European Adventure Part 2 - Food and Logistical Lessons

When traveling and eating in Europe it's anyone's choice how to get along.  You can eat local traditional foods or go to McDonalds for a Big Mac.  We opted for the local fare and experienced some amazing foods.  I don't have pictures of all the food so I borrowed some of these to illustrate my point.  German food is so delicious!!!

Here's a typical breakfast.  Meat, cheese, bread and jam.

These little rolls are the BEST!  Our hosts bought them first thing in the morning so they were melt in your mouth fresh.

You can't go wrong with the Curry Wurst.  It's quick, cheap and so good.  The sauce varies quite a bit from place to place but the brats and the curry powder on top never disappoints.

There are a number of ways to eat Schnitzel.  This is my personal favorite Jaeger Schnitzel.  So creamy and rich and soooo good.  I can't decide whether I like it more with chicken or pork but I can promise, it doesn't matter.

Here is the most decadent and traditional dish Rouladen.  It's meat rolled with bacon, onions, mustard and pickles inside.  OMG, this is soooo good!  We first experienced this years ago at my Sister in Law's house.  It is always served with potato dumplings and gravy over the whole nine yards.  The dumplings melt in your mouth!!

Here's Mark eating pig knuckle.  It was falling off the bone and melted in your mouth.  So good!

This was a late brunch in Berlin.  So excited to see eggs on the menu!

What is the problem with all this scrumptious German food?  Did you notice?  There's no vegetables to speak of.  I'm not sure how they do it.  Pickles, kraut and potatoes don't really count as vegatables and that's too bad.  There are salads on the menu but they're not traditionally German.  Note to self, next time I'm in Europe I will need to balance a bit.  Suffice it to say that it's hard to keep the digestive track moving on this type of diet.

One more note about food.  We saw some strange combinations of food in restaurants.  These were not fusion of the two just the choice of one or the other.  One day we chose a Mexican/Italian joint.  Our experience showed that you really can't do both well, better to focus on quality of one type of food.

Now let's talk about packing.  I researched how to pack light on a Europe trip.  Being a perpetual overpacker I amazed myself.  For two weeks I had one small suitcase and a back pack.  Mark carried a larger suitcase for bringing gifts home.  It worked great.  I made one stupid mistake.  I was very excited about vacuum packing my clothes in ziplock bags.  See:

This way of packing sucks, I would never do it again.  The one point I will have to concede is that on the way to Germany a small bottle of witch hazel exploded in my toiletry bag.  None of my clothes got wet!  It was such a hassle to figure out which bag the items I wanted were in.  Having a bunch of ziplocks along was nice but packing bricks of clothes was harder then just stacking folded clothes was.  Oh well, lesson learned.

For all you smokers out there, you will love Europe!  (I know, nasty habit).  You can smoke where ever you choose in Europe.  Here's a couple of examples:

Gotta love the airport smoking room!  I saw this moments after stepping off an 11 hour flight.  THANK YOU Frankfurt!  : )

Here's a smoking box in a restaurant.

The next post will be all about some fun highlights.  I'm anxious to show you a video of one of the coolest experiences ever!  Then I'll move on to some of the most touching moments celebrating lives that were lost or forever changed during the decades of war and religious persecution in Germany.