We recently visited the town of Niederselters, which has a mineral spring and is a district in the Selters area of Germany.

In the 18th century, the town began shipping water from this spring all over the world and it became known as Selters Water.

The term seltzer water derives from this.  Now you know.

There is a little museum in the town so we went there on a whim one Sunday. Good thing we picked that day because the museum is open only on Saturdays and Sundays from April through October. Our entry fee was 3 Euro each.

We timed our visit perfectly because two women had gone in just ahead of us. We were the only four in the place and when one of the women heard us talking she said “Where are you guys from?” in English. Turns out she is American, teaches German in Chicago and was on a class trip. The woman she was with is a teacher in Germany and they take turns hosting each other. The American teacher takes her students to Germany one year and the German teacher takes her students to the United States the following year and so on. They were at the museum checking it out for a possible field trip for the students.

The museum is very tiny and the woman who sold us the tickets was also the one who showed us around. She didn’t speak much English and we are not fluent in German, so luckily the two women were able to translate everything for us.

The first thing you do on the little tour is taste some of the water.

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There’s Sean with his sample. It was indeed very mineral-y tasting and I can’t say I loved it, so he ended up drinking his as well as mine.

After the tasting you watch a short film about the history of the place that’s all in German, so again we were lucky to have translators with us.

You then get to go to the building next to the museum.

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That’s the Brunnentempel, which literally translates to “fountain temple”. There were photos in the museum of the building in a decayed state. It’s been beautifully restored.

From a balcony in the Brunnentempel you can look down into the room where they used to bottle the water.

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Back when the bottling actually took place here, people really used to go in and watch the workers, who were all women. I’m sure for some viewers at least, the women were more of a draw than the bottling process.

Returning to the museum, we saw this display case which shows some of the bottles that would have been used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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And these are the bottles that are used today.

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We often get served this brand at restaurants in Germany. You may be able to see that the label on the bottles on the left say “Classic” while the ones on the right say “Naturell”. The Classic water is carbonated and the Naturell water is not. In Germany these are distinguished by ordering “with gas” or “without gas”. To order non-carbonated water, you can also ask for “stilles Wasser” in German or still water in English. Once in a while a restaurant will not have non-carbonated water (and they rarely give you tap water) so you might have to settle for Medium water, which is lightly carbonated.

I think because we were with the two women who were scoping the place out for a future field trip, we got to see the secret room.

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The room was filled with crates containing thousands and thousands of bottles of Seltzer water from all over the world. Yes, someone actually collected all those bottles and then donated them to the museum.

The crates were all labeled with the countries where the bottles were collected.

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The bottles in that photo came from Croatia, the Netherlands, Egypt, Thailand, Ireland, Poland Sweden, Italy and New Zealand among other countries. Fascinating stuff.

The museum woman knew we were American so she proudly pulled this one out of the collection for us to see.

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This bottle from Japan is the most expensive one in the collection.

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The bottle, produced by hand, has Swarovski crystals on it and costs about $100.

The museum will eventually have the entire collection on display, but for now it’s just a couple of display cases like this one that all visitors get to see.

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There wasn’t too much else to see at the museum. The woman working there apologized profusely for not having any material in English, but it would have been fine even without the women who were translating for us. She told those woman that she was meeting with the town council that week and was going to tell them again that they need English information for the museum. You know she was going to tell them she had THREE Americans at ONCE in the place and didn’t have anything to give them! We probably set a record.

We had noticed in the museum that there was a reference to a statue in town depicting the women who used to bottle the water. We got directions to that and went to see it before leaving the area.

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As if the museum wasn’t quirky enough, on the way out of town we saw what appeared to be two tiny churches in a little park.

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I don’t know why they’re there but their appearance was peculiar. (I typed that sentence just to show that I know how to properly use the words they’re, there and their.)

Which offbeat museums or collections are your favorites?

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About the author: Trish

 

Website: http://travelsandtipples.com