Tübingen

On Tuesday, we drove two hours to Stuttgart to pick up Stefan's mom, Helen, whose tenant had driven her west from Steinebach to meet us. On the way back to Freiburg, we decided to stop off in Tübingen, location of the eighth oldest continuously operating university in Germany. The university was founded in 1477, some 380 years after Oxford, some 13,000 years after the area was likely first settled, and the very same year (surely not coincidentally) that Tübingen expelled all of its Jews (allowed back in 1850).

Unlike Freiburg, most of Tübingen survived WWII intact. The Altstadt thus includes many original wattle-and-daub houses, the oldest of which date to the 14th century; parts of the Schloss above the Altstadt are yet three centuries older. We thoroughly enjoyed our afternoon meander.