First snowfall!

J and I were greeted this morning with the first snowfall we have experienced since living in Germany.  I don't know if it's coincidental, but I have heard that stateside a lot of people had their first snowfall of the year this past week as well.  It has literally snowed all morning, but very lightly.

Rothenburg ob den Tauber

I walked Etsy the last morning we were in Bad Windsheim, packed things up, and then headed out once J was done with her last conference day.  We decided to do some sightseeing of Rothenburg ob der Tauber before heading home.  I don't have all of the pictures here, but I'll post what I have immediately on hand.

We first tried to catch the noon tolling of the main square clock, but missed it by two minutes.  We then wandered around.  First, we went up the Rathaus tower and peeked out the window.  Second, we looked through several Christmas shops.  Third, we toured the gardens and looked at the Jewish memorial (apparently, there was another devastating ethnic cleansing of Judaism in Germany in the 1200's, according to the memorial).  Fourth, we wandered through more shops.  Fifth, we tried to tour through the churches, but didn't feel like spending euro to do it.  Sixth, we looked at some of the ramparts, the section of town destroyed by WWII bombing and being rebuilt by donated support.  All in all, Rothenburg is very impressive.  It's literally an entire city encased in a large town wall.  Most walled-in medieval cities are quite small, whereas Rothenburg felt like well over a square mile in size!  It felt quite spacious for being completely walled in, and the architecture is indeed very well preserved.  It also felt like a modern town in that road construction was still being done, there were grocery stores, cafes, restaurants, a Rathaus, several churches, and a more residential section of town.

Here are some of the pictures I have off hand...

This is the town symbol.  I thought it looked a lot like the symbol for the Freys of Game of Thrones.

This is in the gardens.  I liked the mossy rock water spring touch with fish in the pond, but again, I like all of those things:)

Here is from the Marktplatz of Rothenburg looking down one of the streets to what we thought was a gate.  Turned out, it was not a gate but the lone random gate-looking clock tower in town.

This is also from the Marktplatz looking downhill to one of the actual gates.  Rothenburg has six gates that I can remember.  They are easy to spot because they are all very tall, have large doorways at their base, and nearly all have clocks on them.

This is from the "Ramparts" on the wall under reconstruction looking into the city at the largest church.  This particular church had a tunnel underneath where carriages and pedestrian can still travel through.  This is the first cathedral I have ever seen that was built for common traffic to travel under.

This is a view down the "Ramparts."  For 1000 euro you can have your name on a plaque on the wall as you see here as you have effectively donated enough money to restore one meter of wall.  You can donate more if you like.  I'm sure they won't mind.

Here is a street-level view of the wall under contruction.

Here is a street level view of the "Ramparts."  The towers in the distance are one of the gates.

This is inside the moat outside the "Ramparts."  Rothenburg is surrounded by a cliff or moat on all sides except for one gate.  That gate was the only gate susceptible to attack and was always the only gate that invading forces took to enter.

An opposite view of the same moat leading to the cliff.

Bad Windsheim Day 4

While you could argue that I wasted and opportunity today in that I chose not to visit the Outdoor Museum when I could have, I feel that I had a good day in other ways.

Etsy was too rambunctious for my taste today, so in the afternoon, I did a training session with her going through all she should already know with the exception of fetch.  It worked quite well in that she was quite tired and behaved much better the rest of the day.  I learned that I may have to work on training daily with her just to keep her from getting too crazy as well as keep her well trained...and yes, one can have a well trained crazy dog.

J and I spent a good dinner socializing with A, her counterpart in Belgium.  Great conversation, and she has been helping doing physical fitness training with J the past several days.  This means a lot because she has found few co-workers with which she feels comfortable enough doing this.  We also think we may spend Thanksgiving with them, but we'll figure out those details more in the future.  Considering they are more isolated than we are, it's a bird's-of-a-feather kind of a thing.

Speaking of parties, J and I have been invited to a costume party by a friend of I and S.  We're still trying to decide what costume we will wear, but it should be fun nonetheless.

Today was more quality time spent with others than sightseeing, and I'm okay with that.  I took a video of falling leaves today, but I only had my phone on me at the time, so the video did not turn out at all as I had intended.  With this same phone, I was able to take a nice picture of Etsy during our training today.  I like the contrast of her fur against the leaves.

