The Bremen Town Musicians

In order to make it to Frode’s grandma’s 80^th birthday, we had to head north after Amsterdam. 

We weren’t exactly sure where to visit in between Amsterdam and Stavanger. All we knew was we had to be in Stavanger by the 10^th of July.

So we studied the map…. We decided we want to visit Copenhagen, Oslo and maybe some little towns in between.

Amsterdam to Copenhagen takes over 10 hours so we decided to stop somewhere along the way for a couple of nights….but where….?

It was mum’s suggestion that we visit Bremen.

She told us

It’s a town famous for the brothers Grimm’s ‘The Bremen Town Musicians’!!

None of us could remember the whole story, we knew the story involves bunch of animals, stacking themselves together to do something…. Goat, monkey, chicken and dog? Or was it horse, cat, rooster and mouse? So we decided to go and find out (ok, you can find this out very easily on google but we didn’t, we just went)

To get to Bremen from Amsterdam, we had to change at Osnabruck (Very short transfer time which is always scary). We got on the wrong train and took us a couple of hours longer than it should but we got there eventually.

Bremen is a very interesting city, mix of modern buildings and the old. Not too touristy, in fact most tourists are local tourists (the German retirees), easy to navigate because it’s a small town. Everything’s a lot cheaper than all the places we’ve visited in the last few weeks. And it has many great restaurants and friendly service. All in all, we really enjoyed our stay in Bremen! So glad my mum had such a random idea.

Oh, and the story goes something like this… the old animals (donkey, dog, cat and rooster) were getting kicked out or killed so the animals decided to leave their homes to go to Bremen to join the Bremen town musicians. On the way to Bremen, they spotted the bad guys having a feast in a house and they decided to scare them off and take the house and food. They successfully scared the bad guys away and lived happily ever after.  ….. so they never actually made it to Bremen. (But there are statues of animals in Bremen – after all it is based on a true story, right? :p )