Lübeck: City of Endless Rain

Last weekend was another one of those fantastic, international student trips that the school sponsors. And if fantastic means dreary, wet, and waterlogged, then I have the trip for you!
siiiiiigh.

CLICK ME!
I GET BIGGER!

I guess it wasn't -that- bad, but Cranky Lex comes out when she gets cold and wet. And it was both....all weekend....
Just a little history on the city of Lübeck and why it's cool (and some pretty pictures of the city for you to look at while I'm explaining all of this):

Lübeck is the second largest city in northern Germany, second only to Hamburg. Lübeck also has the second largest harbor in Germany....again second only to Hamburg. Lübeck is situated on the other side of the Denmark peninsula from me/Hamburg. Once upon a time, a long long time ago (13th-17th centuries), Lübeck was the capital of the Hanseatic League. For those of you who don't know what this is (don't feel bad, I didn't know who they were until I came to Germany) the Hanseatic League was a very powerful organization of merchants...essentially. They were so powerful that their cities lived under their own laws and had their own army and because of this power they pretty much owned northern Europe. There are still a lot of things in Germany and northern Europe in general that reflect this influence. Zum beispiel (for example) take the name Lufthansa. Luft = air and hansa is a reference to the Hanseatic League.

Awesome defensive building
 we got to tour

Because Lübeck was their main port, this means the city was also well fortified. Lübeck is(/was, most of it was destroyed in WWII) pretty much a walled off island with tons of churches and awesome defensive buildings.

Sadly, most of the time we were here, it was raining. Not always a pouring rain at all, but steady enough to be considered Chinese water torture.
One really cool thing that we stumbled upon (no seriously, I pointed at tents and said, "Let's go to the thing".) was a viking/renaissance festival in the Markt of Lübeck.
A few of our group bought celtic, leather wristbands as a group because we're just awesome like that.

Also, between all the Americans who went to Lübeck, we bought 6 liters (jugs) of wine/mead and one nice glass thing. Well, we bought more glasses of the smaller variety that aren't in the picture, but they aren't really all that big (so they don't count). I still have one jug of mead sitting on my shelf, waiting for my parents to get here. Then, and only then, will I crack it open. :)

After trekking around the city in the rain to see all the beautiful buildings, we went to the marzipan museum. I, sadly, am not a huge fan of marzipan and just wandered around the building looking at all the things you could mould out of this sweet treat.

One other thing we did that weekend was go to the sea. Sadly...again... it was rainy and cold, so we didn't do much besides throw rocks into the gray mass that was the ocean.
All in all, it wasn't my favorite trip ever. There were some cool things though, so it wasn't a total bust.