MaiDult is here! (Have some beer…)

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Steven

One of the great things about living in Germany is that there are always beer festivals. You don’t have to wait for Oktoberfest in Munich to get your beerfest on. For example, Regensburg has its own festival twice a year called Dult. In May, it’s Maidult. In the fall, it’s Herbstdult. It has all the same things you’d find at Oktoberfest – beer, lederhosen and dirndls, live music, giant pretzels, and rides- minus the enormous flood of tourists.

Right now, it’s Maidult. This weekend is the last weekend of Dult, running until the evening of Sunday the 26th. There will be fireworks at the closing, probably around 10pm since it’s not fully dark by 9.

At Dult, we have beer:

…and rides:

…and beer:

…and rides:

…and Poffertjes! (little tiny pancakes! In this case, with butter and powdered sugar on them. SO tasty.)

…and rides!

Have you ever been to Regensburg’s Dult?

Hannover (and Minden)

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Steven

On the weekend of April 27-28, I went to Minden for a Peter Cincotti concert. It is not an exaggeration to say that I’ve been looking forward to that show more than the Depeche Mode concert in June. Seriously, if you don’t know Peter Cincotti’s music, you should really check him out. For those of you on Spotify, here’s a very brief selection of his stuff. If you don’t use Spotify- these play buttons won’t work without the software. You’ll have to check Youtube to hear some of his stuff instead. Just check him out. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Ok, now that we’ve got the Peter Cincotti plug out of the way, I’ll talk about Hannover. I traveled to Minden for the concert by way of Hannover, and I did some sightseeing in Hannover on Saturday before the concert and again on Sunday before my train back home. I took a pantload of pictures, and I decided to show them to you a little bit out of sequence. This isn’t exactly the order that I visited stuff, but it’s close enough.

While walking around on that Saturday, I was more than a little bit surprised to see one of these:

While walking near the Kröpcke, a large pedestrian area near the Bahnhof, I also stumbled across a random volleyball tournament. This happened last year in Amsterdam too- it was rather unexpected.

I also wanted to point out this ingenious way to sell food. I saw one of these in Berlin a while back selling currywurst. I am consistently amazed at people’s ingenuity. Also, I kind of want one of those hands-free go-go-Gadget umbrellas. That’s really nifty!

I didn’t eat lunch from this guy though, I went to Jack The Ripper’s London Tavern instead. I mostly went because I liked the name of the restaurant, but the fish and chips were pretty good..

I took a walk down to the Leibnizufer to see the Nanas, large colorful sculptures by Niki de Saint Phalle. I had seen one other Nana recently, the flying protecting angel sculpture in Zurich. It’s the first picture in my Zurich post. When I learned that Niki de Saint Phalle was an honorary citizen of Hannover and had donated a lot of her artwork to the city, I had to go see some. They weren’t hard to find, either.

With my quest to see the Nanas a success, I decided to take the tram over to the Herrenhäuser Gärten, the Great Garden of Herrenhausen. It was absolutely enormous, and I could easily dedicate several hours to walking around on a warmer, sunnier, more flowerific day. That Saturday was cold and overcast, but it was still an amazing place. I wandered around for nearly two hours. Here are eight of the many, many photographs I took at Herrenhausen.

We interrupt this post about Hannover to show you a picture from an art gallery window in Minden. I really, really like the duck detectives, but I have no idea why. Also, the supplicant ant in the background cracks me up. If I ever go back to Minden when this place is open, I am totally buying one of the ducks though.

Meanwhile, back in Hannover, the weather cleared up a great deal. Sunday wasn’t any warmer than Saturday, but at least the sun came out. This means that the sky got bluer and the pictures got prettier.

Hannover has a lot of interesting sculptures. I find sculptures and statues that I like in every city I visit, but Hannover has a larger than average share of really neat ones. This giant gate and the caesar-looking dude on the horse are both standing at an intersection not terribly far from the Neues Rathaus, which I’ll get to a little further down in this post.

This glum fellow with the umbrella is standing not far away from a glum looking woman holding an umbrella. I really want to know the story behind this one.

Someone gave these two very red eyes. It makes them look really creepy. I’m just sayin’.

Hannover has a nice looking opera house. I know nothing further about this building. It sure is cool looking though.

One of the highlights of my trip to Hannover was the Neues Rathaus, the old “New Town Hall.” The building is no longer used for the main city administration, but it’s still got some offices in it. More importantly, you can walk around inside and go up inside the dome for a small fee. You know me and tall places, how could I not climb up?

