Today, though, I’ve got to share just how utterly pathetic The Woodlands Oktoberfest was. I think what made me the most angry was the admission fee. Never have I paid so much and gotten so little. As much as we were disappointed by the Tomball German Heritage Festival earlier this year, that festival made The Woodlands Oktoberfest look like a corner lemonade stand.

How about I share the one good part of The Woodlands Oktoberfest first. The “kinderfest” area, hosted by The Woodlands Children’s Museum, was actually a lot of fun. Our toddler got his face painted, played with a sand table, and made a gingerbread-man puppet. There were handful of other crafts for kids, too, and it was a great area of the festival.

Aside from the children’s area, there were two music stages, about half a dozen food and beer booths, and even less craft/vendor booths. Oh, and a ton of mud. Plywood sheets had been half-heartedly slapped across some of the worst areas, but we got stuck in deep mud under the tent for one of the music stages, and had quite a bit of cleanup to do on our stroller and shoes when we came home.

The food was a mix of American festival food (BBQ, funnel cakes, etc), and your very basic German food: Bratwurst with sauerkraut and potato salad, and apple streudel. My husband got a reuben, which wasn’t half-bad. I got a pretzel to share with the kiddo (he spit it out), which was about as good as you could get in an American mall, and nothing like the bretzels you get in Switzerland or Germany. I also got a tiny bratwurst that was burnt to a crisp on the outside, and  bland and gritty on the inside. I’ve honestly never had such an awful bratwurst, and I don’t know where they bought these, or how you could cook them so poorly. The apple streudel was passable.

The beer selection was Zeigenboch (a local Texas brew), nasty Budweiser in all of its American variations, and Sam Adams Oktoberfest. Hubby said there were three German beers to choose from at a higher price. For American beer, he was charged $7. My coke was $3.

Moving on to the vendors. There was ONE and I mean ONE single booth devoted to German “stuff.” It was your average tourist fare: pins, t-shirts, questionable-looking lebkuchen cookies (I think, but I’m not sure), and steins. There was also some sort of spa booth, a bbq sauce booth, a sari/scarf booth, and some sort of table cloth booth.

The music that we heard while we were there wasn’t that great, either. Though when one of the bands swung into “Mustang Sally,” our toddler couldn’t stop dancing.

In half an hour, you could see all that there was to be seen. We managed to stay about an hour and a half, and that was mostly taken up with eating, and hanging out in the Kinderfest area.

Was it worth $10 an adult? Absolutely not! Will we go again next year? Absolutely not, and we’ll tell everyone we know (starting with you, dear reader) to avoid it until they get their act together. Shame on you, Woodlands Rotary Club! What a disaster!

Everything "western" looks better in sepia, no?

As usual, I am behind on posting our travel adventures here in Texas and around the US. A few months ago, my parents discovered a little place called the Heritage Village in somewhat nearby Woodville, Texas. The museum site is a restored pioneer-era village in east Texas containing period buildings and artifacts and an attached restaurant and gift shop. There’s also a genealogy research facility that specializes in Tyler County.

From our home north of Houston, it took a little under two hours to get to Woodville, and the park is located halfway between Sam Houston National Forest and the Arkansas border. We took the stroller with us, but found that it was rather difficult to get through the bumpy paths around the buildings, and had to leave it behind to access some of them. Since we went on a week day, it was virtually empty, and we only saw one school tour as we were leaving. That was nice because we could take our time through the village, but unfortunately we missed out on any of the demonstrations that are mentioned in the guide and on the website. Another problem is that some of the buildings were extremely musty, and were a bit overwhelming, so we didn’t explore some of them at any great length.

Overall, though, we had fun, and there were lots of interesting objects to admire. My dad, a huge train buff, particularly enjoyed the old Railroad Depot. My mom liked the Collier Store, with its collection of ladies boots and other odds and ends. I was fascinated and disgusted by a reproduction of a dentist’s office (complete with very scary tools). Most of it was completely over the head of my toddler, though older children would definitely get a kick out of it.

