Spazierengehen

I need to take a break from the headache of trying to find a hotel near the airport and figuring out how I will get to the hotel and back to the airport in the morning. I am having flashbacks of the last time I did this. My brother and I came to Germany for a few days after a trip to England over 10 years ago, and I don't think either of us really had a clue what we were doing. By the time we got to the train station in the airport and needed to get to our hotel for the night before flying out at some ridiculously early hour in the morning, we had something like 15 euros left between the two of us. A taxi driver cornered us and offered to take us to our hotel, then proceeded to drive around for about 45 minutes while we watched the meter tick up and up and up. He finally dropped us off and took about 12 of those 15 euros we had. We thought something wasn't right but didn't really know enough German to ask (or accuse) the taxi driver. It was about 3 in the afternoon when we got to the hotel, so we kicked around whatever suburb we were in--and believe me, there was absolutely nothing to do--before turning in around 6 PM. We did, however, find a bus stop sign that indicated it went to the airport in the morning. I think we woke up around 4:00 AM to make sure we would catch the earliest bus, which took a total of 10 minutes to drive us to the airport. Thank you, German taxi driver, for driving us around in a circle the day before. I plan to avoid you this time.

I'm thinking of this while I look online for hotels, and I'm tired of looking for the moment. So this is what Andy and I did yesterday.

I'm trying to see some of things I haven't seen yet before I leave, so after lunch we visited the Herderkirche, which is really the Stadtkirche St. Peter und Paul, but Johann Gottfried Herder is buried inside, so most people call it after him.

The real goal of the afternoon was to head out to the Schloβ Belvedere, which is about a 4 km jaunt south of Weimar. So we started out walking through Park an der Ilm. You can see Goethe's garden house at the end of this photo.

And then we stopped to see the Romisches Haus, which was Duke Carl August's summer retreat.

And then we continued on our merry way to the Schloβ.

We were happy we made it. Two days' recovery time from Munich was just about right for our feet.

Because this was the Duke's hunting "lodge," there are lots of grounds and beautiful vistas. Here's me with the view over the valley.

There's a Musik Gymnasium (not a gymnasium--it's a high school) located on the grounds now, and the Liszt Musikhochschule (not a high school--it's a college) also uses some of the buildings. So there's lots of music coming out of the windows. On the one hand, it must be a beautiful place to make music every day, but then again I bet it's cold in the winter and hot in the summer in these buildings.

We walked around the grounds for a while and looked at the lovely gardens.

You could get lost on the paths through the woods, though I'm not saying we did, because we never get lost. There are lots of random fountains or old ruins that you would never guess are nearby until you turn a corner and there they are.

We stopped at the small restaurant on the grounds to share an afternoon Pflaumenkuchen (of course), and then walked back to Weimar.

The rest of the evening was pretty quiet, just cooking dinner and watching soccer. The butcher shops here are really excellent and incredibly inexpensive, and a much better place to buy meat than the grocery store. One place in particular sells chicken cordon bleu that are just exactly the right size and proportion of chicken to ham to cheese. We also had potato dumplings (a mix from a box, lest you think we are ambitious and have forgotten the size of our kitchen), and white asparagus with hollandaise sauce (which also comes in a box here). We are pretty much limited only to foods we can either boil or pan fry.

The ice cream flavors of the evening were Zimt and Zitrone (cinnamon and lemon--but not together!). I promise we didn't plan to alliterate our choices like that.