Schwerin, Germany

Our first port was in Germany and many people went to Berlin which was a 3 hour train ride each way so I decided to go to Schwerin to see the castle which was only an hour or so away.  The family had lived on that land for 25 generations!  For a 1000 years the castle has been expanded and reconstructed several times and the current castle has stood for 160 years.

The wood floors are not painted – they are made of different types/colors of wood and inlaid to make the patters.

 Much of what looks like wood carvings are paper mache molds and topped with gold leaf. What looks like marble walls aren’t.  They weren’t trying to save money using these techniques they were just intrigued by the science and methods of using fake materials.

The castle was beautiful and the town was quaint and nice to walk around in. 

Houses cost buy the space the ground floor takes up
so they made the upper stories bigger to get around it. 

We got to see a lovely church. 

Normally, the castle is closed on Mondays but they opened it for the cruise ships.   They said there were 20,000 people there yesterday!, but it was just us today so it was nice.