These were saws, not dentist tools (forgot to get a picture of the latter).

After the museum we went to The Pickett House Restaurant, which serves boarding house style all you can eat fried chicken, chicken & dumplings, country vegetables, cobbler, biscuits & cornbread. The food was pretty good, and we enjoyed ourselves.

I’m not sure I’d drive too far out of my way to visit the Heritage Village (two hours is pretty long for a toddler), but if you are going through east Texas, it is worth stopping in to see. More pictures that I snapped at Heritage Village can be found here.

One of our favorite places to visit in Switzerland is the tiny medieval town of Stein am Rhein. We can take a train (the S29) from the tiny depot near our flat in Oberwinterthur to Stein am Rhein in about 30 minutes. The s29 is a Thurbo, which is a commuter train with very tall windows, and each car has a bike area that easily holds the stroller. The views on the train ride through the rolling country side are lovely, full of farms and vineyards. To get to the altstadt from the train station, follow the signs heading northeast from the station. Go over the bridge over the Rhine, and you’re there in about a 10 minute walk.

Stein am Rhein is located close to the German border, and is at the point where the Rhine River connects with Lake Konstanz. It first was put on the map in 1007 AD when Emperor Henry the II of the Holy Roman Empire (which included Germany at the time) moved the Abbey of Saint George to this strategic location (a side note – all of the man-hole covers in Stein am Rhein are graced with Saint George lancing the dragon). Most of the town has hardly changed since the 15th century, and is full of gorgeous painted buildings and the loveliest altstadt (old town) area in Switzerland (at least in our opinion). It has remained a very small village and the most recent historical note was the accidental bombing by Allied forces in February of 1945 (they got the wrong town).

Most of the exteriors of old buildings in Stein am Rhein have been fully restored, and the town’s main walk is easily explored in an hour or less. On the other side of the altstadt, there are paths running along the river alongside parks and restaurants. You can even catch a boat up river to Schaffhausen or along the lake to Konstanz. For children, there’s a really big fun playground on the river front, nearly entirely all in the shade – just take the river path northwest from the town.

Points of interest include the church and abbey of Saint George, and a museum in the altstadt that had a collection of children’s toys of the past (I’m not sure if that was a temporary exhibit or what).

Our favorite place to eat in Stein am Rhein is La P’tite Crêperie about half-way down the main drag. Yes, French food in a German area of Switzerland, but it is divine. And it is a small place, with cooks working as fast as possible, so don’t be surprised if not everyone in your party gets their crepes at the same time. The crepes are enormous, and if you want a dessert crepe, you might want to share your savory crepe with a friend. The menu is in English and German, and usually there is a waitress there that speaks a bit of English, too. My favorite was a ham and herbed butter crepe and a nutella and banana crepe (with a flask of apple wine).

Like many Swiss towns, there is a small Schweizer Heimatwerk shop, containing gorgeous handmade goods from local artisans. There’s also two tourist shops full of every bauble you can think of. But I like to head nearly to the far western wall of the altstadt to the Schoggibox!

The Swiss-German slang for chocolate is “schoggi” so the shop loosely translates to “Chocolate Box.” Inside this very tiny shop are over 300 different kinds of Swiss chocolate from the big names such as Lindt and Cailler all the way down to expensive hand-crafted varieties. There are chocolates filled with kirsch (a popular Swiss cherry liquor), and you can get a Toblerone the size of your arm. I love it because it has every single type of Cailler chocolate bar that they produce, and Cailler is by far my favorite Swiss chocolate.

Above the town is the castle of Hohenklingen.

You can walk there, but it is quite a steep hike, so we recommend going by car or bus. The castle is used mainly for special events, and has very few historical items to view inside, but there is a wonderful little cafe that offers a fantastic view of the town, and that is completely worth stopping in for. We accidentally ran into a wedding reception while we were there, but the cafe was filled with regular patrons. This picture was taken with my cell phone, and doesn’t even remotely do the view justice:

The only place that we didn’t get to explore, and really wanted to was a tiny monastery in the middle of the river that we always saw from a distance. I can’t find the name of it at the moment, but there was a long footbridge you could get to it from the south side of the river. Maybe next time!

The best time to visit is April to September. Anytime outside of that, and a lot of shops and museums have limited open hours (as we discovered the first time we visited on a chilly Saturday in November). We love to take visitors there because it is easy to get to, and makes for a short, but fun and relaxed day. Even if you just go to have dinner at one of the restaurants facing the river, you won’t be disappointed.

My parents with our son in the altstadt of Stein am Rhein.

As always, I have tons more pictures than what I can fit in a blog, and this is especially true with Stein am Rhein, because we visited it so many times. To page through them, click here.

Me, husband, and baby on the edge of the altstadt of Stein am Rhein.

The festival is free, and so is the parking (or it was for 2010 – if you are planning on going in 2011, you might want to check the festival information website). There were a small handful of booths that were selling German-themed items. Most were things that you would see in any tourist shop or airport in Germany. The rest of the booths were selling all kinds of odds and ends that you see at any other festival: clothing, raffle tickets to support various charities, timeshare scams (we almost got roped into one of those), and one very nice local artist that was selling gorgeous jewelry (got a gift for my mother there).

Since the festival is primarily sponsored by ZiegenBock (a Texas beer that got bought out by Anheuser-Busch), that was the main beer, along with several other US beers. No, there weren’t any true German beers at the festival, despite their availability in the US. Disappointing, but we can get decent German beer at our local grocery store.

The food was a mish-mash of sausages and other festival food like kettle corn. One booth had decent potato pancakes served with traditional apple sauce. I opted to feed a craving for fried Oreos (yes, terrible, I know, but it is a weakness), however, for four dollars, you got only four Fried Oreos (you usually get a big bag of them at the Houston Rodeo for the same amount, and they tasted better there). One booth was offering a Currywurst, and maybe two others had sauerkraut.

There were a handful of live bands and kids groups dancing traditional dances, so that was nice to hear and see.

One upside to the festival was the heritage portion of it. In one of the buildings, part of the floor was devoted to a random craft display, but the rest of it had a number of kids projects on German culture and language, and geneology tables all related to the immigration of Germans into Texas and the settling of the Tomball area. It was fascinating. There was also an active booth representing a local German/American club tucked way in the back of the hall. I’m sure that most attendees of the festival missed this building, which was hidden away behind booths.

Parking was a big problem. Yes, it was free, however, there is a dangerous street to cross to get to the festival entrance from the parking area. There is no stoplight, and there were no police officers patrolling traffic to try to keep pedestrians from getting run over as they dashed across the street. Really poorly planned, and frustrating, Tomball – how could you not have officers available for the entrance?

Lastly, I’m of the personal opinion that no respectable festival or business puts its updates on MySpace. Every other business and festival I know of has a page on Facebook. MySpace is a cluttered mess, garish and difficult to disseminate information. Facebook is clean, has more adult users that would be attending the festival, and you can more easily read and update information.

Overall, a fun day out, but if you are expecting to get a ton of German culture, food, and drink, you’ll be disappointed.

When we lived in Switzerland, we recycled everything for several reasons. First, they charge your trash by how much you throw away. The system where we lived is that you buy these stickers. A sheet of 10 stickers cost about $13. For very large bags of trash (65 L, I think) you used two stickers. For your average bags (35 L), just one sticker, and for smaller bags, half a sticker. Next to the trashbins at our apartment complex was a bin for compost material. On designated days of the month, you could leave your paper (carefully bundled in strict regulated size piles) in the trash area.

Here’s what one sticker looks like, though the picture is a bit fuzzy probably to keep people from copying it. You would get a whole sheet of these, same size as a piece of paper that you get from your printer. They are as wide as the page, and yes, they are wavy on the edges.