Oh, by the way, C and R!  With the goats today, I saw several chickens with feathers on their legs down to their ankles.  What kind of chickens are those?

Tomorrow, we check out of the hotel.  I get to pack everything and load the car while J finishes up with her classes.  After that, we head out to Rothenburg Ob der Tauber to take a look at the impressive city in the daylight before we head home.  Then its, "Hello weekend!"  I'm totally going to experience a 9 day weekend!  Score!

Bad Windsheim (Day 3)

Ok.  So I chickened out with the outdoor museum.  I'll get to that in a second.

I had a pretty relaxing morning, had breakfast with J, chatted with a co-worker of hers, then took Etsy for her morning walk after tooling online for an hour.  On our walk, we got to the far park of Kurzpark, took paths we had not taken yet, and then saw a horse!

Notice the yard.  This is why it is not wise to own a horse if you don't have the property for it.  Back at our house, there are fields with occasional horses who have land plots three times this size and pulverize the lawn within a month.  I actually felt sorry for the horse.  It readily let me pet it and started licking my hand as I think it expected an apple to be there.  Etsy wanted to meet it too, but I'm glad there was a fence to prevent such a meeting.  I think it might not have turned out well.

J spent lunch with me in our room.  She get's lunch free, but it's 20 euro per lunch and dinner at the hotel for me, so I bought some groceries and will spend at least the rest of the lunchtimes in our room.

In the afternoon, Etsy and I sought out the Outdoor Museum.  It is supposed to have a lot of transferred medieval aged buildings together in a makeshift town.  I found it easily enough, but it did not look as big as I was led to believe, and for 6 or 7 euro per entry, I wanted to see it with J rather than by myself.  Etsy and I travelled to more of Bad Windsheim that we had not walked through yet and found more manatee images.  We eventually got back to the manatee statue, and found an informational panel that I had not noticed before.  For those who would like to translate, feel free.  I will get around to it, just not during this trip.

We spent dinner at the Hotel Gastof Le Anfore Restaurant with J's colleague who has a civilian husband.  We discussed JAG gossip and points of view.  It was italian cuisine: I had a calzone, J had spaghetti, and J's colleague had rigatoni.  We all had bruschetta and J and I had dessert as well.  It was decent food, the servers were nice, and I would have to say it was the lightest calzone I had ever had: thinner crust, not tons of oil, nice filling and topping, and not heavy on any one item.  It was great conversation and we all had lots in common to talk about in both work and personal lives.  Around when we left, an accordion player arrived and the table behind us was 20 strong 60+ year old men all singing.  We could understand very little of what they were singing, but J and I enjoyed listening.  A patron next to us said that it was a thick local dialect and he could not understand much of what they were saying either.  The best J and I could muster was that it was a very Bavarian set of tunes as at one point they were listing off the different parts of Bayern (Bavaria): Berchtesgaden, and several others that escape my memory.

J and I both agree that the bar singing is definitely something we will have to find again.

Bad Windsheim Day 2 (and Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber)

I took the the second day to explore more of the Kurzpark and do some grocery shopping.  This is what I found...

Some very Autumn scenes...

...and, quite randomly, a few goats and...

...and aviary of parakeets!  The parakeets were the biggest surprise to me.  They were all colors: pink, green, blue, yellow...and they were outside where it was cold!

I took a solo trip to the grocery store and found this...a ninja stylist!  Who knew?

This cat has claimed a small stretch of sidewalk.  I saw three different people petting it, Etsy went a little crazy last night trying to catch it, and today, it walked right up to me for a nice picture.  I went to pet it afterward are it acted repulsed by me and scampered away.

In the evening, J's CLE organizer set up a time to have people go to the Rothenburg Night Watchman tour.  I looked it up online and it was very highly regarded.  When we got to the city, it was impressive even at night: six large city gates, a cathedral sized church that had a street going underneath it, and this clock who's windows opened automatically to show two human-sized figures moving around at the top of each hour.

Interesting history.  Rothenburg was first built around 1100 AD and was never taken until the 1600's during the 30 years war when one of their own accidentally blew up the gun powder tower.  It never recovered from poverty after that, was taken a second time, and lost the north and west walls during american bombing in WWII.  It was spared complete destruction because of two reasons: the local American commander's mother loved Rothenburg so they asked the occupying German force to surrender the city, and the German occupying force was temporarily missing their commander.  The poverty was what actually preserved the city for so long after surviving a very long time without being sacked or burned.

