Taking the Scenic Route

Almost every house has a garden of some kind.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all “unsuccesful” journeys were so pleasant and peaceful?

Steps away from the hotel I see this window.
German Sock Yarn. LOTS of German Sock Yarn
An entire STORE of German Sock Yarn.
(for those who don’t know, German sock yarn is the top of the line in sock yarn)

You wanna know how to make me want to cry?

We leave Attendorn either the 20th or 21st (can’t remember) to spend our last night in Frankfurt for an early flight out. (and, if you will notice, that is our hotel in the reflection, that is how close it is)
Now I need to figure out how to say “Where can I buy Sock Yarn” and “Anyplace else?” *sigh*

When we were getting ready to leave for the trip, Zach thought gettiing phrase books was a waste of money, and I held off on getting them until the last day because of it. I just thought it was a bad idea to come here without phrase books, even if the people he works with speak English and a lot of people around here speak at least some English. Within hours of arrival, he was asking if I had the phrase book. lol.

On the same note, years ago, Zach got tipsy and asked me for my password to Amazon. I didn’t think much of it until, several days later, a compass arrived in the mail. I was baffled as to why he ordered a compass. We live in Kansas where everything is squared off and you can tell what direction it is just by looking at the roads and the position of the sun. We don’t really hike or do anything where a compass is particularly helpful. I teased him about his “drunken compass buying” for years. When we were packing, he pulled out the compass and asked if he should pack it. I jokingly said “yes…maybe it will finally be useful for something and it doesn’t take up much space”. Well, thank goodness we had it. Just trying to figure out the map that first day so that he could get to work was causing huge amounts of stress because we couldn’t tell from Google maps, initially, which building we were even in. We could see the church, but we couldn’t see enough of it to really understand which way it was setting (now I realize that the second spire is the back of the church and we are behind the church). In the middle of the frustration, I suggested he get out the compass and see which direction we are facing and then orient the map to it. It worked. For once, that dang drunken compass was truly useful.

The light wasn’t great and we didn’t walk a long ways. We noticed a market much closer to our hotel and wanted to check that out. It wasn’t as nice as the other one, but had what we needed. (milk for coffee). The food here doesn’t have nearly the preservatives or processing that it seems to in the US, which means it all tastes better, but spoils a lot faster. One dh’s coworkers warned him about that and we noticed our milk was already going sour yesterday. Even a typical household has a “dorm size” refrigerator because they go shopping every day for food. The markets mostly have hand baskets rather than the big carts I am used to seeing too. (they have some smaller carts, and the big market had the kid car carts, but the basket attached to it was about 1/3rd the size of ours) They also don’t bag your purchases, and you are expected to bring your own market basket of shopping bag. (We purchased some shopping bags a few days ago so I didn’t have to try and jam everything into my purse. lol)

Now I understand some of the Haba toys better. Some of the play food was a little odd to me, but I see now what they are taking after. They also have market baskets which just seemed like a neat novelty item to me before, but now I realize it is how they live here.

Along the way, we noticed this door on the building next to the hotel. 

 
Saw this in a window.  Now, I would have taken a picture of it even if I didn’t know the story because who the heck displays a cat with an arrow through it.  lol.  Yesterday, however, the staff at the hotel told us the story behind it, so we could enjoy understanding why there is a cat with an arrow through it. 

Apparently, hundreds of years ago, during a war, the soldiers thought they saw somebody  in the window of the castle, so they shot an arrow into the window.  It wasn’t the person, it was a cat.  They earned the reputaion as “cat killers” and the incident had become so well known that there was eventually a festival honoring the event.

Here are a few shots of the hotel.  On the right is the patio/parking lot we parked on when we first came here.  The door with the brick step and the fountain in front of it is the door we went into.  We did discover there is an actual “front desk”, but it is through another door.  (the one in between the restaurant and bar, instead of the one between the bar and the breakfast room)  On this photo, you can see the 3 windows to the bar/pub on the left building, and the picture windows to the breakfast area on the right building.

The stoplight on the corner.  You could never have a light like this in America.  The first time somebody had an accident, the city would be sued because the stoplight wasn’t visible enough.

The hotel from around the corner.  The stoplight is far right, unseen (in that patch of ivy you just peek at on the far right side).  The 2 windows to the bar are on the right, and the 3 windows (shown) to the left of the door are to the restaurant.  If you go into that middle door, you pass through the hotel lobby on the way to the restaurant.