If you didn’t have a sticker on your trash (on rare occasions, folks would try to pry off a sticker and put it on their own trash, or people just didn’t put a sticker on it for whatever reason), there is a sort of garbage police. Some poor sucker is paid to go through your trash and find out who they are so you can fine you. First, though, they usually put an orange sticker on the offending trash and leave it outside the bin, giving you the chance to put a sticker on it and make amends.

I understand in Zurich, the system is slightly different. Instead of buying stickers, you had to buy a specific trashbag. If you didn’t use a Zurich trashbag, you would get a fine. I think that might be a bum deal, though, because what if your trashbag breaks? Then you are out a buck fifty (or however much it cost).

The Swiss recycle EVERYTHING! On either side of our complex (it was really big), and dotted throughout the city were small recycling centers that had bins in them for glass (green, white, and brown), batteries, cooking oil, and aluminum. They were very clean and emptied frequently. If you had large items, there were designated recyling centers that had a bin for those, and they were often fixed up and sold at resale shops. A few times a year there was a textile collection, where you could donate old clothes, sheets, etc. Useable clothing was given to charity or put in resale shops benefiting charity. Clothing and cloth items that weren’t up to snuff were somehow processed into cleaning rags.

However… there were rules in place for the recycling as well. Being a quiet country, no one wants to hear the clang of bottles as they smash into bins. Outside of each recycling center hours were posted. Keep in mind that these were basically small covered areas about the size of a garage in the US that were lined with big  square metal bins, and open to the air except for a bit of covering over the top, so the noise really carried. And they were usually located in convenient residential areas. Usually the available times for depositing your recycling was 7AM to 6PM Monday through Saturday (I think – it has been a few months). Sunday is quiet day and a day of rest, which I’ll have to elaborate on in another post.

The trash that was collected was burned in a clean way, and the methane collected from it was used to power homes. Apparently the Swiss are so efficient at all of this that other countries pay them to reuse/recycle/turn into methane their trash! We were so amazed at all the things we heard and saw with how incredible their trash systems worked! And I felt so guilty over how much we threw away before. If we had used cloth diapers, we probably would have only taken out our trash once or twice a month while we lived there, since hardly anything got thrown away. Also, packaging is less than in the US for food items, etc.

Anywho… after that long ramble… we now recycle cardboard, newspaper, plastic, glass, and cooking oil. We have a bin in the garage. Everything gets rinsed before going into the bucket. When it gets full (about once every third week), I take it up to the recycling center in Conroe near the Dr. Pepper plant.

I am going to petition my neighbors and my home owners association to see if we can’t get recycling in our neighborhood, but it won’t be easy. But when you think about how much goes into our landfills that could be recycled, really think about it, it is just common sense.

Oh, and I also have bags (most of which I bought in Switzerland) that I take with me grocery shopping. I’m bad that I don’t always remember to take them in the store with me, though. In Switzerland you had to pay for bags (just .30 rappen, or about a quarter) for a paper bag, but most people brought their own. You also bag all of your own groceries, and most people go shopping about once or twice a week, for the freshest goods (and because most kitchens/pantries/fridges are the size of a dollhouse!).

We moved lived in Switzerland for 18 months, and just moved back to Texas at the very end of 2009. I first drafted this post before we left.

Mom and Baby Easter Egg Hunt

Community Easter Egg Hunt

A few weeks ago, we visited the Houston Downtown Aquarium. My husband and I had been there quite a few years ago when we were dating, and it wasn’t all that much to behold. We were hoping for expanded exhibits and when I got a discount through a local photography club that I am in, we decided to revisit it.

The Houston Downtown Aquarium is not owned by any sort of educational group, but by Landry’s Restaurants. Even the official website has “restaurant” in the URL address. Crammed into a few city blocks, the facility consists of a building housing a small aquarium exhibit, restaurant, bar, and gift shop, a small outdoor game arcade and amusement park, and a short train ride that goes through a shark tunnel. The aquarium boasts lots of special events, and is available for rental for everything from parties to sleepovers in front of the white tiger cage.

