April in Paris

We saw, we ate, we drank....we enjoyed every second.

Old Country Fairytale

You know when you think of Germany, you think of timbered houses, quaint villages with cobblestone roads, and in general just cute?  Well, that's where I took Mom when she visited....to France.  To be fair, it's that portion of France that changed hands so many times between Germany and France that it's a little of both.

We went to the Alsace region of France and drove along the wine route.  It's made up of those quaint villages with cobblestone roads.  The required phrase was "awww, how cute."  We visited Obernai, the Haut-Koenigsbourg Castle, Riquewehr, and others that I can't remember.  But they were cute.

It turns out that the emblem of the Alsace are storks.  There were stork nests on the tops of buildings, at the tops of poles designed for stork nests, and it seemed everywhere.  We got a few good pictures of these storks in their nest. 


 













I took Mom to Heidelberg on Friday so she could see the castle with the views.  There's an American base near by, so there tend to be a lot of Americans there, but it's a nice city and the castle, the grounds, and the view are beautiful.

The trip was relaxing and not the run-around of trying to see a bunch of things all in a week.  The weather couldn't have been in any better.  It was sunny and in the low 60s every day.  I think almost every single one of our lunches were outside in the sun.

Pinch Me

You think that if you've seen one, you've seen them all.  Well, that doesn't 't really hold true for some things.

There are very few places left that I really want to go and very few things that I really want to see before I leave Europe this summer and return to the place I really want to be.  So on Christmas Day, I was looking for places to go over the long weekend in January when I realized that I had yet to see David's butt.

That's right, the main reason I went to Florence was to see David's butt.  And there's no hiding the fact (mainly because he's naked) that it is in fact a nice butt. 

This is a replica on top of a hill at Piazza Michelangelo.

And the one below is outside the Uffzi Museum.

You're not allowed to take pictures inside the Accademia, where he lives.

 So I took my time and admired Michelanelo's work.

I'm not a museum person, but I am an architecture and beautiful scenery person.  Florence has all three.  Florence also has some wonderful food and also happens to in the Chianti region....what a coincidence!  So, I took in the scenery, the wonderful vitamin D that I've needed so desperately, and the fruits of the region, all topped off with some great naps.

Girls Like Us

To the land of escargot and foie gras for Thanksgiving!!  That's where Jen, Kim, and I went, without husbands (I think they preferred that more than I, plus I wanted to use that word).   Unfortunately the Christmas market wasn't open and the weather was cold and wet, but France has wine and food and wine and wine.

Strasbourg is only about 2 hours from Wiesbaden and it's in the Alsace region, which at several points in history, couldn't figure out to which country it belonged--to France or to Germany.  Once it was decided and because of the winners, they speak French, but their food is influenced by Germany (think pork knuckle and potatoes with a delicious sauce, like Jen learned), and many people speak at least a little German.

We had fabulous food and some great wine.  When we arrived and were walking in no particular direction, Kim was about to pass out from hunger and we stumbled upon a very nice restaurant.  Everyone was very friendly and it helped we were willing to try without being demanding.  Jen asked our waiter a recommendation for food and what arrived looked very much like corned beef.  We were told it was pork, but it didn't taste like pork.  Later that night, we figured out from someone else's plate at another restaurant that she probably had pork knuckle.

For Thanksgiving we had dinner reservations at a restaurant apparently popular with dignitaries.  I got my escargot and foie gras.  The foie gras was a little sweet for my taste, but the escargot was wonderful--not Petit Louis wonderful, but still wonderful.  Our waitress was so nice.  She only spoke French, but didn't do in an elitist way.  She was clearly much more comfortable in French, but understood English.  I can't explain it.

Thanksgiving appetizers: escargot and foie gras

The next day before we left, we stopped by the Strasbourg City Hospital, which has a wine cellar that was built in 1395 and contains ancient wine barrels and wine from the 17th century.  We also did some clothing shopping and got some wine from the grocery store to take home.

On an Evening in Roma

Over Memorial Day weekend I went to Rome with my good friends Kim, Brian, and their 4-year old son Jack. Rome was another place on my list that I have always wanted to see, so in April when Lufthansa was having a sale on flights within Europe, we combined that with a holiday weekend and booked it. We stayed at a place we booked through Vacation Rentals by Owner, which is a site that regular people use to put their house/apartment/whatever up for vacationers in cities all over the world. Our place was great. It was just down the street from the Colosseum, away from the noise of the main street, and included a private patio.

