Thanksgiving 2012

We hosted Thanksgiving again this year and 6 of our friends came up from Zürich for it. We cooked up a 7.5kg turkey for 8 people and it was just enough for dinner with leftovers for two sandwiches the day after (barely). Our group ate really heartily and did justice to the gluttonous meaning of Thanksgiving. One of the guys had three full helpings of everything and another picked off every single piece of meat from the turkey after we had carved it and ate almost an entire plate of just turkey. Anyway, here are the few pictures I took.

The table (sorry I didn't get a picture until people were about done with their first helpings):

This is Sprüngli's "coffin cake" (with my grandma Nellie's cheesecake in the background - which gets finished completely every single year). The coffin cake is named as such I think because it's basically death by chocolate ... but it's also shaped like a coffin. Compliments of Nico. I love it when people bring desserts from Sprüngli!!

In Nico's own words: "This is as dense as chocolate can possibly get. If it were to be any more dense it would be a black hole." It tastes like heaven in your mouth but feels like lead in your stomach. We cut slices very very very small. Below is what a cross section looks like. The top triangle part is pure truffle, very dense, the bottom is that same creamy truffle bit layered with some cake.

Everybody spent the night either at our apartment or at hotels in Bad Dürkheim and on Sunday morning we made everybody pancakes (with real maple syrup of course) then went for a walk up to the Flaggenturm.

It was extremely windy at the top but I took a picture of everybody trying to hide from the wind anyway.

Since I haven't blogged in over a month, here are a few random pictures of things I meant to blog about but didn't like the amazing golden colors the trees turned in early November. This picture doesn't do it justice but the day we went for a walk around the woods and saw all the colors I forgot to bring a camera. Next year!

And the big heron that perches on the tiniest branch all the way at the top of a tree behind our apartment building:

Strasbourg and Mulhouse

On Saturday we were invited to a friend's parents' house in Mulhouse, France for the night. Many of Martin's labmates from the ETH were there and we all had a nice dinner followed by much merriment and not much sleep.

Mulhouse is only about 2.5 hours from Bad Dürkheim but we still decided to break up the drive by stopping in Strasbourg for lunch (which was exactly halfway to Mulhouse). I had never been to Strasbourg before and Martin had but he didn't remember it so it was a worthwhile stop.

I apologize because I don't think the iphone did any justice to the Strasbourg cathedral. I might rank it within my top 5 cathedral interiors ... after the Venice cathedral that's filled with gold mosaics and St Peter's and the teeny tiny Sainte Chapelle in Paris. And I'm probably forgetting a few others but my favorite churches are not the point of this blog post. What was neat about the Strasbourg cathedral was all the stained glass in it - not just in the bottom of the church but also along all the windows in the very top of the church. Of course the iphone could not manage to capture any of that very well. So here are some pics of the outside and the inside of the cathedral:

There was a big Jesus in the church:

And I lit a candle for my mom. They were orange which I took as a sign:

I'm trying to capture the stained glass in the top and bottom of the church. It's all washed out here but I want to give you an idea of it all. Just add beautiful colors to it in your minds. It was really beautiful with the sunlight streaming through the windows at the top:

It is also interesting to note that this cathedral only has one spire. It was supposed to have two but they ran out of money after they built the first one and so they stopped. So the front of the cathedral is a bit off balance:

The awesome lunch we had at a completely packed restaurant near the cathedral. Martin had stag stew and I had chicken in a riesling sauce and of course since we were in the Alsace region we complimented our meals with some Alsacian wine:

And a picture of some of the cuteness of Strasbourg:

After Strasbourg we continued on to Mulhouse where we went for a little walk in the old part of town. We tried to go into the cathedral there but there was a mass going on so we couldn't.

This is a bit dark but the main square was really cute:

Our little dinner party with 16 people. Good thing the house was enormous! Not everybody's living room easily sits 16 for dinner with room to spare. And there was a pool and hot tub and sauna in the basement that we enjoyed after dinner as well.

