Burgen, Beer, and Bratwurst

First of all, allow me to apologize to those of you who have been badgering me to update this.  I’ve been slacking, but in my defense, I let you know what to expect in my first post.

Last Saturday, the 18^th, the international office here at WHU was kind enough to plan (and pay for) a day-long regional tour for us.  We started off the day at Marksburg Castle, which is somewhat redundant because Burg means castle.  I digress.  Marksburg was built in the 12^th century and passed through ownership by several families before being purchased and restored by the German Castle Association.  It’s pretty close to me, just down the Rhine a bit.

Bonus: The castle goat.  Sadly, his brother died from people feeding him human food. The sign on his pen said so.

After the castle, we went to Lahnstein Brewery in…Lahnstein.  We got a tour of the brewery and had a beer tasting.  Shockingly, I tasted every single beer that was put in front of me.  There was even one that I didn’t despise.  The baby steps continue.  Part of the brewery was a powder tower from the old city wall, built in the early 1400s.  The tower has somehow managed to survive every war to date, and we got to explore the inside of it and climb to the top.

 Bonus: Steve Jobs guided our beer tasting.

View from the Powder Tower. Another castle lit up to the left.

Our final stop of the trip was a traditional German restaurant, the name of which escapes me because I was ravenous at that point.  We had left for the tour around 1:00pm and walked around with no chance to eat all day.   Shortly before the food came out, the waiters were bringing around what appeared to be loaves of bread to the tables.  My table banded together and tried to flag down every waiter who came out holding one, begging to be the next group.   We finally received ours and encouraged Walt, the other IU student here, to begin divvying it up.  He took his fork and knife and began to saw.  Nothing happened.  We all sat there salivating and watching him fruitlessly trying to cut through for far longer than I would like to admit before all coming to the same realization: It wasn’t bread.

It was a warm brick.  We were trying to slice and eat a brick.  I’d like to think our insane hunger drove us to make the mistake, but in reality, I think we all just had a blonde moment.   The waiters’ looks of bewilderment as we begged them to be the next brick recipients suddenly made much more sense.     When the food finally came out at 7:30, people rejoiced.  Not just in a figurative sense; there was cheering, laughing, hands in the air, the works.  The other patrons thought we had lost our minds, I’m sure, though several had witnessed the brick incident and had probably decided that long before.  The food was served to each table on a large platter like this:

Between the 7 of us at my table, this is what the platter looked like after 17 minutes:

What these pictures do not show is the fact that after demolishing  that platter and astonishing our peers, we proceeded to walk around to other tables and eat off THEIR platters (in our defense, some tables only had 3 or 4 people to a platter and we had 5 guys in our group of 7) and then order desserts.  It was quite the meal and quite the day.

I miss everyone like crazy already, and I hope this post finds you well!