CELLE
On Monday we went to nearby Celle for the day. Although I had visited the Christmas Market in Celle a number of times in November a year ago and taken lots of photographs, which I posted here, I had somehow forgotten how beautiful the old part of Celle was with its fachwerk cross beamed houses from the 1600’s and 1700’s.
Celle was the birthplace of the Hanoverian kings who became kings of by England: George I, II and III of revolutionary war infamy. So during World War II the British insisted that Celle not be bombed. So while nearby Hannover was flattened, Celle stayed untouched and is now a beautiful old town. The original exteriors of the houses have been beautifully maintained, while the insides of the houses, now boutique shops, have been completely modernized. So we walked around Celle for two hours marveling at the old houses.
We stopped in Kaffee Kiess, an elegant cafe with wonderful cakes where we had potato pancakes and Apfelmuss (applesauce) just as Kathe did with her father and mother when she was a girl.
We looked through Karstadt department store where Kathe loved to browse, now made more elegant and renamed Galeria.
We walked into the park next to which Kathe’s brother Volker lived for a while and walked through the store where he was responsible for the presentation of elegant merchandise through window displays. It was a time of memories. My brother and his daughter Katie stayed here in the Celler Hof Hotel and my son Tom with his family stayed here for a week and rode bicycles all around the town. Finally we went to the bus stop in front of the Celle Schloss (castle) and took the bus back to Winsen.
In the evening Heinrich and Elke’s granddaughter Nora, recently certified as a dentist who arrived today for a week joined all of us in drinking wine and beer as we played a game of Skippo, a card game that is pure luck but which fools you into thinking you are in control. It was a wonderful day.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 