Hello from Karlsruhe, Germany

Draft started: Saturday morning – June 4, 2016 (twelfth post of this travelogue)

Posted: Sunday evening – June 5,2016

Well, as you can tell from the last post we made it to Karlsruhe with the help of Irina and Matthias. We are staying at their apartment link

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For those of you who may be new to our blog, Irina was our exchange student from 1981 to 1982. We have been fortunate enough to stay in touch with her all these years. Indeed, we get to see her (and now her family) an average of every two years or so – sometimes in the USA and sometimes in Germany. We even made a trip to Europe in 2005 to attend her wedding to Matthias. Irina and Matthias now have a son Viktor who is 7 years old. In his short life, Viktor has been to the US twice to visit our family.

It is always so much fun to visit with Irina and her family. We have been recalling all the fun trips we have made to Europe which allowed us to not only visit her immediate family, but her extended family as well. On one trip we got to meet her wonderful grandparents who were so gracious to us.

As has been the case with the rest of this trip, this visit has been pretty low key. We decided to spend as much of the short two days here visiting with them. That said, Irina did take us to a Thai massage salon on Friday. It was quite relaxing. We then went to a bookstore downtown (taking the tram) where Pat got some English language novels and we bought Viktor a book on trains. He is fascinated with trains of all types from steam engines to the high speed TGV trains.

Saturday we visited what we would call the Farmers Market which is always a fun event. They have three markets per week and Saturday is the biggest. There is an amazing number of vendors and the quality of the meat, fish, cheese and vegetables is top notch.

I have mentioned the wonderful breakfasts that I always enjoyed when I traveled to Europe. While Irina and her family do not usually have sliced meats and cheese for breakfast, they made sure that we had them for our visit. I have attached a picture of the wonderful breakfast assortment with the second picture showing the traditional boiled egg in a special cup. Lastly I am attaching a photo of Irina at the local bakery close to their house. It does not get any better than that.