This is the main gate.  They still have the door there that was built in the 1500's.

During the tour, the Watchman gave a short plug for one of the city pubs: Zur Hoelle, or in english, To Hell.  The local city joke being, "Go to Hell!"  We decided with the people we car pooled there to check it out.

To our surprise, the Watchman showed up a few minutes later.  This is the best shot I could get.  It was dark and I didn't want to use the flash.  You will find a better picture of him online.

This is J enjoying spiced hot wine, a seasonal favorite of Germany.  I took a sip.  It was really good.  However, I was driving so that's all the more I had of that.

One of the ladies we drove there was also a JA who's husband was a civilian, just like me!  We've decided that we will all have to hang out in Belgium at some point.  That is where she is stationed.

Bad Winsheim Day 1

This was the first day that J started her CLE.  She spent the bulk of the day learning about international law.

I spent the day exploring Bad Windsheim.  I took Etsy for a walk early in the morning, of which it was still dark, so little exploring occurred.  After breakfast with J and a few of her colleagues, I explored more.

It is worth noting at this point that one of these colleagues is in the similar situation that J and I are in: wife works as the Army JA in Belgium and the husband is a civilian trying to find his niche in a virtually all female military spouse environment.  He was supposed to come with her, but their daughter had things with school going on this week that they did not want to keep her from attending.  We hope to meet the both of them soon and have some time to socialize.

After breakfast, I worked on blogging and then took Etsy with me to explore.  We chose to go south.  We were immediately greeted by a statue that I mentioned in the previous blog.  It is right next to a church, but is actually a World War I memorial.

We wound up encountering a small lake, probably man made, but what was quirky about it was fish were jumping from the surface every 30 seconds or so.  I don't know why, but it certainly was different.  In retrospect, I should have taken a video.  It was as if the fish were on drugs or something.

I also saw a duck of which I was unfamiliar.  I took its picture so I could try to identify it later.  Bordering the far side of the lake was a small creek that the locals used as a moat.  All of them had their own little gated bridges across it.  Some of them were fancy.

This second one is fancier, but all you have to do is swing your leg around the gate to get in.  All of the other owners have some sort of gate around the doorway to avoid this.

It was a colorful morning romp.  Here are some other pictures...

After lunch with J, Etsy and I went the other direction where we heard rumors of a big park.  I liked this building on the way because it looked like the faces on either side were vomiting the pretty banner carved in stone.

The park we walked to was crazy huge!  It must have been the size of the city itself.  When you tack on the farmland that extends beyond it, which is also readily walkable, it makes easily for miles of flat and pretty rustic / suburban trails.  I tried to take pictures that showed this as best I could.

The above is the closest part of the park to town.  Here is the path that extends the whole length of the park and beyond...

It keeps going...

...and going..

...and going so far that I couldn't take enough pictures to properly demonstrate it, but the park itself definitely goes for at least a half mile if not a mile.  The path actually keeps going from there, and goes through farmland for several more miles.  I found out at dinner that the area is a "permanent" volksmarch area, unlike the common volksmarch areas which are only held for a day.  Here, there is a permanent station where people can walk their volksmarch stretch pretty much whenever they want to.

I've hit my data limit for pictures today, so I'll have to wait until I get home to put the rest up.  It was nice countryside.  J and I are truly midwesterners in that we like the vast relatively flat stretches of land.  Something about the wide stretch of land that somehow feels comforting...like now big the world really is, or a feeling of freedom and space and wilderness.

Until tomorrow.

Hunting Season

We've been keeping busy these past several days.

First, we might possibly have a second car in two weeks.  Not this week, because of work (J's, not mine).  Second, Bad Winsheim travels will be getting posted soon.  Third, well...little things I've done in the meantime.

Dog walking and taking J to work has created the necessity for a second car.  We recently found one that we think will work: cheap, VW, moderate mileage, well maintained, small, and (hopefully) fuel efficient.  It's a stick shift, so I'm going to very much enjoy having more control over a car engine again.  Don't worry, it will be staying here when we get around to leaving back for the states.  In the meantime, it will be our little mule.  No pictures yet, but worry not...they will come.

