Pfaffenweiler Weinfescht
It’s wine season! While telling us about our region (Baden), the IES staff recommended on weekends we travel to the little villages in the area who will be having festivals to debut their wine. So today, we went to Pfaffenweiler, which is a half-hour southwest of us. I’ve decided I’m retiring here. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble loading pictures, so for now you can look at one I’ve found on google images. I actually found a type of wine I liked enough to buy! Unfortunately, however, I’m still not feeling at my best, and I still don’t have tylenol to make it better. I ended up leaving early because I was getting cranky (and cold and wet), and a creepy man sat next to me and kept trying to take the wine bottle that was sticking out of my purse.
On an unrelated note, I thought I’d share a story about Freiburg. On the old East Gate of the city, there’s a painting of a man with a few vats behind him. It’s a pretty nondescript picture, so you would normally walk right past it. During our city tour, my group’s task was to ask a local about the story behind it. Apparently, once upon a time, there was a rich, stupid man from the neighboring Swabia who decided one day that he would buy Freiburg. This man must have been really stupid, the storyteller emphasized (over and over again), because you clearly can’t buy a city whose name means “free town.” The man, really stupid, ja?, loaded up all of his gold and jewels in vats to take to Freiburg, but he was caught by his wife. When he told his wife his plan, she told him that he was really stupid and couldn’t get away with it. But, since when do husbands actually listen to their wives? So the next day he heads to Freiburg and announced he is buying the city. “You are really stupid,” they told him. “You can’t buy us; we are free people.” “Ah, but see how rich I am?” Then he opened his vats, which were filled with sand and stone. His wife, who is not stupid like her husband, had switched the vats in the middle of the night, and the really stupid man was laughed out of town. The storyteller really got a kick out of this story.