We woke up and had a “traditional” Bavarian breakfast. I use
the quote mainly because I couldn’t tell if Joe and Yanni were making this up
as an excuse to pound liters of beer for breakfast. Yanni’s mother got up early
to make us a wonderfully delicious home-made breakfast before we headed out on
our adventures. A traditional Bavarian breakfast includes playing yodeling and
oom-pa-pa Bavarian music loudly on the stereo, eating weisswurst (white
sausages), large pretzels with sweet mustard, potatoes, and this amazing cheese
spread called “Obatzda”. Obatzda is a Bavarian specialty that combines
two-thirds aged Camembert and ones-third butter. Apparently, everyone’s
grandmother makes it differently by adding a little of this and that, so you’ll
never get the same one twice, but it’s truly delicious and I plan to make this
myself. It’s life-changing cheese (but then again, which cheese isn’t?!?!?!?!)
Then, as I said, there are liters of beer involved. In the morning. It was going
to be a long day.
We hopped in the car and headed over to Burgthann, another
small village with a cool castle-like structure. We climbed all the staircases
and took lots of photos of the view. Really beautiful country here in the
hillls of Bavaria. As Joe and I were walking past a random doorway, these women
were getting ready to open some sort of shop inside. They yelled at Joe and
somehow talked us into moving this bookcase/desk thing for them. The thing had
to have weighed 500 pounds or more. Neither of us were expecting that kind of
effort, but they were sweet little ladies and Joe and I are chivalrous
strapping young men who were smart enough to fake like it was as light as a
feather. Hahahaha
We continued the drive to the Ludwig-Donau-Main-Kanal
(Ludwig Canal), which links the Danube basin with the Rhine basin. This doesn’t
sound impressive, but when I explain what it is, it will get exponentially more
impressive. King Ludwig I (not the “mad” one build this canal between 1836 and
1846 and used horses to pull barges full of goods more than 60km in the hills
of Bavaria. Sounding more impressive? It’s gets more impressive when I focus on
the word “hills”. The hills were a bit of an engineering challenge since canals
generally need a flat area to traverse, since pulling barges up waterfalls isn’t
ideal. So King Ludwig moved MASSIVE amounts of earth to basically “fill in the
gaps” between hills. Think about how much dirt you’d have to re-locate to fill
in a gap between two small mountains, now multiply that by like 100 mountains.
NOW, it’s impressive. There are number
of cute tiny locks and dams along the route, but it’s really a neat engineering
feat. The canals are basically abandoned, but a few times a year, during festivals, they break out a
team of horses and pull the 70 year old “Elfriede”
boat up and down the canal for fun.
That was about all the time I had for fun this morning as I
had to catch a train to go to my work conference. I thanked Yanni’s lovely,
generous, and hospitable parents for everything. Then we walked the five blocks
back to the train station, so I could head back to Frankfurt. Yanni and Joe
even accompanied me part of the way, so they could have some fun time after
touring me around Bavaria. Seriously, thank you both so much, Yanni and Joe, I
can’t wait to see you two again. Possibly next year during conference time!!!!
I made it to my hotel and was amused to find these hilarious
pillow sculptures they made on my bed. I was pretty underwhelmed with their
work on these. I’ve seen waaaay more impressive towel, pillow, and blanket
sculptures at other places. But let’s be honest – I don’t usually stay at
places fancy enough for any sore of sculptures to make appearances, so I shouldn’t
complain or make fun. Hahaha
I’ll point out two additional weird things about my hotel,
however: The buttons on the elevator aren’t in any real order. I understand the
words for basement and lobby don’t start with the same letters in German as
they do in English, but at least the numbers should be in a consistent order. Bizarre.
I also found out (when I pushed the wrong button on the elevator)
that my hotel has beer in the vending machine in the basement. Hard to complain
about THAT…
There was a quick happy hour at the conference hotel, so I
walked down this creepy dark path for a mile to drink some drinks and network
with some really smart people. You don’t care about the conference, I assure
you.
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