(Thursday afternoon)

Happy Weihnacht!

Oh my oh my oh my.

You all know how I like festive, and I like Christmas, and I like walking around shops.

I have been to festive Christmas shopping nirvana. Mecca. Or maybe we should keep our religious metaphors unmixed and just say heaven. All hail the Christmas market in Stuttgart. They put these temporary shops up for about a month, and the merchants decorate them with greens and all sorts of goodies on top, some of them mechanical, some of them tacky, all of them knuckle-bitingly festive. And so many of them! Really, a third of that Christmas market would have been impressive. You keep turning the corner and there are more and more shops. Candies and crafts and bag shops and shops selling slicer-dicers and other proprietary items, ornaments both expensive and cheap, springerle forms, cooking implements, candles, jewelry, cookies, you name it. And on a sunny weekday, with the thermometer around freezing, it was absolutely packed: pensioners enjoying wurst at stand-up tables, children crying to their parents for some toy or another; occasional anglophone and francophone tourists, and above all, people very serious about doing their Christmas shopping.

For lunch I opted to burn my mouth on a bratwurst with a mildly rye roll. I only lacked ketchup; turns out other shops had it, I just got unlucky. There were a number of places selling "glühwein," apparently a (local? German?) hot wine drink. You could get it punched up with rum, or amaretto, or various other things. I have never been that into hot red wine, but there was one establishment selling "apfelglühwein," which turned out to be a seriously high-octane apple wine. That and a slice of Christmas stollen to soothe the roof of my mouth made my walk back to the hotel afterwards much warmer and nicer!

I hope some of the photos I took can give you a sense of the market, because I'm at a loss for words. I was as happy as several clams in a pod, I tell you. I did, in fact, go a leetle overboard buying little wooden Christmas ornaments. You will only know what incredible restraint this apparent shopping spree represents when you take a look at the legion of ornaments I didn't buy. :)