| Comments: | After drinking and eating myself silly for two days - visiting relatives in a foreign country will do that to a person - I finally managed to get my ass out of bed at a reasonable hour and hit the bricks.
The 'bricks' in this case was a dirt road in the Black Forest by my uncle's house who lives in Freiburg Germany. Nice.
I ran through a field to get the forest road, up a trail to a dirt road and then along the road following signs to the 'tallest tree in all of Germany'. I saw the 2.5 km to go sign, the 2 km to go sign and then ran for what I could have sworn was 2 more km but never saw the tree. Then, realizing that I had not run in about 100 years I decided to go back before I had to call a cab.
On the way back to my uncle's house I even took a different dirt road and did not get lost! I'm proud of myself for doing that. :)
After I got back, showered and cleaned myself up we had a good German breakfast of bread, butter, jam, butter, cheese, butter, juice, butter, coffee, cream (because sometimes whole milk just won't do…) and hiked through the Black Forest to my aunt's house where we had the first deer of the season (so help me god) with all the traditional trimmings.
ASIDE - I have been a vegetarian for 15 odd years now, have not ever been a coffee drinker and today I ate meat and drank some. It's one thing to be an American with lots of leisure time and walk the high moral ground and quite another to be the a-hole guest who insists on making a scene when the only dish at the table is meat. I opted for the path of least resistance. Plus, when you tell people that you don't eat meat or drink coffee and they serve it to you anyway and those people are your family and you love them, what the hell are you going to do? I did feel like utter crap afterwards… Not physically, but like I had committed some horrible wrong. Serious, it was very weird and kind of a bummer. But my aunt and uncle were happy and that - to me - was the greater good. |