Just another day

Not too much of excitement going on for the Ramquists in the last couple of days.

On Monday, we had a very interesting experience in the German spa. For those truly interested, send me an e-mail. My husband made me promise not to write about it in the blog, so write I shall not!!! Let's just say that the spa was more liberal than the spa I visited in Korea!!

On Tuesday we decided to find out if it was possible for Nate to bike from downtown Stuttgart to his office. So, we took the U1 tram (above ground train, called the U-bahn) from Vaihingen to Marienplatz. It took about 20 minutes by tram and seemed possible via sidewalks that for the most part said "biker - frei". We think that means bikers are allowed. We started to walk around Marianplatz, as we are thinking about living in that area and wanted to check it out. Of course, I got hungry so we went into a Turkish restaurant. Nate got an adana kebap, which is a bit long hunk of ground meat with a lot of spices in it. It had a bit of a kick, which is hard to find in Germany. We're discovering that the Germans don't like too much "hot" in their cooking. I got what ended up being a fish casserole with mushrooms, peppers, cheese, and onions baked into it. It was so hot I didn't really eat for the first 15 minutes. But, the flavor was great!!! I think that they put all sorts of spices and sauces to cover up the fact that they're using cheap fish... and it worked. I really liked it, as did Nate. We sopped up the leftover sauce with bread they left on the table. A really, really good meal.

Afterwards we decided to walk to a different U-bahn train, as we wanted to check out a suburb called Mohringen. BAD IDEA!!! Stuttgart is shaped like a bowl. The main city is inside the bowl, and then there are several suburbs all outside the bowl. We walked from the bottom of the bowl, to the top, and over! I am so out of shape, I was huffing and puffing and yelling at Nate the whole while. I had to remind him what a bad date he was!!! But, it ended up being a very pretty walk. We could see over the whole city, buildings, vineyards, and all. And, we were walking through an obviously wealthy section so there were very interesting buildings and gorgeous gardens everywhere.

I'm not sure how long we walked that night, but we only rode the tram for probably a half mile or so. We ruled out Mohringen. I think we're going to stay out of the burbs.

Last night we really didn't do much. After Nate got home we walked to the little Italian place we had eaten at before and ordered a bottle of wine and some pasta. Nate got noodles with broccolli and I got what ended up being a pork steak with a ham slice and cheese on top of it... with a side of noodles in this unbelievably good cream sauce with mushrooms. Can you tell that I liked this?!!!! After dinnner we just went home.

During the day I really haven't been doing too much. I've been doing some work for the company I used to work for, about four hours a day. The rest of the time I do things like go to backereis, grocery stores, pharmacies, and I'm hoping to eventually get the nerve up to hit up the metzerei (meat shop). Right now I'm heading out to a cafe to get some lunch and maybe a coffee. It's raining and it seems like a nice day to sit in the cafe, eat lunch, sip my coffee, and read a book. It's still nice being in Europe.