Elisabeth (the Rake)'s birthday

This is the Hoeh speaking. 24 years ago, a new person was suddenly there in my house.  We called her Elisabeth. Even though her first name was really Anna.  It didn't really matter, since people call her whatever they want to, including Stan. which by the way was actually my grandfather's name!

Today we started the day by going with Maija's parents to deliver the apples we had sorted  , and many of which we had picked or picked up

to the press, which was in Regensburg and looked like this:

It turned out we had 250 kilos to add to their batch.  The deal is that you get credit according to weight of apples, then you can buy any of several juices from them at discounted prices up to a corresponding amount.

Then they dropped us off so we could spend the day as tourists in the historic and scenic Regensburg.

So we are staying with a family of energy- and environment-conscious vegetarians, and we took the opportunity today to be conscience-free sausage consumers.

Ja, we got it out of our system, maybe.

St. Peter's Dom Platz

Boat tour on the Danube.

Inside St. Peter's Dom

View from the Stone Bridge Tower

It was a lovely day.

But to backtrack a little: There is an interesting and apparently widespread but locally-varied holiday called (well, regionally varied but here called) Kirchweih, in which the anniversary of the consecration of the local church is celebrated with dancing at the foot of a very tall, somewhat festooned tree,  This one was 24 meters.

The local teenagers have a large party the night before, which we witnessed, observing scores of 16 year old girls filing back and forth to the bathroom while similar numbers of guys drank outside. One guy did come in and sit with us in the Gasthaus, finding it incomprehensible that Elisabeth was a carpenter. " Ein Zimmerman?  Ein ZimmerGIRL?? Du, ein ZimmerGirl?! Nein. Ja?" This was him the next day, apparently recovered:

Anyway, they all bounced back after their night of partying and put on a remarkable performance in their own customized versions of traditional garb. 

Unfortunately we can't show videos in this app or from this iPad, but there was a really good young accordion player too.  Even though apparently this holiday is a sort of "coming out" for drunk teenagers, in that they basically party publicly officially for the first time - all weekend - it was a truly good-faith performance they put on for a sizable crowd!   And we understand this happens all over the country every October.

So we are here til Friday and then we will go on to Italy via Munich.  Maybe we'll post again before that ...