Wiesbaden Stadtfest 2013

Germans love festivals!  Throughout the year you can find some kind of festival practically anywhere in this beautiful country.  And I don't mean just Oktoberfest.  This weekend in Wiesbaden we celebrated Stadtfest or "city festival", complete with Oom-Pah bands, food, wine, crafts and a terrific Friday night show in the market place with Mike and The Mechanics.  Here's just a sample:

 Check out those Lederhosen

 How about a pumpkin pyramid?

What would a German festival be without a car show?

Or, a country & western band?

Tanya, do we really need that car?

Sicily

In mid-February, we spent four days in Sicily.  How does one begin to describe this complex, independent place?  Decaying, proud, chaotic, beautiful, home of the Mafia?  It's all of the above, plus heavy memories of the Spanish Inquisition thrown in.  On such a short visit we were only able to scratch the surface of this place.  We must return.

A Trip to America & Two Observations

We just returned from a 10-day trip to the US; Jay to visit friends and family and Tanya joining Jay for the 56th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival.  The longer we're away from America the country seems more foreign than where we're living while still being familiar.  Hard to explain but we seem to always have our feet in two different places at once.

 Visiting my sister Joni at Lake Tahoe.

 Our neighbor Becky from Portland.

 My high school buddy Larry in San Francisco.

Our friends Sam and Michele in Monterey.

Two observations during this last visit:  First, the most obvious is how big America is.  The people, the distances, the food portions, the stores, the highways....all BIG!  The second observation is the behavior of drivers.  German drivers seem to be impatient, ready to use their car horns at a moment's notice whenever there is any possibility that they will be slowed down or inconvenienced at all.  By contrast, US drivers, especially in Oregon, seem to be downright lackadaisical. I think this all makes sense.  My theory is that since American highways are so big---the lanes are bigger and they actually have shoulders one can pull over onto---and the speed limits are lower than in Germany, that there is no great rush to get where one is going.  Traveling at 55 mph (88 kph), compared to the more normal 100 to 130+ kph in Germany seems positively leisurely.  Since Germans can only go so fast in their more congested urban areas, they get this impatience for speed out of their systems by zooming down the autobahns.  I didn't sense this same feeling in California, for example, even when cars were traveling down the freeway at 65 mph (only 104 kph).

Trier: The Oldest City in Germany

Closing out January this year we took a weekend trip to Germany's oldest city, Trier.  There seems to be a bit of a dispute about whether Trier really is the oldest city in the country.  Worms and Köln also are vying for this distinction.  In any case, Trier claims to have been founded in--or before--16 BC, which is really old no matter how you want to slice it.  The most impressive monument in Trier is the Porta Nigra, or Black Gate, which was built by the Romans, is the largest Roman city gate north of the Alps, and is a UNESCO world heritage site.  A couple of other sites we visited were the ruins of the old Roman amphitheater and the Roman baths.  The baths were built over 1,600 years ago and are an impressive remnant of Roman civilization in Germany.

Vienna in January

The first eight months of this year have been filled with adventures, but no postings.  Well, let's fix that right now.  In mid-January we spent a 3-day weekend in Vienna.  Of course....January...the perfect time to visit. No crowds, no lines at the main attractions.  And, of course, our visit just happened to coincide with the biggest snow storm of the season, shutting down the Frankfurt airport, delaying trains and simply slowing things down a bit.  But, hey, that's one of the joys of travel...meeting the unexpected head-on and enjoying the experience.