So about 10 years ago, a few weeks after we got engaged, Kath and her father went to on a Reformation tour, ending up at the Passion Play in Oberammergau, Germany. She came back and declared we had to go again in 2010. Hence, 2010 -we go. Actually it wasn't as simple as that, we looked into how to get more of the trip and looked lots of tours. It is tough to get tickets. Each year they sell about 500,000 tickets, this year over 1 million requests for tickets were received. They do reserve 150,000 tickets for Americans. The key is to book with a hotel in town and they get a package with the room that includes the tickets. To do this, we ran into a promotion with my undergrad degree at the University of Minnesota alum group and hooked up with them.
So we flew to Munich. The flight is long and boring especially when the inflight entertainment system was broken. We had to actually entertain ourselves for the most of it. We got there and met much of the group we would be traveling with on the tour at the airport. Being a small town, we were broken up into several groups. Some people stayed in Oberammergau while some people like us, stayed about 10 minutes away in Garmisher, Germany.
So we got int
o Garmisher and to our hotel and tried to figure o
ut how to stay awake. Our hotel was nice and we had our own balcony. The photo on the left is from our balcony
.
We hung out for that afternoon, trying to figure ways to stay awake. It was our hope to be awake until after dinner that night.
We figured we could easily walk around the town for awhile. So we just started roaming and looking at people and shops and what not.
We ended up stopping at a coffee shop and getting a few things. We were able to use our intensive Italian language training to order two cappuccinos. The town and areas around where we were staying were lovely.
We walked around enough to get lost for a little while, but we managed to get back to the hotel and bothered each enough to stay awake for dinner where we met some of our other tour companions at our hotel. I will say this now and several more times, just some of the nicest folks you will ever met - and darn funny too. But enough of other people, let's focus on us. After dinner, we collapsed and had a great nights sleep.
So, the next day we headed to the play. The play started at 2 in the afternoon, so we h
ad we got to town early around 9 or 10 and did a walking tour of the town. Though it was raining, we
walked through the town and saw some amazing murals. The town is certainly geared for this event every ten years. They h
ad some wonderful shops all ready to go, a
pparently we were
told they have long tradition of woodworking around the area, so the shops had many things to look at and buy.
So after our tour, we had some free time to wander and shop and stuff. We all met up around noon to catch a local bus to get some lunch at another hotel, Hotel Anika for lunch before the play
.
After lunch we headed to the play and we wish we could share some of the sites from the play, but they were not joking around about no pictures. So here is one borrowed from the internet.
You can click on it and make it larger. You can see the choir and the cast the setting for the play. It was all in German, but you know the play and they give you the translation to follow along. The music and singing is pretty awesome. Periodically, the play used still life images, where actors would stage a still life of image from a story in the bible, like this one, (again borrowed)
The people in town make up the cast and musicians. You used to have to have been born in the town to be in it, but they now allow people that are married to someone that was born in town. Plus, the donkey is not from the town, so they are really expanding their tolerance.
There has been quite a bit of acknowledgement about the controversy around the staging of the play. The show has been modified to take into account of the sensitivities of other citizens and their beliefs.
We took a dinner break after the first three hours back at the Hotel Anika, where we dined and enjoyed our evening. We had some time to hang out before heading back
for the last three hours of the play. The end of the play ended around 11:30 pm so we when we got to the hotel, we knew we had a short turn around as we were headed out early the next morning to a couple hour bus ride to Salsburg. More on that in the next post.
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