Heidelberg

I hope that you all had a lovely Memorial Day weekend. We had a lot of fun!

Friday Night
For some reason on Fridays I'm usually pretty tired, as is Nate. We went out to dinner at a little Italian joint in a pedestrian circle. The weather was sunny, breezy and the food was good. We got ice cream from our favorite stand and decided to go see the movie Pirates of the Caribbean III. It's always fun to go to the little "English" theatre and listen to people speaking English all around us. Mainly it is parents from the army base with their kids. We just sit and listen and smile.

Saturday
We had intended to get up early and go to Italy to see my brother Tim. Tim is in Italy right now singing with his choir. However, he didn't see it fit to actually tell us where to find him, so instead we went to an Italian Fest going on at the local convention center. It was called "Italiano Mundo", which I think means something like Italian World. Inside there were big displays set up covering different cities and regions in Italy. Each had something like food, wine, olive oil, trinkets, leather, etc. on display. There was also a large Ferrari, Mazzerati, and Ducati section. Nate and I drooled over the Ferrari convertibles. Maybe someday we will have hundreds of thousands of Euro to drop on one of those beautiful cars. But.. probably not! We ate gnocchi and lasagna in one section and went to several other sections sampling wine. The wine in the "Trentino" section was by far our favorite, so we picked up a bunch of brochures and plan to travel there very soon!!! It is in the North, so will be very easy for us to access from Germany. We got some delicious gellato, played foosball in the "kids" section, and enjoyed ourselves for quite a while.

Sunday
We decided to check out the evening service at the "City Chapel" that we had visited before, so we slept in and then took the S-bahn to the Neckar Park I talked about before. We strolled along until we came to a nice spot and stopped to read our books for a while. Hunger pangs started so we found a little roadside "wurst" stand and got our sausages, chips, and (as usual) ice cream. They had a fun little area with ping pong tables, and wouldn't you know Nate had brought our paddles and ball. We had a blast. The wind was ferocious, so the ball was spinning in odd directions, sometimes hovering in mid air. We played for a long time, and then kept on walking down along the park. It started to rain, so we jumped on the U-bahn and took it back into the city. We stumbled upon this cute little pub and decided to go in for supper. It was pretty empty because we were there so early, but the food and service were both spectactular. We got a salad that ended up having mushrooms fried in butter sprinkled over the top. It was incredibly good (if unhealthy). We also got a pork, cream sauce, mushrooms, and spaetzle dish that tasted similar to ones we'd had before. However, this cream sauce was made with some sort of wine and tasted lighter than the others we'd had. It was delicious. Afterwards we looked at our Lonely Planet guidebook and saw that we had accidently picked one of the "restaurants to visit" while in Stuttgart. I guess we just have good taste.

Monday
Memorial Day was wet. Very wet. But, we decided that the rain wouldn't deter us from travelling. So, we went to the main train station and bought ourselves the discount "Bahn Cards". We bought the 50% off card. So basically you pay a start-up fee and then eventually you save more money than you paid by getting big travel discounts. I'm sure that makes no sense... but anyhow, after buying the card we bought train tickets to Heidelberg. We are meeting my Dad there on June 13th and thought it might be fun to check out the town.

We arrived in the rain, walked in the rain to the town center, and strolled around in the rain using their map guide. Supposedly we were looking at famous old buildings, but the map wasn't specific and we got pretty frustrated. Sooo we took to a beer hall recommended by the Lonely Planet book. It was a small, old building in an abandoned mill. The tables were long and packed with Germans. We squeezed in at a little table and ordered two half liters. Then, we ordered what the Germans call "spargel". Now, we have been seeing signs for this spargel in nearly every restaurant we go to. Basically it is white asparagus. It is REALLY expensive, so we decided that we would just try it once since we were on a bit of a "vacation!" Out came our spargel with hollandaise sauce, boiled potatoes, and schnitzel. Well, the spargel tasted just like normal asparagus (which neither of us are a fan of), so we fought over the potatoes and schnitzel : ) I doubt we'll buy it again.

Afterwards we walked to the big castle in town. It was absolutely beautiful. Part of it is crumbling, but other sections were restored and just amazing. They also had two old beer/wine vats that were HUGE!!!!!!!!!! The grosses vat holds 220,000 liters--- I think it may be the largest vat in the world. We toured the gardens, the pharmacy museum, and found a pond full of tadpoles. If those tadpoles all live, the castle will be seriously overrun with frogs.



We were wet and cold. So we stopped in at a cafe and had some cappuccino and a piece of apfelstrudel. After a visit to a Jesuit church we were just plain tired, so we walked back to the train station and took the train home. We hopped on over to our favorite Italian place and just relaxed in the warm, familiar building with our wine and pasta. It was good to be home.