Zwiebel Fest

It feels like it's been so long since I posted anything so I thought I'd catch up today. Two weeks ago Brad and I went to the Zweibel Fest, which translates to Onion Festival. They serve everything with onions there including onion cake (kind of like quiche) to steak and onions. Fortunately there were no onion desserts - that would just be too gross. If it were an episode of Iron Chef America, I imagine one of the chefs would have made onion ice cream - on that show they're always making the grossest ice cream... So Brad, I and Chris Santos, a friend of ours, hopped the train and headed off. The fest was in Esslingen, which Brad and I want to go back to someday, it was really a neat town, with some really interesting buildings! This building with the clock and the WWI monument in front of it is just an example of the interesting buildings there. When we got there, we looked around. It was a small fest, just taking up one small square area with all the restaurant booths set up around the outside edges and some more on the inner edges. You could walk through the fest in one big square. There were people at the fest, but it wasn't really crowded so we ate dinner, then walked up the hill behind the fest to the top where there is this old fortress. It was quite a haul up several steps to the top, but you can see the awesome view. We sat at a cafe on the top of the hill, inside the walls and had a cup of coffee (me) and beers (Brad & Chris). After hanging out there for a while, we headed back down to the fest to discover that it was now extremely busy, and there was no where to sit down at all! Plus the crowds were packed in the walkway. So we circled, like buzzards, looking for a place to sit down when a couple got up and left. We squeezed ourselves in to a space that really fit two people and spoke with the german couple across from us. They spoke a little English so we were able to communicate, somewhat. It was a lot of fun. When it got later we all headed back to the train and home.

My lessons learned:
(1) do the tourist stuff early
(2) once you find a place to sit, don't give it up
(3) onion cake is not very good but onions with steak is awesome and onions in potatoes is really good too
(4) crepes with nutella are always a success
(5) the waitresses will hunt you down demanding the cost of the broken glass if you make the mistake of breaking one. (Not like in the states where they just absorb the cost, here, if you break it, you buy it)

Something else we've learned from going to all these fests is that the Germans don't believe in plastic cups or plates. They give you glass cups and plates, you give them a deposit of normally 1-2 euros. When you bring the dishes back, they give you back your deposit. I think this is a really good thing since beer tastes so much better in a glass than in a plastic cup.