The first part of the “climb” is actually an elevator to a small stairway to… another elevator. This elevator does most of the vertical ascent, but there are glass panels in the floor and ceiling to show you the shaft as you travel. The next picture is looking up and the following picture is looking down the elevator shaft. This is not for the claustrophobic, agoraphobic, or acrophobic.

At the top of the elevator, there is a chamber filled with decades of “Francisco was here, 1988!” styled graffiti, as well as a metal spiral staircase to get you to the upper levels of the observation dome.

The view from the observation level at the top of the stairs is amazing if you’re there on a clear day.

After visiting the dome, I walked around the inside of the building for a while. The grand staircase and the ceiling in the center chamber are amazing.

There are also a variety of models of the city of Hannover in various times. This one shows how bombed out the city was in 1945, which is really fascinating to see.

Segway tour! I saw these guys as I was walking around the Rathaus. I’ve always wanted to go on a Segway tour.

This is the view from the water’s edge behind the Rathaus. There’s a cafe right there- if I’d been hungry when I was at the Rathaus, I can’t think of a nicer place to sit and eat.

Lastly, this building… I’m not actually sure what it was. I assume it’s a church of some sort. It was just neat looking, so I snapped some pictures of it.

Have you ever been to Hannover?

I got an award thingie!

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Steven

A little while back, I got a note from The Diary of Sugar And Spice that she was nominating me for the Versatile Blogger Award. I’m not clear as to whether she’s Sugar or Spice.

The rules for dealing with this award, as noted here, involve the following:

Thank the person who gave you this award. (Thanks, Sugar and Spice!)
Include a link to their blog. (http://thediaryofsugarandspice.wordpress.com/)
Next, select 15 blogs/bloggers that you’ve recently discovered or follow regularly.
Nominate those 15 bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award
Finally, tell the person who nominated you 7 things about yourself.

For those who I am about to pass the award on to, please don’t feel obligated to do anything with it. The award isn’t created by any official group, like a WordPress Advisory Board or anything. It’s just one set of bloggers showing appreciation for the contributions of other bloggers.

However- I don’t like chain letters or posts that say “pass this on or else.” While I am following the rules of the award by listing fifteen bloggers below, my linking to you here doesn’t mean you’re required to do anything about it.

Moving on, then. I’m passing this on to:

And lastly, the requisite 7 Things About Myself:

I have never seen The Godfather. Not part 1, part 2, or part 3. I’ve never read the novel either. For as much as I love movies, everyone just assumes that I’ve seen this at some point, I never have.
I am immune to being earwormed by other people, but I earworm myself all the time.
I spent a chunk of the early 1990s in a Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow cast. I was usually Brad, but I played Frank a few times.
I only got my passport in 2006 because I wanted to see London. My goals at the time did not include any other destinations.
I carry ear plugs with me every day, and especially to all the concerts I go to because my hearing is already starting to show signs of wear and tear. When I’m in a crowded restaurant or bar, I often can’t tell what people are saying to me because I have a difficult time parsing their words out of the background noise.
Sometimes when I get going on a project or a blog post or something along those lines, I go into a sort of hyperfocus and lose all sense of time. It’s not uncommon for me to lose hours writing a series of blog posts. This is great for productivity, but bad for my health- when I am in this state, I forget to eat and I don’t notice the migraine forming until it’s far, far too late.
I’m a chronic overpacker pretending to be someone who travels very light. I can usually get myself down to a single bag, but that bag is stuffed to the gills. On any given trip, I might have too many extra shirts, a flashlight, enough electronic gadgets to initiate a hostile takeover of RJR Nabisco from the road, and quite possibly a boat anchor. (Hey, you never know when you’ll need to stop in a hurry!)

Do you pack light or are you also prone to overpacking?

Will this post stirrup your emotions? Neigh!

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Steven

March was, for me, an insane travel marathon. Four countries, eleven trains, five flights (two of them trans-atlantic), two long car rides, and numerous hotels- all in a period between March 19 and April 5. During that time, I realized something that I had never really given voice to before now- travel for me is all about the food.

This realization came to me when we got back from the second trip to Zurich. Yes, I went twice. In less than five days. I didn’t mention that previously because the second trip was for work. One of our colleagues from the Florida office came to Zurich, and she traveled back to Regensburg with us afterward so that she could see a little bit more of Europe while she was on this side of the Atlantic. That Friday, while a small group of us were walking around the Altstadt, my personal tour-guiding spiel sounded a bit like this: “This is one of the two Irish pubs in town. Over here, right past $IMPORTANT LANDMARK, is a great Italian restaurant. Here’s another giant church, and near it, one of my favorite places to have breakfast.”

I didn’t realize it until that moment, but my mental map of Regensburg is almost entirely comprised of food.

