Germany 2017 Post 6

Right. I forgot. After all that Gottlob stuff and Leipzigerie, we also saw one of the famous paintings of Bach, by Ernst Gottlob Hausmann. Prior to Graf, Hausmann was the reigning portrait artist in town. The painting is nice, and all, but it's like the Mona Lisa. It's on every pair of tourist socks in town. Not as interesting as a Gottlob painting of some minor dude that I've never heard of!

After lunch we headed to St. Nikolai Church, which has beautiful interiors but no connection to my family that I know of. And then to St. Thomas Church, where all 11 of the Gottlob children were baptized. I very badly wanted to see the baptismal font, which was contemporaneous to my people, but the choir was practicing awful Easter music and drove us away. The interior of this church was filled with super old paintings depicting patrons of the church in various solemn moments. I could have stayed for hours with my computer, just looking up their names and learning more about them.

We wandered around for a bit and I saw a sign for Leipziger Lerchen. This was a pastry I'd purchased the night before and very much enjoyed. Didn't know that it was a local delicacy. At the bakery in town I found a placard in the window that tells the story of the pastry. I stood over a particularly putrid sewer grate in order to take a clear picture of the card and get the story, which is that the original pastry was a bird pie containing lark meat, egg and herbs. In 1876 the king of Saxony banned the killing of larks and bakers created this substitute pie filled with marzipan, with the strips on top representing twine used to tie the legs of larks (eew) and the single cherry representing the heart of the lark (double eew). Tasty, though. 

And then off on the train for home. Altogether an excellent day.