The Italian gentleman, Andreas, we rented the apartment from recommended restaurants, certain self-paced tours of sites, and also where the grocery store and other necessities were. Since we were starving, we went to the closest recommended restaurant to our hotel and it was awesome. It was a small place with seats outside and it was packed with Italians and tourists alike. The place across the street was empty. The prices were super cheap and the house wine was amazing. We liked this place so much that we went back for our last night. The best part was that the local Italians seemed to love it as much and they were regulars, judging by their interaction with the staff and owner.

On Saturday, we headed for the Spanish Steps. We hadn't had coffee or anything to eat yet, so in tremendous faux pas, we found a McDonald's and got coffee and croissants. We wandered over to a piazza that Andreas recommended, where you could climb to a high point and get a view of the city. After that, we had lunch and then walked to the Vatican, for which we had reserved tickets online.

Spanish Steps

View of Rome

First of all, the Vatican is huge. You walk in and you see signs pointing toward the Sistine Chapel, which is all I wanted to see, you walk down some halls, past beautiful artwork, and some awesome ceiling art, but you still aren't there. So you follow more signs and you think that it's got to be close. But it's not. More hallways, more art, more signs. Finally, you arrive to a huge, dim room full of tourists who wanted to see the same thing. And you look up.

Not the Sistine Chapel, but very beautiful.

Even though there are signs saying no photography and guards, too few for the large crowd, shouting 'no photographs', there are still people taking pictures. So, I turned off my flash, held the camera at my chest and pointed up for a few shots. It's hard to see (especially since I didn't bring my glasses) with the dim light, but it was absolutely amazing and beautiful. The crowds got to me, though, so I didn't stay long.

The Sistine Chapel

Me, in from the Vatican and not on fire!

Since we had been walking all day, literally from the Vatican to our apartment near the Colosseum, Brian and I went to the grocery store to get stuff for dinner. We bought super cheap wine, which turned out to be really good, and had pasta with sausage and zucchini on the patio that evening. It was wonderful.

The walk to Piazza Navona

Rome is filled with lots of statues with butts and phallic symbols. Funny.

On Sunday our only goal was to see the Colosseum and we figured 10 was pretty early, but were surprised to find the line already with a wait of 45 minutes. So instead of waiting, we joined one of the English tours they were trying to get people to join outside and I'm glad we did. Had we just paid for entry, we wouldn't have heard any of the stories of the entertainment that the Colosseum intended. Around 700,000 people died in matches and thousands of different kinds of animals from all over the world that the Romans could reach. The guide said that they had "comedy" shows in between the battles. The comedies were things like a dog versus a porcupine or a woman versus a midget.

Inside the Colosseum, this was the arena floor, which you can see they've reconstructed there on the right. The gladiators entered from beneath and the floor had trap doors to remove the dead animals or the gladiators. The gladiators were mostly criminals who were serving a sentence and they lived across the street, where they learned to fight. Being a gladiator, if you survived, was sort of like being a Hollywood star in today's world.

Since Jack wasn't having a lot of fun and Brian was bored too, they left Kim and I to walk around on our own after lunch. We strolled the city, saw Trevi fountain, and got a gelatto and coffee. That evening we went back to the same restaurant we tried the first night. Kim and I got an awesome spicy pasta and mussels dish and some delicious red house wine.

Trevi Fountain

It was a great trip, with great weather, and some great friends. I'm happy to have been able to see Rome with them.

Upside Down

On Saturday my friend Kim and I took a USO tour called Riesling...something..something...wine tour. That's all I heard anyway ;) Erich "the Red" was our German guide. He got his nickname from President Kennedy, because he couldn't pronounce Erich's last name. So because Erich had (at that time) a red beard and red hair, Erich "the Red" he became. Erich took us through the Rheingau (Rhein River area) stopping in a few towns to explain different things about them and the places you can go to taste the small winery's product. He was a wonderful tour guide with a very dirty-old-man sense of humor.

