1) The Circle of Life: In a recent post, I discussed Obazta, a Bavarian cheese dish. I promised that the next time I ate it, I would take a photo. I ate it today, but I didn't have my camera. Then, Jess sent me a photo of some Obazta we had in Bamberg. That's Gretchen on the right.
2) I have been making my way through "Von der Natur nicht vorgesehen", and the author at one point mentions the places she'd been in the United States: New York City (naturally) and Vinalhaven! The same, 1200-person Vinalhaven that we can (theoretically?) see off in the distance when we visit the beautiful summer home of family friends on another island in Penobscot Bay. In other news, I'm definitely translating that for my thesis. *gulp*
3) On Wednesday, I leave for Vienna for three days. The plan is to get there around 4 pm, stay Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night, and then spend as much or as little of Saturday there as I want. Hopefully I will not go crazy with solitude as I did in Switzerland. I've gotten four guidebooks from the library, as well as the Rick Steeves' "Germany and Austria" that my Dad left here. I think Rick Steves is kind of a stupid jerk, and normally I'd say that at least it was useful for the maps, but he draws his own, because he is kind of a stupid jerk. So...I'm using it to get an overview before using the German-language guides for more specific items. RS promotes this BS-type of "have-your-eyes-pass-over-everything-without-seeing-anything" tourism. It's like, "Here is how to see everything "important" in a city in one day", and it's unfortunate. It also makes him look dumb when he refers to anything in his best-selling guidebooks as "off the beaten path." And lastly, today, I found this in the book (referring to cake shops): "Shops like this boast "K u. K" - good enough for the König und Kaiser (king and emperor, same guy)." I am currently enrolled in a class for four hours a week about how König and Kaiser are not the same guy. I am not going to get into why he's wrong, but what really gets me is that he made this fairly obivous error while saying something that had no other purpose but to make him look "smart". Okay, I'm going to stop myself there.
4) On...Thursday? I went to the Trinity Church (Dreieinigkeitskirche) on Gesandtenstr. (here in R'burg) and climbed up into the steeple, as it is open for a nominal fee during the summer. Here are a few photos from the visit (click to embiggen):
(The rest of the photos are also in the "photos" section of the blog.
5) This weekend I went to
Aschaffenburg, which is near Frankfurt right on the Hessen border. Our friend Regina's parents and brother live there, so five of us went to visit and stayed with her and her family. The biggest deal in Aschaffenburg is the castle, which is quite large and is red.
This is a replica of a temple from Pompeii. King Ludwig I (who was not a kaiser!) built a lot of neat stuff, in fact, he paid for the spires on the Regensburg cathedral! (Tangent: last week I went into an antique shop and saw a postcard of the cathedral in the early 1800s before it had the spires. It was pretty funny looking. I should go back and buy that.)
We also walked around the shopping area of the downtown a little, looking for a mothers day gift for Regina to buy for her brother to give to her mom. Hah. Unfortunately, my camera died right before I was able to take a photo of a giant knife that served as the sign for a kitchen store. I was able to take one photo in the toy store:
We didn't do that much else, though we had two GREAT homemade dinners at Regina's parents house. Homemade sauerkraut is about the best thing ever.
We went for a walk through the neighborhood and into the hills on Sunday before we left:
6) On Saturday night we went to a party at Regina's friend's house to watch this truly bizarre event called "
Eurovision". Basically, a bunch of european nations hold American Idol-like singing contests, and each country's national winner performs at Eurovision. Then, all the countries vote (they're not allowed to vote for themselves), and the winner is decided by popular vote. The reality of the matter is that every single act is more outlandish than the next, and in the end, everyone votes for countries to which a) they have current or former political ties, or b) they feel bad about exacting a genocide on. Evidence: All of the former Yugoslavia voted for Serbia, most of the former East bloc voted for either Russia or Ukraine, and Turkey voted for Armenia. Germany had a really classy jazz performance, and if it had actually been about talent, they would've won. France also had a great show, including a stuffed animal cat sewn to one of the singer's shirts. He occaisionally sung to it. The best, however, hands down, was
the Ukraine group, headed by a drag queen dressed like a disco ball. The link is to a *highly* recommended video.
The following cat was not interested in the competition:
The cat did find time to meddle in our game of Werewolf, which is basically a children's camp game. Americans mostly know it as "Mafia". The Germans had a handful of great twists on it, though. The game is this: Everyone in the group is assigned via secret slips of paper to be either a "dorfbewohner" (villager) or a "werwolf" (werewolf). There are about two werewolves for every four villagers. There also needs to be a moderator, who oversees the game. The moderator declares it "night" and then tells the werewolves to open their eyes and see who their partner(s) is. Then they silently agree by pointing which villager they want to eat, and then they "sleep" again. The moderator then tells the group who got killed. Then the entire group discusses who they think the werewolves could be and decides by show of hands who they want to sacrifice for the public good. The challenge is to keep suspicion away from yourself and identify the right werewolves based on aural clues and pop-psychology. Either they villagers win by killing all the werewolves, or the opposite situation comes to pass. Here are the twists: There is a hunter villager, who can take someone with them if they are killed, thus complicating "revenge for finger pointing" killings by the werewolves. There is an oracle villager who can as the moderator every round about the werewolf status of ONE other player. The rub is that nobody knows you're the oracle, so you have to convince the group who to kill without sounding like you're passing the blame. The last twist, which was great, was having a "Romeo and Juliet." Two players are secretly chosen by the moderator at the behest of a villager designated "cupid", and then they identify each other by "waking up" during the night when directed by the moderator. They do not know if their partner is a werewolf or not, but if one of them dies, both of them do, so they have to defend each other from the torch-waving villagers. It was pretty great.
7) One more photo from Regensburg:
