We had another mostly normal week, although Thursday night gave us a nice break from our usual routine. Ryan had his Boy Scout Court of Honor, where the Scouts were recognized for everything they had accomplished over the past six months, and Ryan had a particularly good night. He earned more merit badges than anyone else this time, earning 10 this time! He is still working toward his Eagle Scout and we hope he will have everything finished by the end of the school year, which somehow feels both incredibly far away and like it will be here tomorrow. After the ceremony, the Troop hosted an Oktoberfest themed dinner, which seemed like a pretty perfect way to celebrate a successful night!
Friday was a little unusual because I actually had to go to work. Since it is the end of the fiscal year, I had to put in a few hours, although thankfully it was only a half day. It felt very strange getting up and going to work on a Friday since I have had every Friday off since switching to 10 hour days in May. I was more than ready to leave when the time came, especially because I had something much more interesting waiting for me that afternoon.
A friend of a friend had arranged a group tour of the former Gestapo headquarters in Stuttgart, which is now a museum called Hotel Silber. What makes the location especially striking is where it sits today, right in the middle of the Dorotheen Quarter, one of Stuttgart’s upscale shopping districts. These days, the area is filled with high end stores and busy streets, which makes it hard to imagine that the same location once housed the Gestapo. I had never even heard of Hotel Silber before the tour, but the timing could not have been better because I am currently reading Ken Follett’s Winter of the World, which takes place during World War II. The tour gave us a much deeper look at what was happening in Stuttgart during that period, and it was fascinating to connect the history I have been reading about with an actual place.
Hotel Silber was originally built as a hotel in the 19th century before eventually becoming a police headquarters. During the Nazi era, it was used by the Gestapo and became a place where people were interrogated and persecuted because they were considered enemies of the regime. Today, the building serves as a museum and memorial documenting the history of the police during the Nazi period and telling the stories of people who were persecuted. It was a sobering visit, but I am very glad we had the opportunity to go. Standing inside the actual building where these events took place made that history feel much less distant and abstract, especially while I am reading about the same period.
After spending the afternoon immersed in some pretty heavy history, I decided the obvious way to spend Friday evening was to make French onion soup from scratch. We did not have any plans, and I still had a bunch of baguettes and onions left over from our Oktoberfest themed dinner, so I figured it would be an easy way to use them up. How hard could it be? It is just onions, right?
As it turns out, I dramatically underestimated French onion soup. It takes forever and requires a surprisingly long list of ingredients, several of which I did not realize I needed until I was already standing in the kitchen with onions cooking. Matt ended up making two separate trips to different stores to find all the ingredients I thought I had, but apparently did not. The onions alone took two hours of stirring in a pot before they were ready to become soup, which is a lot of time to stand around wondering if this was really worth it. The soup was absolutely delicious, so I suppose it was, but the kitchen looked like a culinary crime scene afterward. Cleaning everything up took almost as long as making the soup, which is not exactly the part of the recipe they advertise.
Saturday started with Ryan helping another Eagle Scout with his Eagle project. After dropping him off, Matt and I decided to make the most of our free morning and headed to Heilbronn, a city about an hour north of Stuttgart that is known for its wine. Many of my favorite German wines come from the area, so I was excited to check out the local wine festival. We also decided to bring the dogs with us because we had such a good time taking them on an adventure the previous weekend and figured we might as well make it a tradition. They seemed excited about another outing, although in hindsight, I am not sure they understood exactly what we had planned for them.
Heilbronn’s name dates back more than 1,000 years and is closely connected to the city’s springs. The name is believed to come from the Old High German words “heil,” meaning holy or healing, and “bronn,” meaning spring or well. Together, Heilbronn roughly translates to “holy spring,” a reference to the abundant springs that helped make the area an important settlement. While we were walking through the city center, we came across the actual Holy Spring which is now encased in a statue.
We had arrived shortly before one o’clock and did a short walk through the city center, feeling pretty proud of ourselves for getting there early. We finally found our way over to the wine fest only to discover that the festival did not actually open until two. Apparently, our planning had a small flaw, so we decided to get lunch at L’Osteria, one of our favorite pizza restaurants, and wait for the festival to get started.
Once we finished lunch, we walked back toward the festival, although I quickly became distracted by something that had absolutely nothing to do with wine. There were people on the roof of the huge Killianskirche, the main church of Heilbronn, and naturally, I decided that I needed to know how they got up there.
