Day 7: Lutherstadt Wittenberg

May 23 -- The breakfast continued to be amazing at the hostel, and we were ready for a short train ride to Wittenberg. We got to the Berlin train station, easily found the right platform without even having to ask someone and sat to wait for our train with time to spare, feeling like pros. The train pulled up and we got on, but we didn't know where our seats were (the numbers on the seats didn't match our tickets), so we asked someone. She told us, "No, that's not this train." So we hurried and jumped off again before the train left the station. In hind sight, we should have just stayed on the train because it was just the slow train going to Wittenberg and not the express train, but in the panic of the moment, we didn't even think about that. By the time we figured out the correct platform for the express train, we had missed it. So back to the ticket booth we went. We had a very similar experience as on Sunday, with the ticket lady not offering help in any way, and ended up having to buy a new ticket on a slow train with an hour and a half to kill before departure. We were frustrated, of course, but also disappointed because that was the only day we had in Wittenberg, a place that was on the bucket list for our trip, and because it meant we would miss the organ concert at noon.

We didn't have any more mishaps getting there and arrived around 2pm. We dragged our suitcases through town and deposited them at the hostel, which just happened to share a courtyard with the Schlosskirche (the church where Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses). We toured that church (saw where Luther is buried and saw the door which is no longer wooden) and the Lutherhaus museum (which was in the house where Luther lived and which didn't do a very good job of explaining what we were looking at) and the City church (where Luther did most of his preaching). We ate a sack dinner under the Melancthon statue, while looking at the Luther statue. Our group lowered the average age of the tourists quite a bit, since most had arrived on tour buses and were, as Preston says, blue hairs.

At the end of the day, we had walked another 9 miles and were happy to call ourselves reformed. Happy 500 Years, Reformation!