Rothenburg, Germany

Saturday I went with my friend Helene and her darling daughter Olivia (2 1/2) to Rothenburg. First off, Olivia was a little dream, she was incredibly patient so her American Auntie could snap a bunch of photos...such a little sweetie...! Second, I'm apologizing now for the lesser quality of the photos...the truth is when I travel, I don't have access to my photoshop program on my home computer, so what I shoot is what you get, sometimes that's lovely, sometimes, not so much.

So off we went to Rothenburg, it's a 15th century walled city which miraculously survived World War II, despite being less than 50 miles away from Nuremburg which was more than 70% destroyed during WWII.

The city is filled with amazing houses in all state of repair, mostly in better shape, a few needing some work. We stopped here for lunch:

The English menu modestly said "cheese noodles"- which turned out were cheese Spaetzle!!! There is little I love more in this world than a good dumpling, but I have to say that Spaetzle is the closest non-dumpling thing there is to stealing my heart away...and Cheese spaetzle? Oh be still my beating heart!!! It was truly amazing!!!

After getting a little sustenence into our bodies, we set off to explore more fully. It was a perfect weekend as they were having their annual festival celebrating the town and it's heritage. Throughout the town we could see re-enactment groups everywhere, but rather than the North American norm of civil war re-enactors, these were Medievil re-enactors. On this corner there was a musical group who also gave out bread with a lard based spread & mead of some sort. I didn't try any of their treats...but they were quite talented musically.
One of the women passing out bread...
The groups were much like you'd find in a civil war re-enactment group in the US, families coming together to create the groups, from the very young (I saw a little boy in one of the groups who could have been just about 18 months old) to the very old- this little girl didn't seem too thrilled to be on display with her photo being taken approximately every 1.2 seconds, but she was an active participant & sang right along with the adults.
These are a German treat called Snowballs. They are made of pie dough, although Helene told me they normally don't taste like anything. I see this as a challenge. I *love* the idea of these lovely little hand held round balls of pie goodness, but will have to think about how to add some goodness to them! How to keep the round shape but create a filling that one wants to get down to...sounds like a challenge!
This is the main square of the town. You can look at my (not very well lit) photo here:

Or you can take a look at the real thing here. For the west coast people, 8 or 9 am latest is the best time to take a look, before it gets dakr...
There were people dressed up as 15th and 16th century folks everywhere you went. Which also meant they were constantly getting stopped to have their photos taken. What I didn't notice about these ladies until later when looking at the photos, is they are posing quite carefully to look "time appropriate"- notice they are all hiding their ice cream cones behind each others or their own backs...

There was a long section of one of the side streets roped off down the center where a group called the 1525 group was camping. These guys were haning out near the torture devices...

turns out even in the 16th century there had to be a bit of entertainment, throughout the day I saw several people (children and adults) on the see-saw...notice the little boy? I saw him running around quite a lot- he could not have been more than 18 months old.

More photos from Rothenburg tomorrow...