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- Written by Tom Snow
I'm almost done putting together a blog about my weekend in Salzburg, Austria, but before I put that up, I have to say a few words and share a few pictures from a day trip I took a week later to an out-of-the way spot in the northwestern tip of Bavaria. This place is called Kloster Kreuzberg and is in the Rhön mountains. It's not only a monastery (Kloster) but also has a big restaurant, some quaint-looking inns, hiking trails, and a brewery. Apparently the beer made in this brewery got some recognition from a 1987 Playboy article naming it the best beer in the world. So someone was reading the articles after all! Now, up to this point, I'd only ever heard the epithet "best beer in the world" applied to the Belgian Trappist ale Westvleteren 12, so if there was a rival claimant to this title, I had to taste it for myself.
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- Written by Tom Snow
Before I relive the recent weekend I spent in Hamburg, I have to discuss something that non-Europeans, especially Americans, overlook about Germany: it may be a lot smaller than the United States, but it's more culturally diverse. I recently found a great listicle on the Chive, one of those light entertainment sites I use for after-work unwinding, about what Hollywood gets wrong about people's countries. In this list I found a picture of a woman decked out in Dirndl standing next to a Warsteiner beer tap, captioned "Bavaria is not our whole country." That's so true.
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Strasbourg (German Straßburg) is a French city on the German border, on the west bank of the Rhine, and that location is probably responsible for its conflict-ridden history. It's the largest city in a region called Alsace (German Elsass) which for much of the past was desirable to whichever side didn't have it. The city was traditionally German until 1681 when the French took it, then the Germans took it and all Alsace back in 1871, which caused the French to seethe in resentment until they wrested it back in the First World War. Aside from the relatively brief Nazi occupation in the Second World War, it's been French ever since.
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- Written by Tom Snow
Funny how it worked out...I spent four days in Mérida, Yucatán, flew back to San Antonio and went back to work for a week, and then I found myself boarding a cruise ship bound for the peninsula I just flew away from. This was pure coincidence, of course; all my friends and I settled on a cruise leaving on a specific date and it just happened to be a week after the Rock 'n Roll Half Marathon in Mérida.
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