While I doubt I'll be seeing some of the more popular sites of Bad Winsheim, i.e. the Fraenkrische Therme or French Spa which is an over-the-top brine hot tub/massage/sauna/restaurant experience, there are a few sights around that I'd like to check out.  One such item is a freaking huge statue of some king or something.  It looks like it's out of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  There is also supposedly an outdoor museum and a historic town where people role-play villagers...at least, this is my understanding.  We'll also have the dog in tow, which is nice because it's cheaper and I'll have an excuse to keep my exercising up:)


Now, for the past several days.  One of the advantages of living near an Air Force Base is that you regularly see a lot of planes in the air one normally wouldn't see.  This past week, I saw this ultra-light plane flying around overhead.  Rod?  I'm hoping you can identify this one for me as you are far better at planes than I am.  Sorry about this picture, it was the best I could do at the time.

J and I also received a random program in the mail for what I thought was a soccer game tournament.  Turns out, it was a rifle shooting tournament taking place in our very town! This was too bad because we actually would have attended it.  In the program, they had a brief bio on each shooter.  Coincidentally, because I properly decoded the program, while walking the dog that morning I heard three rifle shots in the distance.  There are plenty of hunting stands around, so to actually have one of them used was unusual but not unexpected.  I then come up to find this at the edge of the trail we usually take...

At the time, there was a red and white tape across the gate shown.  Once we got this close, a jeep came up from the other side, presumably the hunter, and just drove right through the tape.  I guess that's how it's done here.  While I have not translated the sign, I read it to say "trail hunting" or something like that.  After our walk, the hunter got together with two other hunters with their own cars at the entrance to the trail.  Soon after they all left in a caravan.  Interestingly enough, I did not see any game with them nor weapons of any kind.  

This week will be more active on the posts than usual as I will have more time on my hands than usual AND will be taking more pictures.  

Finding more little things

This weekend, we decided to explore a couple of places that we have known about for a while but have yet to explored.

First, we went through a local thrift store.  While there are several around, this one seemed quite large and diverse from the outside, selling plants, furniture, glassware, and paintings.  Inside, it was a lot of little, practical things: glass and ceramic kitchen dishes, furniture shelves and tables, lamps, lots of different alcohol drink glasses, a good section of books (a rare few in english), lots of records, clothes, old speakers, very few old computer parts, wooden figurines, and VHS tapes.

J found lots of glasses that she liked and a decorative Norwegian plate.  I found a gardening section in the books and while I could read very little of it, I did take a picture of a little item I found interesting in a Hydrokultur gardening book.  Apparently, one can regrow another pineapple with the cut out stem.  I may have to try this some time.

We also perused a local "American Video and DVD Store."  We were unsure of the selection, the prices, or of the currency, but we were curious and have been tiring of both our poor home selection and the high prices and equally poor selection of the on-base DVD's for sale.  First, this store was very close to the Vogelweh Air Force Base, so it was nice to discover that all prices were in american dollars.  Second, the selection reflected the clearly targeted audience: LOTS of action flicks, very little else.  Third, selection was ok.  They sold a decent number of titles we were familiar with, but the vast majority were B or C list movies (if that's even possible).  We did not recognize the vast majority of the movie titles being sold.  Fourth, the prices were all crazy low.  The highest priced items were $17, and there were only about 20 of them.  The average DVD price was $5.  There was also an entire room of $1 DVD's.  We actually found quite a few movies of interest there.  We bought a handful of movies, and will probably get more there in the future.  Neither of us have an issue with searching a handful of minutes for a $1 DVD.

J decided to spend this weekend cooking and baking like crazy.  She put together pumpkin-cheesecake bars (still in the oven), shepard's pie, chocolate wafers, tacos with every possible fixing, apple pancake egg bake, buffalo chicken salad (still in the crock pot), and acorns and pinecones (for an Autumn wreath).

Also, stay posted.  J has expressed interest in making appearances on this blog every once in a while.  We've been getting quite crafty and been doing a lot more in the kitchen than we had in the states.  She is interested in sharing some of our endeavors.  We have also discussed posting a link to this blog on our facebook pages, so be ready for that too!