Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!

6 December 2011
Passau, Germany

You gotta want it BAD to shop in weather like this!

We spent the day in Passau, Germany today, a delightful town on the Danube River. It’s so delightful, it was delightful even in the rain/snow and cold that surrounded us today. Yep, it has been threatening rain for us all week, and today it finally came through. With the exception of my feet, I was reasonably warm in my layers. And my feet were warm after I came back to the ship at lunch and changed from loafers to boots, so even that was easily dealt with. There’s a quote that goes something like, “There’s no such thing as inclement weather, just inappropriate clothing”, and that was the case today!

Anyway, we started out the morning with a walking tour of the city led by our guide, Josepha Brandenburg. Rather than count us off into groups, now we draw poker chips from a bowl and go with the tour group with our color. Worked pretty nicely. Anyway, Josepha took us around some of the cute little lanes and alleyways here on the peninsula of Passau. These lanes are very charming, and seem like they should be for pedestrians only, but every so often a car will turn up one, reinforcing that they are in fact roads. (Frankly, I wouldn’t want to drive anything but Sheldon up the street, not even Chip—the lanes are that narrow!)

The first stop on the tour was St. Paul’s Cathedral (no, not that one), which is done in the Gothic style (I think…I’m an engineer, not a historical interior decorator, and again, too hard to take notes while walking!) A little too dark and ornate for my Lutheran tastes. From St. Paul’s, we went to the gingerbread demonstration. It was held in a tent behind the shop of Konditori Simon. This shop is currently run by the fourth generation konditor, Walter, and both he and his father, also Walter, provided our introduction to gingerbread, or lebkuchen, which translates to “the bread of life”. There are three historical types: one made with spices and only honey as the sweetener—it is very cakey; another made with spices and molasses (probably my personal favorite, since it tastes most like the gingerbread we are used to); and a third made with marzipan in the dough—the marzipan is very detectable in this one. After a brief introduction, they let us taste all three. They also showed us some historical springerle cookie molds, including one as big as a dinner plate that embosses the seal of the city of Passau (a red lion, in case you are interested). They did say that springerle cookies are supposed to be very firm cookies in order to retain the image transfer, and are best eaten dunked in a beverage (a tea cookie I would call them). Unfortunately, the tent was VERY crowded, so there was no chance of asking many questions. No recipes for me <sniff> <sniff>. On our way out, they gave each of us a decorated gingerbread cookie for the road. I haven’t eaten mine, YET.

After the gingerbread demo, it was off to the Dom St. Stephen (St. Stephen’s cathedral). It is the other style (maybe it’s the Gothic one…who remembers these things?) and is quite lovely. It has five different pipe organs with a total of over 17,000 pipes. All five sets of pipes can now be played from one keyboard, but no more than 6,000 pipes are ever used in one concert because the vibrations cause damage to the structure and actually make people feel ill. Also, no concerts are given between November and April because for every three degree drop in temperature, all the pipes have to be retuned! Obviously, they aren’t going to do that willy-nilly! There are also over 500 cherubim, all of which were individual carved and have distinct features. They were really cute—some were waving, some were pointing, some were even crying. Apparently Germans believe very strongly in the concept of a guardian angel, and believe these cherubs represent them.

We broke off from the tour at that point (they were headed back to the ship) and hit the Christkindlmarkt in the Domplatz (cathedral square…see how fast I’m picking up the lingo?). Now, at this point, I really have to comment that you’ve gotta want it really bad to shop in weather like we did today. It was about 3 degrees C and pissing rain. (That’s rain that’s hard enough to be annoying, but not enough to warrant an umbrella, in case you wondering.) However, we’ve come all this way, and we’re not skipping anything, so we continued to use our grid system to make sure we don’t miss anything in any market. It paid off for us this time, because we found a stand selling Christmas table linens run by an absolutely lovely lady. She spoke very little English, but managed to understand all of our requests (which were numerous—she had many patterns in both long and square, and we wanted to see them all) and kept up with what I bought versus what Julie was buying. When our transactions were completed, she gave each one of us a free piece of linen! Wasn’t that incredibly sweet? (As Julie said, we were probably her only customers so far that morning, given the weather, but I still prefer to think it was simply due to her being so nice!)

After combing the market, we headed toward some of the shops we’d passed in town. We found a cute bath products store where we got our gifts for the White Elephant Exchange we’re doing on the ship later this week (I assembled a Rubbery Ducky themed bath gift, with bath bombs, a rubber ducky, a soap that had a duck silhouette in it, and a bath scrubby—I don’t like gifts absolutely nobody wants!). We also went into Butler’s, which appears to be the German equivalent of Crate and Barrel. Another neat store we found was called “Bears and Friends”, which sells all manner of gummy bears in flavors ranging from coffee to gluhwein to cranberry, as well as the more traditional ones we are familiar with. It was VERY hard not to walk out with one of everything in there (and they were giving free samples!). (I seem to recall that gummy bears originated in Germany, so don’t think this is too odd…) Our last stop before lunch was at an apotheke shop, or drug store. The ship is collecting donations for a women’s shelter in Vienna as part of their philanthropy on this cruise, so we bought diapers and wipes to donate—and you’ll be glad to know Pampers are available in Germany. God save Proctor and Gamble!

We came back to the ship to drop off our loot, have lunch, and change shoes (me), before heading once more into the breach. On our second pass (by this time, it had changed over to snow, which did not really make it seem any more palatable!), we wandered through the handicraft market and saw lots of beautiful things, none of which was small enough to get home in any way, shape, or form. We also found the StadtGalleria, which we think roughly translates to the City Mall. It was definitely a mall, with all that entails. However, it was warm and dry and had a cool shop called Mr. Paper (you know I had to go in, and you know I bought foreign office supplies!), so we give it a thumbs up! We also went into a chocolate shop that had lots of molded chocolates, several of which were quite naughty, as well as a chocolate Smart Car! That one was painful to pass up!
By that point, we gave in to the weather and came back to the ship to dry out. Soon we’re heading to the Lido Bar for our fondue dinner—tonight’s menu options were duck, entrecote of veal, some sort of odd-sounding fish, and eggplant parmesan, so I think we made a wise choice. (Yuck yuck yuck, and yuck.) Then, tonight is the crew talent show…this should be good, since they are all very nice but speak English with varying degrees of success!

Tomorrow we are off to Salzburg (birthplace of Mozart and the setting for several key scenes in “The Sound of Music”, in case you were wondering!), and it’s an early departure, so I’ll sign off now!

Love,
Heidi

P.S. Best Julie comment of the day: tonight at the fondue dinner, the table of (slightly) drunk ladies sitting next to us were concerned that their fondue pot wasn’t cooking fast enough, so the waiter took the protective cover off their Sterno burner. As we all know from our “Fun with Science” fire triangle experiments, the increased oxygen greatly enhanced the size of the flame, whereupon Julie proclaimed, “Well, if they can’t fondue, they can always barbecue.”