Das Ist Das Paradies, Ja?

THURSDAY, 9/1 (September already??):

This is the view out of our hotel balcony as I write this—

Welcome to Berchtesgaden, Germany, gateway to the Berchtesgaden National Park, and a place where a weather forecast of sunny & 80 actually means thunderstorms and 55.

Oh well, nothing’s perfect, right?

8-)

We actually just arrived in Berchtesgaden a little bit ago; we spent most of the day in the fifth country on our trip so far, Austria. We’ll actually be going back there Saturday to visit Market Day in Salzburg (and to find that brothel I wrote about a couple of weeks ago) but today we visited the resort area of Zell am See—

It’s a picturesque town located on a picturesque lake in the middle of the picturesque Alps, so you’d better believe it’s crawling with tourists, even on a less than ideal weather day like today. We were actually able to sneak in our visit just before the rains began, and therefore could see cute little things like these—

And eat cute little things like these—

That’s an apple strudel smothered in a vanilla cream sauce. I believe that by eating it, my cholesterol shot up 30 points, and just by looking at the picture of the strudel, it shot up another 10. But boy, was it GOOD!

We also crashed an Austrian funeral, as well. We didn’t actually plan on crashing an Austrian funeral, but we were in a church taking this picture—

When all of a sudden four guys carrying alpine horns and dressed in lederhosen walked into the church. We were kind of curious as to why they were there, but didn’t find out until we slowly backed out of the church, heard the horns start to play, and noticed a funeral procession wheeling a casket up the walk to the church entrance. We kind of stood there, heads bowed, until the line of mourners (quite a long one, or so it seemed) wrapped up, and then we high-tailed it out of there.

Guess we can cross THAT experience off of our bucket list.

Finally, we’ll wrap up today’s blog with three pictures you won’t see everywhere. The first is of a poster for an Alpine hoedown coming up soon—

The second is of a box of store brand of cereal from the Rewe chain here in Germany—

It’s funnier, I guess, if you know that “Ja!” is the German word for “yes”. So Loraine’s holding up a box of “Yes”! brand cereal.

Finally, it’s been noted that I haven’t posted a picture of me yet this trip, which is understandable because I’m the one taking most of the pictures that we’re posting. So Loraine took this one as we were walking back up a VERY long hill from the Rewe store to our hotel.

Berchtesgaden. It’s hard to take a bad picture here, even with a dork in it!

(jim@wmqt.com)