12 posts tagged “beer”
This post is going to be all pictures, because there isn't really much to say about the content of those pictures. That said, by the time I finish this post, I'm sure there will be plenty of text. Like that.
And that.
And that.
Just kidding, but I do want to say two things:
1) Janice, if you're reading this, I just wrote you a post card, got interrupted before finishing it, forgot that I hadn't finished, and mailed it. So sorry that it's weird and unsigned, among other things.
2) I shouldn't drink out of white mugs here. The water is yellowish in both the kitchen and the bathroom, but there are fewer specks in the bathroom water. Just a tip for y'all there.
(We won the Uni Tournament on Monday. We were the only non-gym-class team there. L to R: Back row: HaJu, Max, Ingrid, Moritz, Thomas. Front row: Michaela, me, Wolle and Clemens)
Sepp was in the band! How cool is that?! They played a lot of silly American and British summery songs. It was pretty great.
Today I went to Munich to buy a dirndl. That was my singular goal for my day off. Preferably cheap (used), and preferably green (hunter, to be specific). Now, I know that the picture is gigantic and that you probably looked at it before reading this and there was no suspense, let alone surprise. BUT LOOK AT MY BABY!
One of the light bulbs is out in my room, and it's dark out, so the colors are not accurate. The dress (the darker part is one piece) is a slightly-lighter-than-hunter green, closer to the yellow spectrum than blue, to be as accurate as possible. The apron is a dark chartreuse. It's not as olive as it all looks. Hopefully I will have a better photo tomorrow, as tomorrow is Tag des Bieres (Day of Beer), which celebrates the 491st anniversary of the Rheinheitsgebot in Bavaria. We are not actually sure if it is a dirndl holiday, but it's gonna be. Then May Day is on Tuesday, and that's DEFINITELY a dirndl holiday.
Here is another picture of my dirndl, with the necklace I bought in Berlin, which matches fairly well, though the buttons on the dirndl are silver, not gold.
I promise that the cut of the top is very tasteful. Anyway, the whole get-up was a little less than 50 Euro, which is a pretty good price for a set. It was much cheaper than the first store I went to.
The problem with bargains is that you go broke on them.
And I bought it. It was not pass-up-able. You'd agree if you saw it up close.
Oh, and if that wasn't a good enough argument, my Felicity doll had this get-up when I was little, and I always wanted the me-sized version.
The color in these photos is REALLY off. It's dark green, with horn buttons. It is perfect.
I know that's not how you spell "varied". I realized today that I've just been blogging too long, and have run out of synonyms for "very". Things in Germany have lots of something, I guess.
Bamberg
Bamberg was not what I expected. I thought it would be smaller and quainter, but it was an awful lot like Salzburg, but with a little bit of a Schaffhausen flair. Kay and I arrived around noon, while Jess, Maya, Gretchen and Lauren came an hour or two later. Scheduling confusion. I don't want to talk about it.
I had come to Bamberg with approximately three goals in mind: 1) Rauchbier (smoked beer), 2) Seeing why Andrea called it "Can't Miss", and 3) To see an example of "every major European architechtural movement starting with Romanesqe."
I did get some beer.
I picked a restaurant "with a lovely beer garden" at random out of my guidebook (never again!) and Kay and I spent an hour or so looking for it, only to discover that it was a Spanish Tapas Beer Garden. To add insult to injury. To rub salt in our wound, they did not have Rauchbier (tools!), and the stuffed peppers we ordered were so salty that they were bitter, and needless to say inedible. In a smart move by us, we relocated to a more traditional German restuarant across the river where we got tea and apple cake for a reasonable price. As we were finishing our cake, the other four girls showed up, and were also ready for lunch. So, we headed to yet another restaurant, this time a 100% German Gaststätte. Pretzels, camembert, wild garlic ravioli, and asparagus soup were ordered in addition to Rauchbier for all! (Among our group, Rauchbier is now known as "beef jerky beer", due to its smokiness). While there, we were treated to many a traditional German song/hymn by a table of middle-aged men throwing a few back on the first floor under our mezzanine table.
