Day 7 (8th July) Passau in Honeymoon

Passau is another one of the smaller towns we dock at. We only spent half a day there and that was enough time to see what was worth seeing.

Before that, last night we passed by Linz, and I wanted to snap a few photographs of the banks as we passed by. We passed around midnight, and I saw there were several other cruise ships docked there. I went up to the sun deck to take some pictures, but unbeknownst to me, the ship was just passing by some very low bridges. I went up and saw one coming up. It was so close that I felt if I jumped I could have touched the bottom of the bridges - they actually had taken down the canopy on the sun deck for this purpose. There were a few more of those low bridges in Linz too, so they were fun to pass through. I was surprised they didn't bother to close down the sun deck - I guess they expect everyone to be sleeping and didn't bother.

Passau the town is charming. It sits at the confluence of the Inns river (which I had visited at Innsbruck with Contiki) and the Danube, so it is shaped like a peninsular, with the oldest part near the tip, and the newer parts up stream. It reminds me of Manhattan, which is situated between the Hudson and East rivers. Our tour guide has a progressive sense of humour, and she even took us to an avant garde theatre that we normally won't visit.

Passau has a church with the biggest organ in Eurpoe in it, and we sat to hear a concert. They played Bach, as expected, but went into Schumann or Liszt and then some modern stuff that I didn't recognise. So I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity in the program.

Besides that, Passau is a charming little town, and we had fun walking around the narrow cobble stone streets looking for souvenirs. There is a castle on a hill across the river from the town where there is a couple of vista points, so we went there, intending to have lunch at the restaurant at the museum in the castle. But the walk up was a little confusing - even though it only took 20 mins to walk up the hill, the footpaths were small and winding ones going up the hill, with some forks in between. I took Google maps with me so I knew where the paths lead, but we didn't expect the footpaths to be so deserted - some parts of them were just a narrow dirt path along a hill, with no railings on the other side. So we doubled back and went up the long way, and by the time we got there we were so hungry that we went into the first eatery we saw - which was a little cafe selling cakes. So we had cake for lunch. The view was beautiful though, so it was really worth going up there.

When we came back to the ship, there was some amount of time before dinner, so I spent the time in the library practising, the same as the day before when we were in Melk. It turns out people have been listening, and now there are people whom I hadn't meet, had not heard me play, but know that I play because there were others who told them about me.