I was most interested to see the aquarium portion. It was sadly lacking in a variety and quantity of fish and information. I’ve seen more species of aquatic life at the Dallas World Aquarium (and they are constantly expanding and improving their exhibits). There are a few petting tanks in the middle of the exhibit, and kids had fun touching and giggling at the baby sharks, horseshoe crabs, and anemones. But, if you want to see a great aquarium, this isn’t one of them.

However, not everyone is a fish-nut, and there are lots of other fun things to do and see. For older children and adults, the train ride through the shark tunnel is a lot of fun (if very short), and the game arcade and rides are clean, fun, and safe. There’s even a really cool carousel where you can ride on creatures of the deep. The food is great (though, pretty steep in price), and the gift shop is stocked with every kind of toy, book, and keychain you could think of.

Overall, if you are looking for something fun to do with older children, this might be it, especially if you can get a coupon.

I had a hard time working in the dim light of the aquarium, so not many of my shots came out very well, but here’s the link if you want to see some more.

Just a quick note in the midst of our preparations to leave…

Switzerland is not part of the European Union, however they abide by certain of their laws and even accept the Euro for currency. Well, they are supposed to anyway. In the last month, I’ve been to Konstanz, Germany three times (long story), and Colmar, France once. I had leftover Euros from each trip, and while we usually just pool the leftover Euros for the next trip outside of Switzerland, we’re not going anywhere else for a while. So, I thought I’d try to spend my Euros here in Switzerland.

At first shopkeepers sigh or get a befuddled look on their face when you hand them Euros (at least in Winterthur). It seems that every last one of them is happy to take the paper currency, but no one wants to take the coins. It turns out that the banks in Switzerland are the same. No one wants Euro coinage. I wonder if any of my Swiss friends have experienced this?

So, now I have a big fist-full of coins that I’ll just have to pack in my suitcase and hold on to until our next trip to Europe (perhaps Ireland in the summer?).

Many of you have asked what I’ll be doing with this blog in the meantime. I keep up with most of my friends on Facebook, and while this blog has documented some aspects of our life in Switzerland, it was more of a travelog than anything else. I have a bunch of day-trips that we took that I’ve not yet documented here, so I’ll continue to do that for a while until I run out of material. And of course, any future adventures will be documented here.

Hope all of you are well. Happy New Year!

December

17/18 – phone calls about bills, packing
19 – get back and give back loaned items
20 – Westfield family Christmas (take 1)
21 – shopping for stuff to ship home, packing
22 – laundry and final packing (could use a baby wrangler, might as my neighbor Roz)
23 – shippers take away 99% of our things, Rosie flies home, Dinner at Regina and Werner’s
24 – dinner @ Stacy and Oliver’s
25/26 – possibly taking a day trip somewhere in Switzerland
27 – going away party
28 – possibly taking a day trip somewhere in Switzerland
29 – laundry, packing, give away all remaining food
30 – flight home, parents picking us up at IAH

31 – IKEA, grocery store

January

1 – REST ! Unpack just a little, and put together things from IKEA (namely the dresser I need to get), Westfield family Christmas (take 2, this time with grandparents).
2 – UNPACK SHIPPING CRATE AND POD – both should be in in our driveway by then. Anyone in the Houston area welcome to come by in the morning and help. I say Houston area because we have limited crash space because my parents are staying with us for a few days; floor and one air mattress available, but probably not advisable, as we need room to shuffle boxes, etc. (nice run-on, Krys)
3 – unpack, shop for clothes for H and jeans for me.
4 – H goes back to work, I continue to unpack.

early January: I go back to work part-time (possibly? Sharon needs to let me know when to start)

mid-January: welcome back gathering at our place, weekend trip to Dallas to get Jake (our other dog) and see friends and family, MIL visits?

late-January: San Jose to see my new baby nephew.

Early to mid February: Possible road trip (just Eddie and I) to destinations north and east to see friends and family. Hope to get to see my grandpa on this trip.