I went inside the church first, assuming there would be some obvious entrance to the tower, but apparently that would have been far too easy.
A quick Google search revealed that we needed to go to a shop across the street, pay a deposit, get a key and then find an exterior stairwell. After that, it was just 197 steps to the top, which seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do before drinking wine. As we had the dogs with us, Matt kindly volunteered to stay with them while I made the climb.
By the time I reached the top, I was definitely questioning my decision to voluntarily climb 197 stairs, but the view made it completely worth it. Even better, I arrived just in time to watch the opening ceremony of the wine festival from above, which gave me a fantastic view of everything happening below. From up there, I could see the festival getting started and the city stretching out around it, and for a few minutes I completely forgot how tired my legs were. After taking in the scenery, I made my way back down, returned the key, collected my deposit and met up with Matt so we could finally get to the festival we had originally come to see.
Unfortunately, the dogs were not nearly as impressed with our plans as we were. We had brought them along in their stroller because we thought they would enjoy spending the day exploring a new city with us, but it turns out wine festivals are apparently not a major attraction for dogs. They spent most of the afternoon bored, whining and looking generally offended by the entire experience while we sampled a few wines and listened to the local band. Eventually, we decided the dogs had made their position clear, so we packed everyone up and headed home. The wine festival was fun, but somehow the completely unplanned church tower adventure ended up being the highlight of the day.
That evening, we invited a few friends over for drinks, and somehow the conversation eventually turned to Carpe Diem, one of our favorite cocktail bars. The bar had recently moved to a new location and had its grand opening the night before, where hundreds of people apparently showed up and stood in line for a DJ who did not even start until 1 AM. We could not believe people were actually willing to do that, but then we started talking about how we were young once too. Somehow, by the end of the conversation, we had convinced ourselves that we could obviously still handle a night like that.
Our friends eventually headed home to watch their kids’ sports game online, but we decided to meet them at the club at 11 PM. Matt was already asleep by that point and wisely decided to stay home, but I went anyway and ended up staying for hours, dancing and having considerably more fun than I probably should have considering what I had planned for the next morning. I finally made it home shortly before 2 AM and went to bed.
It was only a few hours later when Matt reminded me that we had promised another set of friends that we would go on a Schnapps hike with them the next day. 😅 At the time, this seemed like a perfectly reasonable plan. After several hours of dancing into the wee hours, it seemed considerably less reasonable.
A Schnapps hike is exactly what it sounds like: a hike through the German countryside with several stops along the way where everyone pauses for a shot of schnapps. We picked up our friends around 10 AM and drove almost two hours to our starting point in Sasbachwalden, a picturesque village in the Black Forest known for its vineyards, half-timbered houses, and beautiful hillside views.
From there, we parked and set off on a hike that lasted about three hours and covered a little over five miles, winding through forests and vineyards. It seemed like every few minutes we came across another little schnapps cabinet or trough stocked with schnapps and other drinks, including water, beer, and wine. Fresh water flowed through the troughs to keep everything cold, and each stop had a little coin box where you could pay on the honor system.
The cabinets or troughs are kept cool by fresh water running through them, and inside you can find all kinds of homemade schnapps in different flavors. There is usually an honor box where you leave your money, pick your drink and continue on your way. These stops were definitely the highlight of the experience and we loved trying the many flavors that were on offer.
The schnapps stations also made those hills a little more entertaining and probably helped distract me from the fact that I had gotten home only a few hours earlier. There is something particularly funny about hiking through a vineyard in the German countryside, stopping at a little roadside cabinet for a homemade schnapps and then continuing on as if this is the most normal thing in the world.
After the hike, we made the two hour drive back, quickly dropped off our friends, changed clothes and headed into downtown Stuttgart for dinner at a Georgian restaurant. Our dear friend Natia is from Georgia, and she wanted us to try Georgian food before we take a trip there with her sometime in the next year. The food was so good, and after everything else we had managed to cram into the weekend, it was the perfect way to end the day.
We made it home with just enough time to spend a few hours on the couch watching TV with Ryan before finally calling it an early night. I am not sure how we managed to fit everything into our weekend days and still have time for TV at the end. But, at this point, it feels like a pretty accurate description of life in Germany.
