman there who seemed to be on her own planet, we were the last in for the tour and missed the start.
The woman who let us in did offer to let us have a tour in English but since I noticed this week that my listening skills are better than ever in German and I feel bad for putting Nico through the stress of concentrating in English all the time, I said no. This turned out to be a little mistake too because while I picked up a lot, in some rooms I understood almost nothing. This was again due to the way the tours are run. It's so popular that they have three tours simultaneously and the floors are really creaky so while the thirty of us in one group are trying to listen, the sixty people in the other two groups are walking round, talking and generally making lots of noise.
All of these complaints aside, what I did hear was generally interesting and what I saw was quite impressive. And while some of the tour covered points I had heard before (the large model ship that hangs from the ceiling and has real working canons), there was a lot of new bits. For example, I never knew a blue whale once swam up the Weser and got stuck! It's picture and jaw bone still hang in the town hall.
It's definitely worth a visit and I hope we'll be keeping up this new plan of discovering our region after the move, but make sure you get a paper ticket and take the tour in your own language.
