Wine Festival (also known as Weindorf)

Two weekends ago Brad and I went to the Stuttgart Wine Festival. We went with both Adrian (who I work with) and Chris Santos. The Wine Festival is set up in downtown Stuttgart. They take a couple of the squares - the ones where they have the vegetable and plant markets on Saturday. Then they set up a bunch of tents and booth where they sever beer and wine. We got there at about 6 p.m. and it was already crowded. We walked around and looked at all the different foods offered and the different wine booths. We did stop and buy a bottle of wine (3 glasses worth). You would buy your glasses -- small glasses with the Weindorf picture on the side. This time, instead of putting a deposit down for the glasses, you instead purchase them outright - for .50 Euro each. Then you can reuse your glass with all the other wines you purchase.

Most of the food was traditional schwabian fare (Schwabian food is the food of the region we live in), everything from sausages to cooked dishes. Brad had a pork steak and baked potato dish. I had a pasta dish. Both of our dishes were good but the best part was hanging out with friends trying different wines. We had some people join us at our table, a married couple (she was British and he was Australian) and a german woman. They all live in Stuttgart and belong to a English club. Kinda interesting, but the German woman was both pushy and Booooring! She went into a half hour long story about getting pulled over for speeding when she was in America - the end of the story was she got a warning. Argh!

It was a beautiful night and the wine fest was really busy. By later in the evening it was so crowded that it was hard to walk to the bathroom - you had to work your way through a very big crowd. It was a good time, so good of a time that we went back on Sunday night. We ended up going back to the same place (I think our friend was sweet on the waitress). I had a fruit and cheese dish for supper and Brad repeated his meal from the night before. I don't know what kind of cheese it was, but it was really good! We walked around and checked out the other booths also, a lot less crowded on Sunday. Only problem with the place is it's pretty expensive, but we had fun. We took all these pictures Sunday night - we realized after we got there that we hadn't brought the camera on Saturday. It was another good reason to go back!

Ironically, Monday (Labor Day), we ended up eating lunch at the wine fest. Neither of us had intended to go back but we went downtown to go to the toy store, forgetting that it is on the mall that had the winefest in it! We were going to get something to eat at a place other than the wine fest, but ended up waiting too long. In the end we realized it was after 2:00, so we just got something at one of the stand up booths and ate it sitting in front of the Rathaus (this is their government building downtown). I had potato noodles with cheese, Brad had a sausage in a bun. It was really good.

When we went to the toy store (our destination downtown), we were actually looking to buy a jigsaw puzzle for me. I did get one, it's pretty cool, it's a jan Van Haasteren puzzle, the scene is of a circus. It's like a Where's Waldo picture in a jigsaw puzzle. One of the things I liked about it, was instead of just looking for the place the piece went in the puzzle by color and shape, instead I'd take the piece and spend time trying to find it on the picture on the box - so each piece became a bit of a challenge to locate it. This artist has created a bunch of puzzles, click here to check out some of them.