2010 Trip: Konstanz Day 3
29th May 2010
Today started with a morning trip to the Saturday market, just down the road from Angela’s flat. The stalls filled up the narrow residential street, sporting bunches of herbs, vast rounds of cheese, cakes, pastries, assorted selections of white asparagus (the vege in season), breads, and olives. A gastronomic paradise - one could even find such things as salad burnett and sorrell in the mix.
We bought up a variety of cheeses, strawberries, herbs, and olives and headed to Lukas' place for breakfast. It was quite a breakfast! Breads, pastries, five different types of cheese, the traditional cucumber and tomato, tea, coffee, and lots of fresh strawberries. As I have come north, I have been following the onset of Spring and strawberries (erdbeer) are a prime example, they have been prevalent since Turkey! Though I have to say, while the strawberries here don’t have quite the colour of their southern counterparts, the flavour, texture and size leaves nothing to be desired! Nom nom nom!
After quickly getting our stuff together, the three of us headed out to explore the area around Meersburg. We caught the car ferry across the lake and the walked about 5km along its banks. Here we came to a picturesque small township where we visited a museum of the early inhabitants of the area. They lived in communities of houses, supported above the lake water on stilts during the stone and bronze ages. The tour guide droned on in German and Angela and Lukas kindly provided an itemised translation. It was really rather interesting, especially the current thinking on the technological abilities of these tribes - from the early methods of making fire to constructing tools to smelting techniques.
On our way back to Meersburg, we stopped for a late lunch at a little cafe near the waterfront. All the cafes here serve fish from the lake (surprise, surprise). I made do with a generous helping of kartoffelsalat (potato salad) - the traditional complement and a refreshing still cider made from local apples and pears. Upon our return, we were all a little tired so declined visiting the castles above the town and contented ourselves with an ice cream on the waterfront.
We caught the boat back to Konstanz. Interestingly, students here get a good deal, most of them have travel passes, but they don’t get checked - if you look like you could possibly be a student, you can just shake your head when the ticket inspector passes and they will just ignore you - sweet!
Angela whipped up a traditional dish from the area for dinner - green sauce (Grüne Soße). I will actually detail the recipe at the end, because it was so awesome. After this we watched the Eurovision song contest, which was really interesting. Moldova got shafted and Germany won!
Green Sauce For the body of the dish: 8 large boiled potatoes, cut into decent sized chunks 4 large tomatoes, cut into wedges 8 hard boiled eggs, cut into wedges. Arrange on a plate… For the sauce: A bunch of each of the following: salad burnet, sorrell, chives, italian parsley (large bunch), dill, and chervil. Blend these together with oil, salt, pepper, two soft boiled eggs, and a pottle of dairy like sour cream or quark. Smother the sauce over the rest of the dish and eat… Serves 4