A Moveable Fest

This is what Oktoberfest looks like if you're really doing it right. It's getting to be a regular thing for us: last year we went to the real Oktoberfest in Munich; this year Oktoberfest came to us. Each year for the past 38 years the German NCOs Association has put on their own 2-day version at SHAPE. We'd been hearing for months that they do a good job, and we were not disappointed. It's a huge deal for the SHAPE community: two of the kids Sarah met this summer even came home from their colleges in London and Paris so that they wouldn't miss it. Of course our version of the fest is a little different from Munich's. Besides being smaller (1 tent instead of 14), they served black beer (schwartzbier) instead of märzen. One of the beer guys told me that it's a specialty of Saxony. The food was a little different (spätzle seems to be beyond their capabilities) but was still very good, and the band did all the stuff you'd expect a German oompah band to do, including bawdy skits with men dressed as women. And they had the whip-cracking guys. Now I have to buy myself one of those hats my friend Curtis has.

Fascinating discovery

The other blogspot.com users have no doubt already seen this, but for the rest, you can watch in real time the photos people are uploading to their blogs. Not only is it mesmerizing, but once in a while a real gem of a photo like this one rolls by. You can stop, back up, and resume. I bet this guy does well. Be aware that the pictures are frequently stupid and occasionally pornographic, but the overall effect of seeing what people post is just enthralling.

On the Belgian adventure front, my mother arrived Friday for a month-long visit. We haven't done much of anything yet, but it's nice just to have her around. We've set her up with email, so friends and family can contact her at her regular address.

Liverwurst for breakfast

In case you didn't figure it out from Rita's last post, we were in Germany. We had week-long TDYs (business trips, for you private-sector types) in separate cites, but we joined up at the end of the week and spent a couple of nights on the Rhine in St. Goar, where we saw the fireworks Rita described and sampled some nice local German wines. The morning we left we took a long walk along the river. It was cold, foggy, and beautiful.

My second favorite part of Germany is breakfast. German breakfasts include lots of cold cuts, cheese, fruits, grainy granola cereals, yoghurts, and really great grainy breads. One morning on my trip it was still pretty dark, so the staff had set up a candlelight breakfast for us. Too bad I had to go to work afterward.

The river aglow

David counted about 30 boats of various types idling on the Rhein between St. Goar and St. Goarshausen for Saturday's fireworks display. The whole show last over 30 minutes and was yet another spectacular display of German fireworks prowess. Most of the firepower came from a barge right on the river but the castles above St. Goarshausen and St. Goar alternated with the barge. It was a fitting end to a fun day of sightseeing and shopping.

Us vs the weeds

It was barely light out and the fog hovered over the ground but David was out there spreading weed killer to try to best the nasties that are taking over our lawn. We suspect his efforts will produce nothing but faster-growing grass, since this weed killer, alas, was mixed with fertilizer. However, on a more positive note, the planted beds I weeded this afternoon surrended far more quickly today than in past weedings. I've taken on the challenge: me against the weeds. Could it b that I am scoring small but significant victories?

Wine tasting and fireworks

Saturday we took our first SHAPE trips and tours adventure, to the Mosel Valley in Germany for a wine tasting. They took us to Weingut am Rosenberg in the town of Osana, where we had lunch and tasted 13 different wines produced by the family-owned business while getting a very informative seminar on wine. After we worked our way through the wines we went down into the cellars, where we saw the oak casks they use for the very best wines as well as the ultra modern wine press. Then we tasted a peach liqueur (yum) and something the owner called "moonshine" (a grappa-like drink) that was pretty powerful. We trooped back upstairs to find their "cream," a Baileys-like drink, waiting for us. We came away with a bottle of the peach liqueur, the cream, and some of the semi-dry red, which David took a liking too.

Note that during the wine tasting, the older folks among us - us and two other couples at our end of the table - filled up our waste pitcher pouring out the wine we couldn't finish with each tasting and the water we used to rinse our glasses. The younger folk at the other end of the table didn't splash a drop in their pitcher, so we ended up using theirs too. Those girls had a REALLY good time.

After the wine tasting and seminar, as if that weren't a full enough day, they took us to Bernkastel-Kues, an extremely picturesque village on the Mosel, which was celebrating its wine festival. There was a carnival spread along the river bank on one side of town, and various wineries had booths offering their wares on both sides of the river. We saw many, many people walking around town carrying an open bottle of wine, some swigging right out of the bottle. An interesting cultural experience... At 9:00 PM the fireworks started, from a spot down on the river and from up on the hill at the old castle. It was a spectacular show. We got back to SHAPE in the wee hours and dragged our weary selves home to bed.

59ers: A French cultural lesson

In her last post Rita referred to "59ers" from France. No, that's not the folks who showed up 10 years late for the California Gold Rush. You can tell where a French car is by the last two digits of its license plate. France is divided into 95 "metropolitan" departments and four overseas departments. These are more like counties than states because they're small and don't have a lot of independence. They cannot, for example, issue their own license plates, enact laws, or run schools. All that's done from Paris.

Each department has a two-digit number that goes at the end of its plates and is used for a bunch of other stuff (the first two digits of a department's zip code start with it, for example). They're basically in alphabetical order. Thus, Ain is 01; Bouches-du-Rhône, at the mouth of the Rhone river where Marseilles sits, is 13; Hérault, where I spent my junior year abroad, is 34; Paris is 75; Var, Toulon's location, is 87; and so on. But anyone who has ever studied French knows that there are always exceptions. Terrain-feature-based names go together: Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin are 67 and 68, being filed under R; Savioe and Haute-Savoie are 73 and 74, under S. And exceptions to the exceptions: Bouches-du-Rhône is 13, while Rhône is 69. Possibly because they're Johnny-come-latelys, the departments around Paris are 91 though 95, regardless of their initial letter. Then there's the Territoire de Belfort, which is 90, between Yonne (89)and the first Parisian suburb of Essonne (91).

Anyways, the people across the border from us are in the department of Nord (French for north) and have a 59 on their plates. 59ers.