bats don't eat bacon

Ann and I spent about five seconds in the actual town of Prien am Chiemsee. I'm sure it was a lovely town, but we weren't interested in the "Prien" part so much as the "am Chiemsee" part: a lake so big that it's nicknamed the Bavarian Sea. (And everyone knows by now how I feel about lakes). So for the day and some change that we were there, we stuck to the lakeside area of town called Prien-Stock, using it as our jumping-off point for a boat trip to the islands of Herreninsel and Fraueninsel.

The main (only?) draw of Herreninsel is the palace Herrenchiemsee, which was commissioned by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, "the fairy tale king" -- the dude who also brought us Neuschwanstein Castle. Ludwig II was big on castles as homage: Neuschwanstein was his homage to Richard Wagner; Schloss Herreninsel was his homage to Louis XIV. We suspect Ludwig II had a little dude crush on Louis XIV. Maybe more than a little dude crush. You don't commission a replica of Versailles in honor of somebody you like just a little.

The castle remains incomplete, but the parts of it that are finished are pretty stellar. Having been to Real Versailles in May, I can say that Fake Versailles compares rather favorably, though the grounds are less extensive and there are no wings off the main castle area, seeing as how Ludwig II ran Bavaria bankrupt before he could get around to adding them on. Also, Fake Versailles sadly incorporates none of the magical weirdness of The Hamlet -- but then again, Ludwig II wasn't building a castle in honor of Marie Antoinette.

Unfortunately they don't allow pictures of the inside of Fake Versailles, so you'll have to go for yourself if you want to see things like the swimming-pool-sized bathtub, the dumb-waiter-table, and the many, many paintings of Louis XIV in Ludwig II's private bedroom.




Finally, in a particularly delightful case of "Germans can be really, really weird," we ended the tour of Fake Versailles and saw a sign (still inside the castle!) for an exhibition on bats. Bats! Why not? It turns out that there are bats living in the roof of Fake Versailles, which makes the whole thing slightly less random, but we've still got no explanation for this sign. I never would have guessed that "bats eat bacon" was one of the seven most common bat myths in Germany.