A day trip to the Schwarzwald with Phil and Kristina

 Greetings from abroad!  Wow, what a fun weekend it has been!  We started it off Friday evening with a top-floor Happy Hour and BBQ at the institute, featuring fresh beer on tap from the local brewery, Unser Bier.  Here is their website for more info: Unser Bier brewery.

Then on Saturday morning (ahem...morning being just before noon) we rode our bikes across the French border to Saint Loius to enjoy their Saturday outdoor market.  Lots of fresh produce, meats, cheeses and yes, of course, baguettes and other delicious breads are available.  Unfortunately for us, we got there right before closing so there were no more rotisserie chickens or baguettes left.  Fiddlesticks!!  Oh well, it is only a 15 minute bike ride so we will just have to go again.  We also hit up our new favorite cheese store and brought back some delicious soft cheese and some fabulous  Sauvignon Blanc.

Later in the day we popped on into ArtBasel, the world's largest contemporary art festival.  Neato mosquito!  If you like art, or crazy crap glued together, or crazy crap glued together and called art, this is your place to be!  We bought the discounted tickets which allowed us to explore for the last two hours of the day.  This was nowhere near enough time, but it was enough to get a taste of what there is to see.  Next year, we will bring the camera and share the weird art with you!

Then we finished off the day with some drinks on the Rhein (we saw a double rainbow!) and then we finished the night with friends at Hirsheneck, which is a fantastic restaurant collective and punk rock club.  Coincidentally they are very dog friendly, so Austin got to enjoy the night out with us.

We don't have any picture from this weekend, but we know that's what you come here for, so below are some pictures from Phil and Kristina's visit in mid-May.


We bought a day pass on the train to the Black Forest region in Germany, which only costs about 30 Euros for up to five people!  On the way to Staufen we missed our connection, so we just wandered around to kill an hour until the next train.  We ran across this collection of lazy sheep that were comically baa-ing away.  It seriously sounded like a drunk, fat guy pretending to be a sheep.

 

 Here is the castle on top of the hill near Staufen, we were too lazy to climb up there.  You can see below the castle many grape vines.  The region in and around Staufen is known for their local wines.  Holy monkey!  We tried several at the bottling cooperative and were blown away by the taste and value!

 After exploring Staufen for a half day, we headed into Freiburg for some sights, food and beer.  Freiburg is a cool university town and the centerpiece of the city is the hugemongous church.  One of the gargoyles is a guy with his pants down and the drain pipe is well-placed, to say the least.

Way back in the day, local government officials would carve the official dimensions of goods into the walls of the church so that customers wouldn't get ripped off.  This was the official dimensions of some kind of bucket (it was probably for beer).

Apparently goiters were a problem back in the day as well.

 

We finished our tour of Freiburg with some beer and local grub at a college pub.  It was a really nice day and we look forward to heading back to the Schwarzwald sometime soon.

Hope you enjoyed our little update, keep the peace and come see us real soon, ya hear?  We have also posted some recent photos on our Flickr account, if you want to peruse our happenings:

EuroFadok photos

P.S. We are training Austin to be a shelf.  It's going pretty well so far.