The Aerie

Getting Ready to Go

We're getting packed and ready to go today: cleaning our hosts' house and lining up our luggage and gathering together things that have become scattered after five weeks in a different place.

Theresa and I had a nice night out alone together in Neumarkt: we went to the Obern Gastskeller on the IM'ed recommendation of our hosts. The food was great, but of course the room was smoky in typical German fashion. I really should look up the per-capita cancer and autobahn death rates and compare them to the U.S. It would be funny if they were lower, but I suspect they're not.

We went for a stroll through town afterwards. Neumarkt on der Oberpfalz is a very attractive place. Then we came home and hit the sack early in order to get up early and start cleaning. Instead I slept late. I don't know what's going on, but I've been getting tons of sleep here - maybe it's months of sleep deprivation catching up with me.

In order to further delay chores, I took a nice shower and then strolled through the suburb of Polling where we are staying and over to the butcher and baker. There I bought my LAST pretzel! WAAAH! I haven't had pretzels this good since I was a child in Queens, and that's probably a memory enhanced by time. Pretzels here are called "Breze", which if you migrate the B to a P you can see the word "pretzel" starting to emerge. At the GC 2006 convention I even saw a stand which had them listed as "brezels".

And how good are they? Well, if you buy a pretzel in America - at a mall or the movie theater - you get a piece of salted bread that has been preserved for days.

When I bought my breze from a temporary stand at the GC convention center, I had to wait. Because the guy with the dough pretzels on a tray had just hurried up and dropped off a fresh set. When the woman handed me the breze, it was almost too hot to touch, and fresh from the oven. And that's from a rolling cart. The ones from the bakery are even better.

I am going to miss these pretzels, or breze.

So I'm doing laundry, and we have the bags mostly packed, and we're getting on towards cleaning the bathrooms. When we're done I'll drive the boys into Nuremburg for one last trip to Ultra Comix, as a reward for their hard work.

The weather is being inconstant again - on my stroll it was sunny, but now its drizzling again. I want to wash our hosts towels and sheets and hang them to dry, but we'll see if that's manageable given this odd weather.

Anyway, back to work before the wife gives me the evil eye!

Posted by Albatross at August 30, 2006 4:53 AM | TrackBack