As planned, from there we went to Domplatz, which the guidebook referred to as having "no possible rival for the title of Germany's finest square" (Rough Guide to Germany, 6th ed. which I usually LOVE, by the way). I think the author may not have been talking about the right platz when he made this claim. What we found at Domplatz was an average-sized square with the Dom on one side, and a large palatial-but-institutinal-looking building on the other side. There were no businesses or restuarants, and frankly, Alexanderplatz could've given it a run for its money in the "finest square" category. And that's saying something. It would appear from my photos file that I was not actually inspired enough to take a photo of it. Here's the Dom:
Apparently there is an impressive collection of sculptural art in and around the Dom, but the group didn't seem in that sort of mood. I look forward to checking that out when I visit again, probably with my parents and brother. We wandered out the back of Domplatz and found ourselves on a road called "Teufelsgraben", which means "Devil's Ditch". In the distance, there was a tower that looked like it might JUST be close enough to walk to.
And we set off toward the horizon. It turned out that the path to what ended up being Schloss Altenburg went through big beautiful fields, and offered an impressive aerial view of Bamberg.
The castle ended up being two hills away instead of the assumed one. But by the time we realized that, it was way too late to turn back. Fact: Bamberg was built in Rome's image (apparently) even down to the fact that it sits on seven hills.
HERE is a google map of the important places in this story.
The castle/fortress was fairly small, and we only visited the outdoor elements of the building. In retrospect, I'm not sure that the inside was accessable to visitors. This website says that it was built for the first time in 1109, and rebuilt after a fire in 1553.
As you will see if you click on the google map link above, this castle is in the southwest of Bamberg, and the trainstation (Hauptbahnhof) is in the northeast. With an hour and half before our train, we didn't think we were going to make it back from the castle. Then, lo and behold, there was a bus that went from about 5 minutes away from the castle to 20 minutes away from the train station, and we managed to make the train.
So I only got to see a very little piece of Bamberg, and while it didn't blow my mind, I'd be very willing to give it another try. This experiment was inconclusive. A few more photos from Bamberg: The first two are the Old City Hall, and the last is a restaurant named after one of my favorite, frequently-posted-about things.
First, because I know what is important, an excerpt from a letter from my wonderful Grandmother:
"Oh, did you know that your cousin Philip has just gotten a new job as an assistant to the brew master in a new brewery just outside of San Francisco. He just started this week and is very excited about it. He can help you brew your beer when you come home - Is German beer really better than our American brew Sam Adams?"
Nini, I couldn't tell you. That crazy German purity law only makes the beer pure, not necessarily good. There is a brewery here which shall remain nameless that has some pretty bad beer. My friend Manu says it's because their water source runs under a cemetary (!!!). As for Sam Adams, I am not yet of legal age to consume such things in the United States, and thus cannot comment. (He he he.)
Second, Berlin! I had a very different trip this time than last. I finally made it to Alexanderplatz, which is where this teaser photo is from:
All of my photos are uploaded if you are interested in checking them out without commentary. Due to a technical problem, they're all out of order. If there's an ocean, it's Rügen, if there are skyscrapers, it's Berlin.
Okay, another teaser from Berlin:
Third, Rügen! I still can't decide if it's a kitschy beach town or a classic, timeless resort or a wholesome family place with lots of swimming and hiking available. It's the little (relative to what, I don't know) island on the north-east coast of Germany, in the Baltic.
Teaser:
Just above and to the left of that gentleman's head you can see the famous white chalk cliffs, which we did not see up close, but which were, in part, made famous by Caspar David Friedrich's painting, Chalk Cliffs on Rügen.
Last, I must vent my train frustration. The German rail system continues to blow me away, both in it's relative efficiency and the scenery I get to see when I ride it. That said, I was on trains from 8:30am until around 4:45pm today. I left Binz (Rügen) at 8:30 knowing only my travel plans as far as Berlin, and was able to get a train to Nuremburg within the hour, and one from Nuremburg to Regensburg that left 10 minutes after I arrived. It worked out pretty well, with a few notable and sadly intertwined problems. First, on the train from Binz to Berlin, though I had a wonderfully reclinable chair and no seatmate, screaming children kept me from sleeping. Second, the train from Berlin to Nuremburg was extremely overbooked, and I spent the first hour to Leipzig sitting in the vestibule between compartents (not cars, it wasn't that bad). There were two of us in the vestibule, and a seat opened up, and the nice fellow sitting with me said "go ahead!". The problem was that right next to that seat was a woman with a cat on her lap. She had taken it out of its carrier and was petting it the whole time, in what was surely an attempt to spread dander throughout the enclosed, dubiously ventilated space. I kept hoping it might bite her and make an adorable attempt at freedom, so I could cheer it on, sneezing between fist-pumps. It did not, and I remained in the vestibule while the German guy took the open seat. After Leipzig, a space opened in the dander-free cabin, and I moved there. I soon realized that the vestibule had been about 134587986734867598 times better than the three screaming/yelling/arguing-punching-my-seat-reading-aloud boychildren in the seats behind me. Though I smiled on the inside imagining how my going BACK to the vestibule/roar of the engines might finally send the message to the parents that the glares of the entire section did not, I just couldn't do it. The ride was 3.5 hours from there. On the train from Nuremburg, I was again given the privilege of sitting in the vestibule, only this time with four other people, three of whom were also sitting. The fourth was a large fellow with seemingly poor balance who insisted on standing up the whole time. I could tell that the other three members of our little gathering (including his apparent girlfriend) were wondering, as I was, how expensive body casts are these days. Luckily spots emptied out readily at the first stop, and I didn't have to back to any German hospitals.
