Got Melk?

Thurs., Nov. 12 (Day 11) - A few lingering thoughts about the Cathedral we saw yesterday in Passau, St. Stephens. I forgot to mention that this cathedral has the largest pipe organ in the world. Also, we thought that of all the cathedrals we've seen, this one was the most beautiful. The cathedral in Cologne was the largest and most imposing, and was definitely the most impressive one on the outside. But St. Stephens Cathedral was, in our opinion, the most beautiful inside. We are now cruising on the Danube River. The Danube is very wide. Joe said, "Now THIS is a river." You can see how low the water levels are by looking at the rocks on the bank. It is obvious where previous water levels were. This morning we arrived in the small Austrian town of Melk. The big attraction here is a huge Benedictine Abbey way up on the hillside. A bus took us up the hill to the abbey, where we were led on a guided tour. In this location, a palace was built about 1200 years ago. About 300 or so years ago, the palace burned down and, at the invitation of the Dukes,  the Benedictines built this beautiful abbey. It is still an active abbey today, with 30 monks living here. There is also a junior and a senior high school on the grounds. The abbey is built in the Baroque style. Inside the abbey we went through a series of rooms which had different colors. The first room had a beautiful blue hue, the explanation being that blue is a spiritual color. The next room was green, then red, etc. At the end, you could look back through the doorway and see through all of the different rooms and colors. It was beautiful. The blue room contained the rule of St. Benedict. One of the rooms contained a small gold cross, and in the center of the cross was a sliver of the cross of Christ encased in glass. The abbey had a library that had a collection of 85,000 books, all leather bound. There were books on medicine, the law, philosophy, theology, among others. The bookshelves were from floor to ceiling (very tall ceilings). There was a balcony at one point in the tour where we had a view that overlooked the city of Melk and the Danube River. After our tour ended, we had the option of taking the bus back down to the ship, or walking back through the town of Melk. We decided to walk and went into some of the shops in town. Melk is a beautiful town. We stopped at a highly recommended chocolate shop. The specialty was chocolate with apricots -apricots are plentiful in this area. We sampled some of the chocolates, bought a couple of candy bars and then headed back to the ship.