Tor!

Elias has been enthusiastically trying to catch women's world cup soccer games on TV, so we surprised him on Tuesday with a trip to Augsburg to see Japan play England. Our original plan was to pick up the tickets, go hang out in old town Augsburg for a bit, then go to the game; but when we arrived at the stadium 2.5 hours before kickoff, the parking lot was already filling up. We skipped Augsburg altogether and people-watched instead.

Some folks were rooting for Japan,
and others were rooting for England.
Some were rooting for Germany (playing against France further north in Moenchengladbach later that evening).
It was a very friendly crowd,
and pretty much everyone cheered whenever either team displayed finesse, but Japan was clearly the crowd favorite. This might have been because Japan was #4 in the FIFA rankings, vs. England at #10, or because Japan was playing so well despite the devastating earthquake and tsunami earlier this year. After the game, Japan thanked the world for its post-tsunami support, and England's players joined in the banner march to show solidarity.
With 20,777 attendees, the relatively small stadium still had room for another 2,000 or so; but 20,777 is a lot of people when it comes to clearing out parking lots and walking to mass transit stops. Both teams would go on to the quarter finals regardless of who won. England surprised everyone and won the game 2:0. Toooooooooooooor!

A packed Friday

On Friday, Stefan and I drove south to Staufen, then east, past Münstertal, and into the hills...

where we parked and began our hike up the beautiful...

Belchen (1414m). A helpful trail sign left little doubt about what direction we should take, until we encountered this...

fork just a dozen meters up the road. Stefan wisely checked the map, but it didn't show the fork, so we stayed to the left until...

we were strongly advised to go to the right. We had one last view of the...

valley behind us, where lay nestled the tiny village Kaltwasser, before we headed into the...

mossy...

woods. We saw nothing but trees, switchback after switchback, until at long last we emerged...

atop the ridge, with water vapor still burning off the mountain in the warmth of the late morning sunlight.

The Belchen is clearly a lovely place to spend the summer if you are...

a sheep or a goat or...

a cow.

We opted for...

a more open route back down, and observed that folks on the Belchen enjoy a little more flourish than those on Schauinsland when it comes to...

stacking wood. After we walked back through...

Kaltwasser to our rental car, we decided to drive to...

Staufen for some coffee, seltzer, and ice cream. I believe Germany is one of the only countries in the world where one can make an occasion of going out for seltzer.

We made it back to Freiburg in good time to see...

the play Elias's summer camp put together. The play is about a king who locks up his daughter because she doesn't want to get married; but then he begins to have regrets and sends a dragon from Toulouse to look after her. First the dragon has to track down the princess; a rabbit is unable to help, and the dragon subsequently receives conflicting directions from two foxes (shown above). Eventually he learns that the princess has been stolen from her tower by a band of robbers; the dragon rescues her and...we have to go back next Friday to see how the story ends, since the play isn't done yet. (Elias won't be in camp next week, so he'll be in the audience rather than on stage.)

Can there be a better way to top off a great day than to go see...

your two favorite German soccer teams face off in an exhibition game at a small town field in Bahlingen am Kaiserstuhl? How fortuitous that we happened to be in town during the Kaiserstuhl Cup! SC Freiburg beat 1860 Muenchen, 2:0, scoring a dramatic second goal just before the clock ended. Other highpoints of the evening included two storks flying over the field into the setting sun, and the absence of vuvuzelas.

Kaiserstuhl and Merdingen

Elias continues with jock soccer camp this weekend. He's still having fun, but we're learning how different soccer is in Germany compared to the US. None of that chipper YMCA it-isn't-whether-you-win-or-lose building-moral-fiber stuff here--it's all about the champs. Kudos to the few girls who manage to nurture their love for the game: of the 65 or so kids at the camp, 62 are boys.

After we dropped Elias off on Saturday, Stefan and I drove to Ihringen, on the southern end of the formerly volcanic Kaiserstuhl, and took the train around the mountain to Endingen. We then hiked the 17 km length of the mountain back to the car. The Kaiserstuhl offers a mix of forested peaks, grassy meadows, and terraced vineyards, along with a chapel on the Katherinenberg and a lookout tower on the Totenkopf (the highest point, 555m). A long portion of the trail had stone markers from 1772 and 1773, indicating the then-border between Austria and France.

After we picked Elias up, we drove over the Tuniberg to Merdingen for a wine and Zwiebelkuchen fest. Various clubs in town host food and drink stalls in the local vintners' courtyards. All the wine came from the Merdingen vintners' collective, and all the food was prepared by the clubs. We ended up buying an entire pan of Zwiebelkuchen--which in Baden means a very thin, crisp dough, with a sour-cream chopped-onion custard baked on top--in exchange for the men's chorus club making us a vegetarian one (hold the ham). Stefan asked if the chorus was going to sing and was told that after the wine had flowed long enough, everyone would be singing. Add to that the poems posted on the tent walls about how a good Zwiebelkuchen helps with the wind music, and you can imagine what things must be like by the time folks drag themselves home at 4 a.m. We were happy to have made it to Merdingen's fest, as the Merdinger Rot Spaetburgunder is our favorite so far.

Tuniberg

In our effort to give him much needed quality time with kids his age, Elias started a five-day "Bernd Voss Fussball Camp" today in Opfingen. By this evening, he was well exercised, tired, and quite happy.

Opfingen is one of a handful of small communities incorporated into Freiburg yet situated several kilometers to the west along the Tuniberg, a sizable hill terraced with vineyard after flourishing vineyard. While Elias was learning new soccer moves, I jogged from Opfingen north around the Tuniberg to Gottenheim, then walked back over the hill, enjoying in the views of grapes and the mountains beyond. In July, when we stayed in Waltershofen (one town north of Opfingen, also part of the Freiburg municipality), all of the grapes on the Tuniberg were green. They have since ripened into purple, red, and yellow-green clusters, and the season of new-wine fests is upon us.

The local wines are quite delectable. With Deutsch-als-Fremdsprache enthusiasm, I've been describing them to people here as tasting like the local dialect sounds: "leicht und knusprig" (light and crisp). This generally elicits skeptical looks, perhaps because most folks here haven't spent a lot of time listening to the extended diphthongs of Bo'arisch (Bairisch), where a simple three-letter word might be drawn out into a four- or five-letter one without a second thought (e.g. turning "gut" into "gu'at[h]"). Bavarian sounds more like a full-bodied red might taste, in contrast to the airy Spaetburgunder flavor of the Badisch dialect. My word choice is possibly also confusing because "knusprig" means "crispy" as well as "crisp," which might evoke images of words and wines infused with rice crispies. Nonetheless, I stand by my choice of adjectives.

As my friend Melissa points out, molted cicada shells are also light and crispy. For those who find that analogy helpful, I would suggest that full-bodied reds are the whole cicada: more than you'd necessarily want to encounter on a warm summer evening. With Badisch Spaetburgunders, you get to appreciate all the essential features of the cicada, without the undesirable heaviness of the squishy parts.

But back to the Tuniberg. In the Google Earth image below, you can see the entire hill (my trot covered only the north end). The Rhine river curves into the left of the image, about 8.5 km west of Opfingen as the cicada flies.