The important thing is that it's over, and that I had quite a good time on my second adventure. Tales to come, I suppose.
Yesterday, we took a tour of Regensburg's favorite brewery (of the three major ones here), KNEITINGER! The "k" is not silent. We went through the fairly tiny brewery and learned, more or less, how beer is made. It's a little unclear yet, as we were not familiar with the Fachwoerter, or "subject words". If you don't know how to say "yeast" in German, a lot of the tour was not going to make sense, for instance.
We heard a lot about the "Reinheitsgebot". Which is an extremely old law (in Bavaria) that mostly just says that the only ingredients you can put in beer are water, hops and barley. Yeast is not among these ingredients because when the law was written in the 16th century, they didn't know there was yeast in their beer. Hey, we all make mistakes.
So, I didn't really take very many photos, but I did get one of what I believe to be a chemostat - the guy's description was "here's where the yeast comes from, you don't need to understand more than that." Ignore the Wikipedia articles seeming belief that only bacteria is farmed in chemostats.
Marianna's Future Career of the Day: Braumeister!
Anyway, my dad is visiting, but he only got here today, and I had class until 12:30, so we haven't really had any crazy adventures yet. We had weisswurst for dinner. One of us bought beer for the other for the first time in the history of the world. I bought us some Franziskaner Hefe-weizen (one of the few brands of Hefe-weizen available in the States), and some Löwenbräu dunkles.
Last night, I was surprised to learn that I would be tying a few on with none other than Andrew Kirwin. He's living in Berlin right now, but is in Regensburg looking for a room so he can study at the Uni here. He went to Needham High with me, and now also goes to Wesleyan. Small world.
Also visible is the new haircut, which nobody noticed. It cost 9 euro.
After a lunch of weisswurst, pretzels and weissbier, we all headed back to the Marienplatz, just in time to see the Glockenspiel go. The top level was kinda boring, but the bottom level was neat. The funniest part might be how everyone on Marienplatz just stops to watch it. I took a video, but it didn't really come out.
We went back to the church tower from our last visit, and Charles and Julia went up to the observation deck, and Kay and I got a snack because we'd seen it already.
Then, we went back for more Weisswurst and beer. It was kind of ridiculous. Julia brought confetti and we threw a lot of it at each other and strangers on the way back to the train station. I also managed to buy some gebrannte Mandeln (burnt almonds), which are almonds covered in sugar and cinnimon. Josine told me about them when she got back from her junior year of high school in Germany, so I'd basically been waiting 5 years to try them.
While criticizing someone else's blog, it occurred to me that it would be very context-y to blog about German beer.
Some basics:
- Wikipedia site
- German magazine site in English
- Some key players in Regensburg:
Weizen: wheat beer (Blue Moon is a wheat beer widely available in the Boston area, I have never had it)
Hefe-Weizen: wheat beer with an extra kick of yeast
Weisse: light [colored] wheat beer (as opposed to Weizen, which can be dark or light)
Radler: lager beer mixed with either lemonade or a 7-up/Sprite-type soft drink.
Helles: light [colored] beer (Wikipedia says it's a lager, which means nothing to me)
Dunkles: dark beer (lies somewhere between your average beer and a Guinness, taste-wise)
Bock: strong beer, 6.25+ percent alcohol.
Berliner Weisse: pale, sour wheat beer, almost invariably served with a shot of either raspberry or woodruff syrup
Diesel: wheat beer and cola
- Radlers are tasty, once you get used to it.
- Hefe-Weizen have a very distinct taste, and when bottled you're supposed to jiggle the bottle to resuspend the yeast.
- I find Weisse on the sour side.
- I'm split on Helles, I think I had one that I liked and one that I didn't.
- I usually order a Dunkles.
