Today we finally ventured down to Lake Constance (or Bodensee) after a big day of sleeping in (well, for Therese that is) and going down to the city center to eat lunch with Todd. The language school is a good 20 minute walk for Todd, which means it took Therese and I closer to 40. Therese is in a stage where she enjoys stopping and picking every flower she sees. This area is beautiful with tons of lovely flowers, so I am constantly talking her out of picking "the special flowers" and picking weeds instead :). Therese and I played in the city garden while we waited for Todd to get out of class. The garden is beautiful (again filled with "special flowers" to tempt Therese) and I will have to get pictures of it sometime, but I forgot my camera... Todd, Reese, and I ate lunch at il Postino again making our first 4 meals in continental Europe American (McDonalds) and Italian. We ate lunch with Christian, an Italian who doesn't speak much English. This meant that Todd and he communicated in slow, rudimentary German (Christian doesn't speak much German either) and then Todd would translate for me. I really enjoyed the slow, easy German with lots of gestures because I could actually understand a lot of it (probably mostly because of the hand gestures). Incidentally, this was the meal where we discovered that Germans don't serve everyone's meals at once. Todd and I got our spaghetti and we waited and waited. Christian, being from Italy, thought that maybe since this was an Italian restaurant they were serving the pasta course and then waiting for us to finish before serving the meat he ordered (which is the way they do it in Italy). Todd and I started eating very quickly so Christian's food would come. However, today Todd and I were at a German/Italian place and our dishes were served 5 minutes apart. I surmised this must have to do with "German efficiency."
After Todd's afternoon class, we went to explore the Marktplatz (market place) in the city center. It is really neat - the streets are supposed to be from medieval times and there are NO cars or bikes allowed. We also finally made it to the lake. It is beautiful as the pictures below show. We walked around, let Reese pick "flowers" (weeds) and grabbed our first bit of German food - Bratwursts, which turned out to be HUGE hotdogs lodged between a small roll (see the picture below), and a pretzel. Therese was in heaven. As you can see, we got home just in time. It seems to rain every evening here, and last night it didn't just rain; it HAILED.
These are the cool fairy-tale like trees that line the Bodensee
Reese and mommy in front of the Lake
Die Bratwurst
HAIL!
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