The tour was mostly driving through the towns on a "bus." The bus, it turned out, was a 15-passenger van. I knew that was trouble in the making, since I tend to get a little car sick, but add windy roads and some incline to it and I wasn't enjoying the ride. Since it was bitterly cold, everyone opted for an old coffeehouse Erich offered instead of more of the tour in the middle of the afternoon. After that, it was more driving; however, we finally ended up at our final destination close to 4.



We went to a small winery where we were treated to 9 wines, plus dinner, and dessert. Everything was delicious! Erich described the wines, what food they went well with, and of course added his humor at any chance he got. "Nipple popper," we learned, was one of his favorite phrases and once he described a wine as a "triple nipple popper."

After dinner, we headed down to the cellar, which dated back to the 1200's. The owner of the winery told us that tradition was that when your daughter got married instead of a dowry, you gave several bottles of wine from your daughter's birth year. His daughter never got married, so he let us taste some of his wine from 1975. Delicious!

Kim thinks Erich had a slight crush or fascination with me, because he made note of my cold red nose while we were outside, remarked how good my haircut looked on me, and also called me "princess" and his "doll." Oh, and when Kim wanted a picture of the two of us, he insisted on kissing my hand.

I don't have any other prospects...hmmm.

I Heard it Through the Grapevine

Some of the rows we picked.

Today, a group of us went to a winery in Nierstein, a city on the Rhein. I carpooled (since I don't have a car) with Tony, who is also living in this hotel, and we arrived just before 7:30 in the fog, barely finding the winery (thank you GPS). The plan was that we get breakfast, we pick grapes, we get lunch, we pick grapes, we taste wines. Sounds great, right? How hard can it be? I mean, the people in the movies are always beautiful and warm and enjoying themselves. Ummm, yeah.

There were about 25 of us who carpooled from the winery to the vineyard, following the vintner. There were immigrant workers there already, which I gathered from their accents were probably Polish, some other Eastern European country, and possibly Italy. We gathered and wasting no time, got our clippers, a bucket and went to work on about 10 rows of vines so long and covered by the dense fog, you actually didn't know how long they were. We later learned they were 4100 square meters (about an acre). We busied ourselves clipping the grapes, moldy ones and all. It was cold, foggy, and wet. So the first hourish was miserable to a degree. Breakfast was the typical German bread, meat, and cheese....and since we were at a winery....WINE!

A heap of grapes we gathered in just an hour.

My bucket o' grapes.

After breakfast we returned for more free labor and worked forever. I felt better, I was a little warmer, because someone had on too many layers and gave their coat, but the grapes only seemed to be hanging at waist level and below. What does that mean? A lot of bending and hunching. After what seemed like forever, but realizing we had snipped the grapes almost to the end of our rows, it was time for lunch.

Don't be fooled, I really wasn't smiling much during the picking of the grapes.

They made yummy soup, had bread, meat salad, fried potatoes.....and WINE! Lunch lasted a little longer, which everyone seemed to be happy about given the hard work. I even saw a few guys break out the ibuprofen!! We went back to work and finished off our rows, which took us to 2:30. Awesome, wine time, right? Uh no, at this point, the vintner said there were about 1400 square meters left at a different part of the field and the group usually stayed until 4:30. Some people were so tired that they didn't want to continue, which included the person who was my ride. I didn't want to bother anyone with a ride back and just came back with Tony.

So, unfortunately, I didn't get to stay for the other 2.5 hours of more grape picking, which would have been followed by coffee, cake, and a wine tasting. I would have stayed, even though I was tired and wet, but I was sort of okay with going home. Afterall, we had wine at lunch and I got to experience the back-breaking work of picking grapes ;)

I got home, relaxed a bit, then decided I wanted some food for my room, so I ventured to the commissary just 15 minutes down the street. I didn't stay long, but I was impressed with the selection. I picked up some staples for my room, including good coffee, since the stuff they serve here at "breakfast" is crap. (Just an FYI: I made need some Peet's coffee sent to me soon after I finish the bag I bought today. At the store, it was Newman's Own (RIP), Starbucks (yuck), Seattle's Best, or general brands I don't even consider coffee (says the coffee snob).

Any bets on how hard it's going to be for me to get out of bed tomorrow morning? Let me just give you a sneak peek: bending over to brush my teeth was slightly problematic for the muscles in my lower back. Now where'd I put that Tylenol PM...