I finally got to see the Passion Play! It's world famous and I've wanted to go for forty years. My high school orchestra went after I'd moved away. I didn't get to go, and I'm still bitter! But now I've finally seen it, and I can recover. You see the theater above. It seats about 4000. 
Presented by a tiny town in the Alps of southern Germany, the village of Ober- ammergau itself is an attraction. Gepetto must have carved Pinocchio here! Surrounded by mountains, there are lots of buildings are painted in the Tyrolean style. (Notice the fool-the- eye staircase painted on the outside of the building. The wall is actually flat.)
People make their living with a B&B during the tourist season. In the winter, they ski or are woodcarvers.
Why would anyone care to see a play that lasts for 3 hours? And that's just the part before intermission! That's when everybody leaves for 3 hours to go eat dinner. Then they come back for 2 more hours. It really was great, much better than you'd think for an amateur play put on by a town of 2500. No ringers; you have to have been born in the town or lived there for 20 years to be in the cast. Music, acting, cast of hundreds, costuming; everything was on a professional level.
Oberammergau has presented the Passion of Christ every year for the last 400 years. Why? In the 1600's the plague - the Black Death - was ravaging Europe. In their little town of 700, already they'd lost 70 people.
The whole town made a promise to God that if he would stop the plague, they would present the Passion every 10 years. From the time of the oath, no more people died. So they have kept their promise, and it's grown so that now they do it for 5 sold-out months and 100,000 people see it.
The flower- decked house is where we stayed for our 2-night Passion Play package. Two great things about it: walking distance to the theater so we could come home for dinner, and it had a pastry shop on the ground floor!
We drove in from Berchtes- gaden in the morning, so we a tiny jewel of a palace built by Mad King Ludwig, which was only a few clicks away. Each year the gold- encrusted Linderhof and it's sister palaces bring in far more tourist dollars than they cost. At the time, the government had the king declared insane because he was bankrupting the country!
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