The Sweet Smell of Shopping in the Afternoon

Saturday:

After following my viertel of wine Friday evening with a half liter of dunkel weizen at dinner I was in need of some serious sleep. Detouring back to Friday for a moment, the 'Cuban' food was good, though not at all Cuban, but thankfully there were no signs of green beans. I'd also like to point out to the proprietors that there are more images in Cuba to show than just various poses of Che Guevara. Ok, back to Saturday.

At the crack of noon I rolled out of bed and made my way to my favorite little French restaurant, Orphee, for a lovely brunch - quiche mit speck, meats, cheeses, fruit salad and jams accompanied by a lovely cappuccino (the Bavarians really know their coffee, it must be the proximity to Italy). Finishing this delicious repast I hit the streets of the altstadt (see the beautiful cathedral to the left of the beautiful church) to do some serious shopping. As the stores here are not open on Sundays or evenings after 8 pm I have only been able to stare longingly in the windows up until this point.

My first stop was the tea shop. It's a darling old store filled floor to ceiling in the corner with big canisters of tea. It smells just wonderful in there too. I successfully asked for and purchased a lovely green tea with mint in German (yay, new language skills) and picked up a new fine mesh filter for steeping it, as my old filter is not a fine enough gauge. Humming merrily to myself I headed out to the mega department store. I struck out there however. I couldn't decide if I really liked a pair of shoes there or not, so gave them a miss, the shoes I wanted to buy for Grant didn't come in his size and I decided the coat I liked was too expensive, so I left with nothing more than a pack of hair toys (can you believe I only packed one and managed to lose it?).

I decided yarn would make me feel much better, so off the yarn store I went. The last time I was here, I was not yet a knitter and as such only wandered in here to pick up a little yarn for a yarn junkie friend of mine. So in my memory it was a wonderful little store filled with yarny goodness. Sadly, it is a wonderful little store filled with not so nice yarn. None of it was terribly soft (well, except for the gaudy acrylic novelty furs) and it came in largely boring solid colors. The one exception was some of their sock yarn. So I picked up some sock yarn (I think I'm going to use the green I bought to make wyvern socks for the knitting olympics if I can get the gauge right) and a package of needles - after all, one can never leave a yarn store empty handed. At this point it was getting late and cold and I needed fuel before hitting any more stores so I popped into the cafe across from the yarn store for yet another cappuccino.

This cute little cafe is the same place I had lunch on my birthday back in 2004 when I was here with Grant. I got lucky enough to get a window seat so I curled up with my coffee and my knitting and watched the world go by. Warmed and re-energized I hit the streets for the last of my shopping. This time I got lucky and picked up two new tops, some new underpants (either gnomes got into my luggage or I miscounted when packing) and a shiny new surprise for Grant. I will refrain from posting further about it, as I'd like to leave this as a surprise for him, and as his honor for blogging about it. Let's just say it's awfully funny to me, but we all know how warped my sense of humor is.

I returned to my hotel in time to discover that my colleague and his girlfriend would be picking me up for dinner around 6:40. A quick change and I was out the door again. We went to a really good (and seemingly to me authentic) Indian restaurant. Warm curry is just the thing when the weather is dreary. I think I'm further appreciating the British fascination with the stuff. After dinner we went to yet another cafe (are you sensing a trend in my leisure activities when it's cold outside?) and I got to try a German treat - eis kaffee. I had initially assumed this was just an iced coffee, but I discovered I was quite wrong. It's actually espresso with vanilla ice cream in it, quite tasty. After the drinks we walked back to the hotel and I called it a night. All in all a very long and wonderful Saturday!