city map

We took the bus out there from Hauptbahnhof, and walked around the village for hours. Each bar is supplied with a standard wine-list, but the cheapest one is always the subject of the festival. So you have to buy a wine-glass (about ,1 l and good as a souveneir!) and you just take it around to different bars trying different wines and foods as you go. It was actually a lot of fun. It's a really big deal for the villages, so everybody comes out.

Weinfest!

I was utterly taken aback by the dialect. We were only a half hour (maybe) outside of Freiburg, but the speech was completely different. I could understand it, and what I didn't understand the villagers could easily explain by reverting back to standard German. But they wrote everything out in their dialekt, so even the menus were hard to understand. Flammekuche, one of my favorite foods (it's kind of like a German-style pizza) was suddenly spelled "Flammechueche," which basically means the k suddenly went gutteral and the u sounds more like an i. "Danke schön", a standard thanks, became "Dankasheen". It was pretty awesome.

So mainly we wandered, drank some good old Freiburger alcohol (but not too much, of course), and listened to German music in some of the bars. And, apparently beer comes in meters and half meters. Who knew? I was confused when Joachim asked me if I wanted in on a half-meter. I thought he said half-liter, and thought that sounded like a lot of beer. Not that a half-meter is a lot better, but there were a lot of us there.

Sean with a half-meter

the band

Aymi and I decided to stay later than the other IES students, because, as they were all getting on the bus about 8 o'clock, all the Germans were getting off the bus. So we figured the party was just getting started. We were right. We wandered around, but everything became much more crowded, and there were a lot more people our age. We went into one bar where two guys, who I guess are local hero/musicians, were playing, and it very distinctly reminded me of the Flogging Molly concert I attended in February. I was pushed, picked up, jumped on, and otherwise pushed around while trying to get to the back. And they were playing some really cheesy German music (it wasn't traditional music, but it would not fit into any "hip" or American music genres). It was intense, but I really enjoyed it. It was cold and rainy, though, and I'm going to have to get some kind of raincoat/fall coat soon. I've never needed a coat before...

written by  lost_red_balloon on September 6, 2008 from Pfaffenweiler, Germany
from the travel blog: The European Union
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Ahahaha!! I love the city map ^^ It looks like the maps I'm seeing at the beginning of all the Children's fantasy I'm reading!

written by  Stephanie Taylor on September 10, 2008

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