Trier

After spending the night in Traben-Trarbach we drove an hour over to Trier. Not only is Trier the oldest city in Germany, it also has the most well-preserved Roman ruins north of the Alps. It was on our list of places to get to while we were in Germany so we couldn't resist spending a few hours there.

This is the Porta Nigra (black gate, in Italian). It dates back to 180 AD and has blackened over the years, hence the name "Nigra".

We went inside it and wandered up to the top of it and took lots of pictures. You could look down at the main pedestrian street and the big church over on the left.

The hallways in the Porta Nigra had carvings on the walls.

Some fun buildings on the main pedestrian street:

Next we headed over to the Roman baths, which were built in the 4th century. It used to be a big building with a courtyard in front of it but now of course it's just ruins. The back of the building is still somewhat intact:

A closer look:

An even closer look:

There were lots of dark and spooky underground tunnels to explore as well.

There were also lots of churches in Trier. We went into three ... Constantine's basilica, the Liebfrauenkirche, and the Cathedral of Saint Peter which is the big main church in Trier. Constantine's basilica was originally just a big throne room for Emperor Constantine but it eventually got converted into a church. It's just one enormous room, no pillars or stained glass or anything fancy. It's pretty neat. The Liebfrauenkirche had a lot of nice stained glass ... mostly modern in design but very colorful and I could sit and look at it all for hours. The main church had all clear glass in its windows and it was very bare compared to most other churches. Here's a pic of the outside of Constantine's Basilica ... this entire building is just one big room on the inside:

There was something wrong with our big camera that made it take fuzzy pictures but the only pictures of Saint Peter's that we got were with the big camera so here's a fuzzy picture of the outside of it. Actually, Saint Peter's is on the left and the Liebfrauenkirche is the slightly darker and shorter part of the building toward the right:

Saint Peter's is the oldest church in Germany and it houses the Holy Robe, which Jesus supposedly wore when he died so it's worth seeing the picture of it even if it is fuzzy (it's also worth a visit!). And here is a slightly fuzzy picture of part of the main pedestrian square:

And that rounded out our 3 hours in Trier. We could have visited many museums there as well but we weren't in the mood to do all that reading in German. There were also a few more churches, more roman ruins, and Karl Marx's house, to name a few things. Plus shopping and tons of weinguts (where you can taste wines from the region). We should go wine tasting in this area sometime because the grapes are all grown on really steep hills there and we want to know how/if that changes the flavors of the wines.