That wasn’t even the first food-related observation I had that weekend, either. During the second trip to Zurich, we went out to a lunch with our customers at a super-fancy restaurant in what used to be a ship-building yard. How fancy was the restaurant? When we walked in, someone took our coats and put them on a hanger. The hand towels in the bathroom were rolled fabric hand towels, not paper. The menus were actually made of iron. (Insert heavy metal joke here.)

During that meal, I ordered this:

The steak in the center of this plate is wrapped in Serrano ham. The stuff surrounding it is delicious baby onions and strawberries in a strawberry-pepper sauce.

The steak in the middle? It’s Pferdefilet. A horse meat steak. And it was delicious.

This isn’t the first time I’ve (knowingly) eaten horse meat. The first time was at an Italian restaurant in Berlin last September, as a pizza topping. But then, I’ve never been squeamish about unusual food, unless I can see it’s original form. When I was in Hong Kong, I ate kangaroo meat, jellyfish, Thousand Year Egg, and fugu. I didn’t get squicked out until the restaurant staff brought out a duck with the head and neck still attached.

The only thing I didn’t eat from the plate pictured above was the ham and the flower. I don’t really like ham all that much, and I wasn’t interested in the flower even though it was edible.

It’s important to remember that while all of these foods might seem unusual to an American, they’re not all that strange to a local. People have eaten horse-meat all over Europe for centuries. There are even special butchers just for horse meat in some countries. The other things I listed above from my Hong Kong trip? None of them is unusual to the restaurants that serve them. (The kangaroo meat was in an Australian restaurant, by the way- you don’t see too many kangaroos in China.)

What’s the most unusual food you’ve eaten?

Easter Weekend 2013, Part Four: The Rhine Falls

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Steven

The Friday and Monday surrounding Easter weekend this year were public holidays in Bavaria. Since I had a long weekend, I decided to do a whirlwind tour through Strasbourg France, Freiburg Germany, Zurich Switzerland, and the Rhine Falls near the Swiss-German border. The last stop on my whirlwind weekend was at the Rhine Falls!

On Easter Monday, the first of April, I boarded this adorable little Regional Express train from Zurich’s main station to Schaffhausen, in Switzerland. After a 40-45 minute train ride, another short bus took me from Schaffhausen over to Neuhausen am Rheinfall, to go check out the Rhine Falls, Europe’s largest waterfall.

When I was planning the trip, I discovered a nice restaurant directly overlooking the Falls, Schlössli Wörth. I made a reservation for lunch a few weeks in advance, and it’s a good thing I did, because the restaurant was completely booked when I arrived. The restaurant is in this structure. The docks are shared with tour boats that go directly up to the falls.

All of the tables in the restaurant line the outer ring of the building, and have great views out toward the falls. My table had a fantastic view.

This is what I was looking at while I ate. I couldn’t stop staring out the window. I’m extremely happy that the sun came out for this part of my trip.

My meal was amazingly good, also. This is a fillet of perch with saffron-butter over risotto. It was so good, I had a glass of wine. I almost never drink wine. This restaurant is a little pricey, but it was well worth it.

After treating myself to a nice lunch, I got on with the business of being a tourist at the Falls. From the shore, it looks very impressive. There are several different tour boats that go on different paths near the Falls.

I chose the yellow boats, which go to an outcropping of rock in the middle of the falls. You can climb up a winding stair to get a higher vantage point, with the waterfall on either side of you. The only way to get to this point is by boat. Here’s the boat.

In this photo, you can see one of the boats approaching the rock with the stairs. This shot gives you a sense of the scale and size of the waterfalls, since you can see tiny people on both the boat and the rocks.

“We’re headed right for the Falls!”

When we reached the tiny boat ramp at the base of the rocky outcropping, I was hilariously amused to note that standing off to one side, waiting to get on the boat to return to shore, were a pair of Mormon missionaries. The Mormons have been my constant companion as I tour all over Europe, Their little plastic name badges (Elder Smith, Elder Cunningham) are a source of bemused comfort now. But I digress.

The stairs are actually quite narrow and the entire structure is much smaller than it looks. It felt a little too crowded while I was there, and it was difficult to get good pictures from the stairs without other people in the frame. That didn’t stop me from trying, though.

Since I’ve been on the Maid Of The Mists at Niagara’s Horseshoe Falls, this seemed like a bit of a smaller waterfall to me. Still, it was damned impressive. I like waterfalls as much as I like tall places and trains. Now I need to see Victoria Falls.

What’s your favorite waterfall?

Doin' Time On The Donau

The life and times of a pop-culture junkie and music addict living in Regensburg, Germany.