Hiking Deidesheim-Wachenheim-Deidesheim

This past Sunday we went for a little 9-mile hike through the forest and vineyards near Bad Dürkheim. The town just to the south of Bad Dürkheim is called Wachenheim and the hike started a few more towns south of that in Deidesheim. From there it looped up to Wachenheim through the forest, then back south to Deidesheim through the vineyards. So you got a little bit of everything in this hike.

Here's a little shack and picnic bench in the middle of the woods:

A little beyond the picnic bench we found a little restaurant where Martin had some new wine:

New wine is made by harvesting the grapes, mushing them into juice, then letting it ferment for a week or two. It's pretty sweet, like drinking juice but with a little kick. You don't drink a lot of it because it's obviously high in sugar and calories but a little glass just hits the spot.

After our break for new wine and lunch of packed sandwiches we climbed a tower above the little restaurant to get a view of the surrounding hills to the west and the towns to the east:

I'm not sure why they planted trees in rows like you can see in the above picture. Maybe when they got done planting all the vineyards in perfect rows they decided to keep it up in the forest by planting trees in rows. That's my current theory. The picture below is looking east towards the vineyards and towns.

We found these really pretty mushrooms:

A pic of some trees:

Finally at Wachtenburg castle (in Wachenheim)! Still have a ways to go after this though ... plus we can see our apartment from this castle, it's so close, but we had to turn south instead of north and head back to Deidesheim and our car instead.

Martin had some real wine at Wachtenburg castle. They served it to him in a little schörle glass instead of a wine glass probably because the castle was absolutely packed full of people enjoying the beautiful day and drinking wine and the kitchen had run out of wineglasses. It was so packed that we had to sit in the tent area where there was no view of anything but tent walls and people. But it was okay because we had cookies and wine:

I like that everybody is outdoors when the weather is nice on a Sunday afternoon instead of sitting inside watching football. Americans should learn from this example.

And I got a pretty decent shot of Wachtenburg castle from between two houses after we came down the hill into Wachenheim:

The Quest for the Schneckennudel

This morning we decided to go for a long walk in the forest to the west of Bad Dürkheim. We have a map of the town that shows paths in the forest and a few sights to see ... my goal is to visit each of the sights on the map.

Here's the map. We live where the pen tip is pointing to on the right side, and our goal is the big red circle in the lower left of the map with the number "39" in it. It is labeled as "Schneckennudel", which I think basically means a spiral (schnecke is "snail"). We had to find it to see what it actually was!

It's not all that far to go, I'd say 5 miles roundtrip, but what's missing on that map is about 785943789643 other trails in the forest. Thankfully we had an iphone with us and google maps actually had most of the trails in it so we just had to stop a lot and find the correct trail to take. You could easily wander around in the forest for days and days completely lost and finally die a slow horrible death of dehydration or starvation or hypothermia in there. It's going to be really pretty once the leaves change though so I'm looking forward to spending more time in there this fall.

So, as expected, the "Schneckennudel" was a big spiral that you walked up in order to get a nice 360-degree view of the surrounding hills and forest:

I didn't take a picture in the direction of Ludwigshafen/Mannheim as that wasn't the pretty direction. :)

Some shots from walking through the forest. Don't let old-man-Martin fool you it was like 60 degrees out! He still set out in long underwear, t-shirt, sweater, and hat! There's definitely something wrong with him.

The Wurstmarkt

For 9 days each year spanning the 2nd and 3rd weekends of September, Bad Dürkheim hosts the largest wine festival in the world. It runs 24 hours a day Thursday-Monday the first weekend and Friday-Monday the second weekend. We were in Sardinia for the first weekend of it this year but returned in time to enjoy a few nights of the second weekend.

There are food booths, game booths, carnival rides, a few shops and, most importantly, wine booths! Each of the vintners from Bad Dürkheim had a booth - maybe 25 booths total. Some of them had a pavilion filled with benches like in the picture below and some of them had outdoor sitting at tables like at a restaurant.

