wild with wanting: Ich Leibe Deutschland

I’ve done it. I have gone for an even bigger amount of time without updating you on my adventures. I believe I has been over a month, and in that time I have been in Germany, Paris, Scotland and England, not to mention home for a quick day, Gold Coast, Brisbane, Noosa and the lovely cruise ship I am currently on relaxing in the sun while sailing the South Pacific ocean, returning home after stop overs in New Caledonia and Vanuatu.

Ok, ok, I know I am a big mean bully who just likes to squirt copious amounts of vinegar in your envious green eyes, my bad.

It’s ok, you can pick yourself off the floor, I promise to not overwhelm you all at once with extensive amounts of words right away, I will split the adventures up into several blog entries over the next week, I can’t have my very few readers dropping like flies from to many words. Big sigh of relief!!

Alrighty, so here goes, get ready for installment numero uno!

Last time I left you I was in Germany on my way to visit my wonderful friend Hanna and her family. They live in a cute little village not far from Stuttgart. I believe it was called Dettingon… or maybe it was Tettingon. To be honest my memory is a bit fuzzy as was my German.

Hanna had warned me that her mother knew some English but her father didn’t know a word of my mother tongue so I made the conscious decision to try out and use some of my German when I could to keep him involved in conversation. It turns out that while I could understand part of what he was saying, my brain cells were incapable of remembering German words to make fully sentenced responses back, so I kind of failed on that endeavor. I could however greet him each morning with a cheery “Hallo, wie gehts? Hast du gut geschlafen?” to which I found out that he was in fact well, and did in fact sleep well the previous night. Pretty sure my German skills are epic. Just saying. I was chuffed at least!

After dinner with her family on the first night, we got ourselves dressed up and went out into town for a few drinks with some of Hanna’s friends and her man that I had heard so much about. It was a great night sitting in town of cobblestoned streets enjoying the crisp German air and enjoying a glass of red all of us practicing German and English and enjoying the general atmosphere before heading home for the evening.

So Hanna took me out to a burg (that is castle for all you playing at home) out in the middle of a beautiful hill surrounded by paddocks. It occurs to me right now that I really need to write these things down if I am going to report proper factual information to you about the places I visit. I will work on that. For the sake of this and everything else in life, let’s call it “My Castle”. Kapeesh?

So, it seems that being the generous soul that I am, I allow people to come in and visit my castle. And can I just say that I have done wonders with the place? It really is looking beautiful and medieval. You’re welcome. To get there unfortunately you had to walk up an immense hill ;or possibly not so bad, but after little hill walking activity for either of us in Manila, I could only imagine it was what it would feel like to climb Mount Everest.

We stayed to admire the beautiful views and grab ourselves a cold drink (it’s all that walking!) before we headed off to pick up Hanna’s boyfriend.

Clearly we deserved a treat after conquering our German Mount Everest, so we decided that it was only necessary for us to indulge in a little something that I had been looking forward to immensely. Delicious German baked goods. Oh. My. Gosh. We went to this amazing little café surrounded by a tulip farm and ordered a piece of cake each. The pieces were HUGE and full of berries and other deliciousness that made my taste buds bring out their party hats and begin a conga line. The Germans sure know how to make a mean cake. If it has fruit on it, it makes it healthy…right?

We headed into town again having heard of an epic party happening that night, however it turns out, that everybody had decided to stay in for the night, so instead we had a quiet drink along the cobblestones once more watching lightening flash it’s way across the sky and the thunder clapping loud into the otherwise silent night.

The next morning we jumped on the train and headed into Stuttgart. We wandered around the city while Hanna showed me the main squares and shopping areas. We caught up with her Aunt for lunch and I was informed that I had to try the local dish of Kasespatzle. Basically it is like a mac and cheese with noodles and was the traditional dish of the region. It did not disappoint. Give me cheese covered carbs any day! Her aunt was a hoot and a half and loved Australia having been there around 20 times in her life. I really enjoyed listening to some of her stories of her travels. What made me laugh the most was how she told her nieces to learn English in either England and America because the Australian’s were too lazy and spoke their own version of English. Let’s be honest – it’s true, now excuse me while I pop over to the servo in my trackie dacks to pick up a slab for tomorrow arvo’s Barbie.

Sadly the time came for me to say goodbye to Hanna the next morning as she dropped me off at the train station to make my way to Paris. During this train trip I managed to read a short book, but also managed to absolutely kill my ipod and phone when the lid of my Coke/Fanta hybrid came undone and decided to leak through my bag. This is why I can’t have nice things, haha, nothing is B-proof.