Blaubeuren – Germany Trip Blog Post #3

 

Late morning, on our first full day in Germany, after our walking tour of Ulm, we boarded the bus for Blaubeuren. 

The town of Blaubeuren is a half hour drive from our hotel in Ulm, in the Swabian region of southern Germany. Cities in this region which you may have heard of are Stuttgart and Augsburg. 

Blaubeuren is a small, quiet village known for its Monastery, which was founded in 1085 by the Benedictines. During the Reformation, it was taken over by Protestants in 1535, but monks returned for a while during 30 Years War. In 1817, it became a Protestant seminary with attached boarding school. 

Our tour guide spent a lot of time telling us about each of the pictures in these panels, which told the story of John the Baptist, as well as Jesus.

He also told us that all monasteries were set up using the same blueprint, such as where the chapel, the garden, the cloister, et cetera were going to be. Anyone coming from a different monastery would be able to find their way around. I never knew that before, and I also don’t know if this was something they did just around that part of Europe during those years, or if they have done this around the world for millennia.

 

The chapel was beautiful, with many wood carvings. I am sure that they all had a certain meaning. 

 But some of them were rather creepy.

Behind the monastery, was the Blautopf, the spring where the Blue River originates.

It was a serene, wooded spot, and felt so much like home to me.

We wandered up one of the streets of Blaubeuern for lunch at Restaurant Ochsen (or Oxen). 

We were treated to Maultaschen, which translates to “mouth bag”. During Lent, to keep church leaders from knowing that the people were eating meat on Fridays, the women put the meat, usually beef, between sheets of rolled dough to hide it. It is a traditional Swabian dish and was very good, with the meat mixed with spinach, bread crumbs and onions. Similar to ravioli, they are square or rectangular and three to four and a half inches across. This was served with a lettuce salad atop cooked shaved potatoes, pickled beets, shaved carrots and shaved cabbage. I ordered it for lunch another day, but it wasn’t quite as good as this first one we had.

I had cut it up for the picture, so you could see what's inside.