A few doors down from the hotel, on the way to our room, is this shop.  This is where we had that pizza, and earlier in the day Zach ordered lunch there (#3) to bring up to the room during his lunch break.  We decided to stop by and get another pizza since the hotel restaurant was closed.  This time we just got ONE pizza. The guy remembered us.

 If I venture a guess, this doesn’t mean quite what I think it means.  As it stands, this would be the last place I would go to have my hair done.  lol

Stopped at the Hotel Pub before returning to the room.  They serve local brews.  We tried two brews on Tuesday night, and two brews on Wednesday night.  The brews are really heavy on the hops and, with the exception of the last one we tried last night, way too bitter for my taste.  But when you are in Germany, you have to try the beer.  It’s a rule.

Both of the servers pictured here can speak decent English.  (actually most of the people here can at least speak a few words of English) The young blond girl is from France and at least Tri-lingual.   The other one has been our waitress several times.  Both are really nice.  Actually, everyone we have met here has been very gracious. 

On Tuesday, when we ate in the restaurant, I looked up how to say “no onion” just to make sure it didn’t have onions (although I have been surprised to know that there aren’t onions in everything here.  At home, almost everything has onions, especially the German-Mennonite ethnic cooking).  After we sat there for a bit, the chef came out and asked if garlic was ok, in perfect English.  I was stunned and pleased.  First, to recognize that an onion allergy might also mean a garlic one (which is true for my dad, but I am fine with garlic), second, to actually ask instead of assume.  I was impressed.  (The dish didn’t come with onions, but it had pesto, which always has garlic in it)  The food was magnificent.  I have noticed that all of the food here tastes extremely fresh and homemade.  I have yet to eat anything that wasn’t absolutely wonderful.  (well, except for that soft cheese I got the first day, but that was just because it wasn’t to my taste, there wasn’t anything wrong with it)

Our Server looked up the words in the translator just to let us know “A good German Beer takes at least 7 minutes to pour”  when our beer sat there in front of us under the taps, waiting. 

Ah, at last.  This one is our favorite.  It is the first beer I think I have tasted in my life that I actually liked, not just tolerated.  (I am not much for beer.  I like wine, but beer generally doesn’t taste all that great to me)  It is the pope’s favorite beer if I understood her correctly.

As we left the pub and walked around the corner, this sight greeted us.  It is a double rainbow, but the second one didn’t show up well in the photo, and the main rainbow was much brighter in person.  You could see all of the spectrum and it seemed to be a full rainbow.

Back in the room, the supper we got from the market.  We had it on crackers, which I am guessing isn’t the norm around here given that there were only two cracker boxes in the whole market, and one was Ritz and the other looked like a Ritz knock-off. 

The larger whole sausage is called “Fresh Sausage” and reminded me of the “fat hot dogs” I used to get at the local market from the butcher counter in the back in the small towns I grew up near.  It was a treat that we didn’t get often, and also depended on whether or not they had them that day.  Usually, we only got them during harvest time.  (because that was one of the main times we didn’t have time to drive to the bigger city to shop, so we were in the local market a lot more)  I need to remember to tell Zach to leave the “skin” on the whole thing next time.  The snap of the skin as you bite into it is part of the experience.  lol.

edited to add: I was wrong, the sausage casing is not a natural sausage casing in this case. (this casing case…lol) It is a paper of some kind and most certainly not meant to be eaten.

Now that I know I can open the windows on the street (duh) I had a few more opportunities for pictures and just standing there watching the world pass by for a while.

I thought this was a person standing on the balcony for a while. The little reflective pinwheel fans in the neighboring flowerbox kept catching my eye too.

It was the first day I felt a breeze and it played with the banners hanging around.

And out our back window, they have laundry hanging on the line inside every day.  I think it might be the hotel’s laundry, but I am not sure.

My posting nest. Notice the internet connection dropped once again.

A sidenote:  As I sit here posting, I hear the bells pealing from the bell tower.  Beautiful.

Yesterday Zach went to retrieve his work email and it kept dropping after a bit, so he went to the window in hopes of a better connection.  Still didn’t work.  Found out when he went to work that the enire mail server system in North America is down for his company.  So, it wasn’t the connection this time.

However, I have noticed that the internet connection is pretty dang slow compared to what I am used to.  I finally have time to read blogs, but they don’t always come up, and almost every time I go to make a comment (especially on xanga blogs) I get dropped.  To reconnect I have to go through a huge rigamarole and lots of waiting again, so I am just not even going to try and comment any more.  lol. 