At all of these booths you get yourself a Weinschörle, which is supposed to be 0.25 liters of wine and 0.25 liters of sparkling water but they were definitely making them more like 70-30 in favor of wine when I was there.

Here I am holding our Schörles:

The first night we went we hung out with our realtor and her group of friends. They're all locals so they have a table reserved at one of the restaurant-like wine booths. Here are some of our schörles on the table:

We learned that there is one day of the festival where only the locals are allowed to go for what they call early morning drinking. They all show up at 7am and sit together and drink until 10am while the festival is closed to everybody else. On a Monday no less!! I love this town.

The second night we went was the last night of the Wurstmarkt, Monday night. There were fireworks at 9pm and it was the most crowded night of the festival. We rode the ferris wheel and took some pictures of the crowds below:

There is also this really high up spinning ride that I wanted to go on but Martin said no. :(

We did manage to enjoy a lot of fair (read: junk) food at the festival. Mostly traditional German fair food. Nutella crepes, Flammkuchen (a very thin crust topped with some creamy cheese, onions, and pancetta), bratwurst, döner kebabs, deep friend potato patties (traditionally served with apple sauce but as an American I take mine with ketchup), and German kisses which are rather large marshmallows with a wafer base covered with chocolate and other assorted toppings. So. Good. (and so full of sugar!) We brought some home and I put them on Martin's laptop keyboard so you could tell how big they are:

L'Isola di San Pietro

While we were on Saint Peter's island of course we went around to some beaches! But first we attempted some bird watching on the west coast of the island. There are several hundred falcons there in the summer - they fly there all the way from Madagascar to have their babies every year. But we didn't really see any, except for a few flying around occasionally. We instead poked around the coast a bit, which is quite rocky and steep in spots.

This is Cala Fico (plus Martin), the most photographed spot on the island. Many of the falcons have nests on top of the rocky cliffs:

Cala Fico from a little higher up:

After Cala Fico we tried to drive around and see more of the coastline but were foiled by narrow dirt roads and dead ends. There are a couple of paved roads on San Pietro (aside from in Carloforte where they're all paved) but if you go be prepared to drive on some dirt roads. Didn't run into any livestock in the streets here at least!

Next we went to La Caletta beach. There was a little restaurant on the beach where we ate lunch. Martin made a new friend there:

There were a lot of cats on San Pietro. It was a lot like in Turkey - the restaurants and random people fed the street cats and there were just cats everywhere.

La Caletta beach:

In general the beaches on San Pietro were not as nice as the ones in Cala Gonone. They still had the clear water but the blue color was not quite the same and there was a little sea grass in the water (okay I know I'm nitpicking here, these beaches were still gorgeous). I think it's that the beaches on San Pietro didn't have the "wow" factor that the beaches in the Gulf of Orosei had - no steep cliffs behind them and hiding them from view until you're right in front of them.

San Pietro is known for its annual tuna roundup. For 400 years tuna have been swimming by San Pietro and into large nets every spring/summer. So, naturally, one of the main dishes available in restaurants in tuna. And they make tuna in every way possible. I tried some smoked tuna while I was there:

We also ate tuna with pesto and pasta and tuna on pizza (we also had smoked salmon on pizza earlier in the trip which was awesome) and tuna sandwiches with tomatoes and eggplant. Other tuna dishes included salted tuna and tuna with tomato sauce and pretty much anything else you can think of. In some restaurants it was hard to order something off the menu without tuna in it.

La Bobba beach, where we went on our last day on San Pietro:

There are two big columns that stick up out of the ocean near La Bobba. They're a huge tourist attraction but I'm not sure why.

And this trip wouldn't be complete if I didn't show you a picture of some of the pizzas we ate. I think Martin's pizza has tuna on it and mine has rucola, ham, and tomatoes: