Bürgerfest 2009 “pot”pourri

It’s a sunny Sunday morning (oops, it’s 13:00 now…still feels like morning at least…) and we’re enjoying the gentle waltzy bounce of horns and accordions making its way along the maze of streets to our building from the stage erected out in front of the Colosseum. Yesterday we tried to navigate the throngs of Bürgerfesters with varying degrees of success. We started off gathering on Haidplatz, collected visitors from as far away as Weiden as well as some locals and decided we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get some falafel from the Jerusalem Imbiss’ stand on Neupfarrplatz (their “restaurant” is over on Obermünsterstraße, not far from Suzie Wong’s, if that’s your scene). Seems lots of the surprisingly large group were new to the concept of Falafel. This was my first falafel since having returned from Budapest, and I wanted to compare. Sadly, I think I have to agree with Monet that the Hummous Bar in Budapest was better (of course, Obermünsterstraße is a heckuva lot more convenient…). Fortunately, I think everyone who tried it, liked it, even if it was a little drippy.

From there we marched around the Platz a bit until I spied a table with just one little old lady holding down the fort. We quickly overpowered her and set up camp, where we remained for the next four hours or so. This surprised me. I thought for sure we’d get up, mosey, wander, check out other parts of town, other stages with different music, etc.…but it was not to be. Half the group would get up for a round of beers and when they returned, the other half would seek out some snacks, and when they were done, they were thirsty, so they’d go wrangle up some more drinks, which inspired half #1 to get some more food, ad infinitum.

Or, well, about 10pm. At that point we shuffled off to Domplatz to watch a presentation of the history of the Dom projected onto the Dom with color coding used to focus our attention on the aspects verbally mentioned during the narration. Great concept, but alas, the execution was a little iffy. The text wasn’t loud enough, and it was rather heavy on the echoes, and there were tons of ecclesiastical and architectural terms being tossed around over our heads, and besides — most of the locals didn’t seem all that interested in it and they talked through most of it. I would love to see this presentation again, but on my computer, so that I can rewind and look up the words I need extra help on.

Oh, and besides the friends and coworkers new to us as of last night, we also got acquainted with a couple of little characters I like to refer to as “Groß und Klein.” See the last picture here in this post. I was pleasantly suprised to learn last night that people in Britain also know them as #1 and #2 — I didn’t know they were called that outside of the U.S.

In non-Bürgerfest news: has anyone tried that new (to us) roast of Aldi Süd Kaffee called “Gustoso?” We brewed our first batch of it today and it was really excellent. We use the French Press method. I expect it would be just as yummy used with a fancy machine to make espressos or cappucinos and stuff.