The TV is, naturally, almost all in German.  There is one channel that is in English, although I think it comes out of Britian, not America, and is another version of CNN.  Pretty much the only thing being reported right now is the War in Georgia (I think it was part of the former USSR).  There is very little Olympic coverage or non-war coverage, and there is a limit to how much I can listen to about war because it really upsets me.

Therefore, all the Olympic coverage I have seen has been pretty much on mute or very low volume (if my back is turned, so I can hear the difference when they move to another sport and see if it is something I am interested in).  I haven’t seen a single shot of Women’s Gymnastics.  None.  I am a little frustrated.  Watching gymnastics is about the only sport, outside of figure skating, that I enjoy watching, and the enjoyment of both of those sports formed when I was a little girl watching Nadia and Dorthy Hamill.  lol.  (that dates me, doesn’t it).  Finally, this morning (Thursday), I saw a few Men’s Gymnastics routines on the high bar. 

Most of the coverage is on syncronized diving (didn’t know this was an olympic sport), kayaking (didn’t know this was an olympic sport either), swimming, (although they do a lot of the prelims and I miss a lot of the finals with the Americans racing), fencing (not horrible), some sport that takes place on a field  that resembles a soccer field with teams and they use their hands to throw a ball around (I think, I am looking at a small tv at little bitty people), field hockey (I assume…I have never seen field hockey, but they have hockey sticks hitting a ball around a field), judo or karate or something like that, weight lifiting (most boring sport ever),  and some Equestrian stuff.  When the horses move around and jump over things, not so bad, but when they just walk around the ring in a pattern I don’t get what they are doing exactly and I can’t understand the commentary, so it just looks like a horse walking in circles.

I wasn’t too upset about the lack of gymnastics coverage at first because I assumed I could go online and watch it.  There were several places to watch videos online, and, naturally, some great sites from the US that would cover the people I have been following.  I learned something.  Even though I downloaded the Microsoft viewer (something I loathe doing, but it was the only way to view the videos) you can’t view anything on those sites if you are trying to connect from another country.  WHAT THE HECK!?!  I was so mad.  I tried other english speaking countries and they had the same dang policy.  So I will be watching no Olympics in English this time around.  Well, maybe the closing ceremony because we get home that day, but since TV will not be a priority, I will probably miss those too.

I just want to strangle the person who was supposed to get us the Rosetta Stone software and didn’t.  Arg!  Maybe I would understand a little more then, but you can’t really follow tv with a phrase book because they talk too fast.

For a short bit it is amusing to see American shows dubbed over because the voices are different.  In some instances, enough different to be comical to me.  I only watch about 3 minutes to hear the voices and then move on, but it is amusing for a bit.  Some of the shows I have seen:  NCIS (Abbi’s voice, in particular, is really wrong), CSI (the main redhead guy has such a distinctive voice that that one is funny to me too), Spongebob (rofl), Higglytown Heroes (annoying in any language), Rosanne (I could almost follow that one because I have seen so many of them), House (wrong, wrong, wrong), and a few other shows I recognized, but have never watched. 

The only thing we have watched more than 3 minutes of was Star Trek:  First Contact because we knew the dialoge well enough that we didn’t need to understand them, plus, we could almost understand them because we knew the English version well enough to hear the language similarities and could pick up on actual words. I bet if they showed Star Wars. Star Trek and Little House on the Prairie back to back a few times I could figure out the language because I have so many of them practically memorized.  (ok…I realize, that particualar combination is wierd, but that would be me)

I got an umbrella yesterday so that I am not stuck in the room every day because it seems to rain all of the time. I will probably still stay inside in the morning, posting, sipping coffee and tea, reading, etc, but after lunch I will go walk around the town a bit more. I feel a little better now so I want to go do something. (the stitches are now all out of my mouth. The final one let go this morning and my mouth feels much better. Still a little tender, but not horrible anymore)

Woke up to fog resting on the mountains

It rained most of the day, so I stayed in the hotel room, sipping hot tea and reading a book. It was a wonderful, lazy afternoon.

When Zach got home from work we decided to go to the market to pick up a few things. Naturally, I grabbed the camera.

The roundabout near the market.

Because a junior high kid resides in me…

The sidewalks

The tall hedges are all over the place

The brickwork on the streets and sidewalks is amazing.

A few posts back I mentioned that there seems to be two kinds of windows. I was wrong. There is one kind of window (in many cases) and it opens two ways. Observe:

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Zach was told by one of his coworkers that those are typical German windows. Very cool. I want windows like that.