Well it’s Friday night, and I just got paid...

... Nothing on tomorrow - Man I’ve got it made!

Today was the start of the Erdbeerfest in Erbach. Erdbeeren are strawberries, and Erbach is about a 20 minute walk from my house. Which is perfect for me, because we “don’t need no petrol for our Gurumobile.”

Sorry, had a bout of reliving my youth there, but I’m OK now … where were we? Oh yeah, the Erbacher Erdbeerfest.

So I walked over to the festivities to see what I could find there. And it was a pretty good time. A surprisingly good time, for what I would think a Strawberry festival would be. Of course there is plenty of wine at everything here, so if you have a bad time … well, then you are just trying NOT to enjoy yourself. I don’t think you could’ve swung a dead cat without hitting a booth that was selling wine at this thing. And they were all from different wineries, not just one with several booths.

A couple of booths had this thing called an Erdbeer-Bowle that is basically strawberries with wine. I don’t know if there is any more to it than that. And while it may have made my testosterone levels dip a bit, it was actually pretty good. I also had a crepe with tomatoes and mozzarella, which was acceptable. Crepes seem to be big at all of the festivals here. It’s pretty neat watching them being made. They make them on these two flat metal plates that are roughly 15” diameter. They pour the batter onto one plate with a ladle, and smooth it out with a T-shaped tool made out of metal dowels. After allowing it to cook for maybe 30 seconds, they pick it up with, what looks like, an icing knife and invert it onto the other metal plate. They then put whatever filling you want (sweet or savory), and fold it up with the same knife and hand it to you. It looks like it would be a challenging thing to do, but these girls have it down.

I tried a couple of wines from the Jakob Jung Weingut which is one of the VDP wineries. I’ve had wine from maybe 6 or 7 of the VDP wineries, and I’ve got glasses from 3 of them. I think I may try to collect glasses from all VDP wineries (I think there are seventy-some, so this may not be realistic). That should help set off my collection of Kentucky Derby Glasses. The Derby glasses were more just gathering glasses left in the infield after the Derbies than a serious attempt at collecting anyway.

I wandered over a tent where I heard some familiar sounding music. There was a band of German kids playing the Beastie Boys, “Fight for Your Right…” They were singing it in English. Most of it anyway, I didn’t understand some of the lines. The Germans (much like anyone else) remake popular songs and sing them in their own language. Today I heard the Dashboard Jesus song (I don’t care if it rains or freezes, as long as I’ve got my plastic Jesus … on the dashboard of my car) being sung in German. I recognized the tune, and asked a German guy at work what they were singing about. It was the same song.

My friends Cheryl and Keith from Virginia were here for a couple of days this week. I got to take a day off and hang out with Keith on Tuesday, and had dinner with the two of them Monday thru Wednesday nights. Monday we went to the Rauch (sp?) a Bavarian style Biergarten which is back in the woods in Eltville. Tuesday we had dinner at Schloss Reinhartshausen in Erbach, and Wednesday we ate at the Paulaner in Wiesbaden.

Tuesday I took Keith to the Metzgerei in Hattenheim and I think he was genuinely impressed. We bought some Blutwurst, Zungenwurst, and Mettwurst. Cheryl swears she took a bite of the Blutwurst, but I think she just licked it. She made the “Bitter Beer Face” when she tried it. She really did seem to like the Mettwurst though. Keith liked most of it, I don’t think he was too keen on the Blutwurst, but he played along.

Keith and I also went to Schloss Vollrads, Schloss Johannisburg, and went to see the Niederwald monument at Rudesheim. When we came back we went down to the Weinpunkt, and had some … well … wein. The woman who works there is very nice. She doesn’t seem to be too put out by a couple of ignorant Americans coming in. She said she likes Bier and Blutwurst, and she’s pretty cute to boot. She humored us until some real customers (i.e. Germans) came in.

On Wednesday I met them at The Paulaner after work. It was rather warm that day, and I got there before they did. I parked my car at the top of a hill and walked down several flights of stairs to get to the street level, and I paid for that indiscretion on the way back. I had some shorts in my bag, but nowhere to change without going into someplace before they got there. I wasn’t really sure where we would be eating, so I wanted to meet them outside the restaurant. As I was walking I saw a parking garage that didn’t seem busy at all. I ducked into it and to the right saw a room for the trash. I hung my rucksack on the door and dropped trou. As I was putting the shorts on, one of the cleaning women entered the room to throw some trash bags into the dumpster behind me. She just looked at me, and walked right past me, threw the bags away, and headed out. All she saw was some awkward fumbling as I tried to pull my shorts up quickly, but I thought it was comical. I did move on pretty right away though, thinking that this was something that I do not need on my “Permanent Record”.