Tübingen

Today I took the train to the quaint little town of Tübingen via the R8 train from Stuttgart (a mere 4.8E with my 3 day pass supplementing part of the overall fee). It was an hour or so train ride and as it was the first day I'd had where I could see anything of blue in the sky, it was a pleasant trip. The train was rather empty so I took over a cluster of four seats at one point and settled in quite nicely.

Arriving in town I scrambled to find the visitor center. Finally locating it alongside the river I bought a map and set about exploring. My feet still aching from Saturday night's all night dancing, I grimaced when I realized that most of Tübingen is hilly and the streets and walkways are all cobblestones. It's quaint to the hilt with a meandering river, turretted homes, river walks, and half timbered houses. They have a rather large gothic church which is really cathedral in proportions...it dates to the early middle ages and is where they hold many concerts. I just missed the last concert by two days. Drats.

To my excitement there were oodles of chocolate stores to be had. At 3:30PM I stumbled onto a coffee shop with a full view of the city center fountain and city building and settled in for my first caffeine in just over a year. Two cafe cremes and two shots of local scotch whiskey later I found myself wandering out the door with two bottles of the elixer to meet AA for dinner at the gasthouse by the river. I arrived early and ordered myself their special "dark Christmas beer". It didn't turn out to be as dark as I'd like. The waiter suggested their dark unfiltered beer on the next run.

AA arrived and we ordered two dinners to share. I wasn't too thrilled with their ideas on salad (with sauerkraut in it) or with the spätzle as it seemed rather plain to me. I did notice that the two men sitting next to me had a different variety of the latter dish: their noodles being thicker and longer and less ribbony than ours was. Reflecting back, we should have ordered the spätzle with the cheese sauce. I'll have plenty of time to try other varieties on this trip so it's all good. I ordered the unfiltered beer partway through dinner as the waiter had suggested. It was just a hair darker and the flavor was like a Heffenweisen, which is what AA had ordered. Tasty, yes, but not what I was looking for. But still, not bad.

Dinner behind us, we decided that we just had to get ourselves a taste of the local gelato before heading home. This is as close to Italy as I'll be getting on this trip and AA did mention that one of his Italian coworkers that he works with simply raves about this particular gelato shop in Tübingen. Mind you, it's probably close to freezing and here we are, two nutty Americans off on a gelato run. For 4E we walked out with two of the largest gelatos I've seen outside of Italy. It was too late to enjoy our delicious finds inside the store as they were closing, so we made our way out onto the dark, twisting, cobblestoned streets and slowly headed back towards our train.

What a way to end a day.