Day five I was intent on finding a toy store.
It was cold, so I wore the red plaid flannel shirt, leather jacket, brown boots, and big gold necklace.
I took the train from Messe to the Konstablerwache train stop, only to find that it was right on Ziel street, where I'd been the day before!
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| apfelstrudel, cocoa, and Guernsey |
It was still quite early in the morning, and though I found the toy store, it was not yet open. I took refuge from the cool air in a cafe, and had a apfelstrudel and hot cocoa, and read more of the Guernsey book. It was sort of lovely.
The toy store was wonderful. I fell in love with everything I saw there. First, the
Sylvanian Families. Ohmygoodness. I want all of them, but especially the hedgehog family. They are for ages four and up, and I decided in the end that it would be silly to buy a toy for baby girl that she wouldn't be able to have for four years. Then there were the baby dolls and stuffed animals and wooden toys, all beautiful. And very expensive. I ended up choosing a simple little dolly (the bigger and more beautiful version was 49 euros!) and a colorful wooden toy, and have no regrets about my choices.
I met A at Messe for lunch. We had bratwurst and fries from one of the stands there. Then we took the afternoon (the booth was crowded with extra help, anyway) and went to Mainz. We walked down to the Gutenberg Museum, and actually paid for the audioguide, so it was a lot more interesting that the Goethe House. We saw an original Gutenberg Bible, and a demonstration of a printing press. And did you know, that no one actually knows what Gutenberg looked like? Most painting show him with a long beard, but he was patrician, and they were almost all clean-shaven. There's your fact for the day.
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| printing press sculptures outside the museum |
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| outside the museum |
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| printing demonstration |
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| sunshine and a church across from the Gutenberg museum |
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| amazing garden (those cones are huge nasturtium plants) |
Mainz was really beautiful, and we did more of the strolling-and-walking I talked about before. Then we got back on the train to return to Messe. I'm pretty sure we got on the wrong train, a regional one instead of an S-bahn (our show tickets would get us on S-bahn and U-bahn for free, but no regionals). I got nervous enough halfway through the ride that we got off and waited for the next S-bahn. We were supposed to be back to Messe by 6:00 pm, and we barely made it there by 6:05. That was our only difficult experience on the trains in Germany, thankfully it happened when we were together, not when I was by myself!
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| beautiful Mainz |
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| A and a statue of an old guy |
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| fountain in Mainz |
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| German buildings are so beautiful |
We had dinner at a little hotel and restaurant on the country road that leads from Bad Camberg to Dombach. They had an English menu, to which I exclaimed "wunderbar!" to the waiter, and we became instant friends. He even gave me some candy on our way out. We also had a lovely view of a red sunset from our table. For dinner I had the roast pork with boiled potatoes and cabbage. It was delicious. everyone else had pork schnitzel with some fried potatoes (not french fries, more like puffs?).
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| view from our table at the restaurant |
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| A and the amazing red sunset |
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