fall weekend

It is decidedly fall here. It dropped down to 4 Celsius this morning, and the early part of the week has been heavy coat and scarf weather.

The weekend, though, was lovely.

Saturday we ran around all morning shopping. I had heard from a former Mexican intern that one could buy mezcal at Galeria Kaufhof (such an imaginative name: Kaufhof = buying courtyard), so we swung by and found one bottle.

It was the San Cosme mezcal joven- the same kind that I bought the first time in Mexico City, mostly because it was a cheaper premium mezcal and because I liked the bottle design. Actually, and I think I wrote about it before, this is bottled specially for German export, so its really not a great shock to find it here.

As for tequila, their selection was limited to Corralejo and Patron Silver.

In the afternoon, we started making Dia de Los Muertos masks. Big ones to cover our heads. Mine is really big.

Sunday, we joined Saori's former roommate, S for a hike through the vineyards around the city. There are numerous trails that wander up into the hills and across the ridges to various hilltops and vinyards (no winery stops though). We started in Unterturkheim and hiked up and across all the way over to Esslingen, a distance of probably 12 kilometers, around 7.5 miles. Along the way, we stopped in at a circular mausoleum of the beloved Queen Katherine, a Russian monarch who married the local King Wilhelm. The high point was in fact, the highest point, a grassy hilltop where people flew kites, there was a beer garden and an observation tower. From there, one could see the Stuttgart spread below, as well as the distant Swabian Alps to the south.

Due to the odd warm weather so late into the year, the vinyards had only begun to change, so there was still a lot of green and yellow, and not quite the seas of crimson and orange yet. But the weather could not have been better.

That night, we were too tired to work on the masks more, and we had homework, so we took care of that.