Bread in Germany with Flat Stanley

We had the privilege of showing “Flat Stanley” around our corner of Germany, after he flew over in an envelope from an elementary school in Massachusetts. He has since returned to the U.S., but his adventures were fun!

Flat Stanley needed some lunch when he got off the plane, and he found lots of choices at a German grocery store. His first choice was pre-packaged bread, similar to what is in American grocery stores.

His next choice was freshly baked bread. You can take the entire loaf home (whole), or you can put the fresh loaf into a bread slicing machine, and presto- neat slices of fresh bread.

Flat Stanley knows someone who cannot eat bread that has gluten in it, so he wanted to make sure that people in Germany have gluten-free choices. They do!

A few days later, Flat Stanley passed by a bakery and thought the bread there looked great! Of course, you don’t have to eat bread for lunch, but that is a popular choice for lots of kids in Germany and in Massachusetts.

Off the beaten path in France: Strasbourg

We had lunch in Strasbourg last summer on the way to Switzerland, but the stop was too short for a blog post. This time, we have more photos and stories to tell. Depending on which roads you take from Kaiserslautern, it’s a bit over 2 hours.

We climbed the cathedral tower first off. FYI, there is a public restroom underground to the right of the cathedral as you face the main doors. We’d recommend a boat tour of the river around Strasbourg, with multi-lingual recorded narration.

We’d highly recommend the hot chocolate and pastries in Strasbourg…we did not have as much luck with lunch during either visit. Please be aware that if you order “boeuf”, it will not necessarily be cooked beef. I discovered tartare by accident, and am no worse for the experience, but just in case the thought of paper-thin sliced raw beef is not your idea of fun, this is a head’s up. Both restaurants included meat-heavy menus, with a few vegetarian choices. The second lunch educated me as well, yielding larger-than-golf-ball-sized hunks of liverwurst. I actually like liverwurst sandwiches, but not large balls of the stuff!

Our favorite moment was difficult to photograph, because we were sitting in a café enjoying stupendous “chocolat chaud”, when a black cat strolled by wearing a harness on a leash!!!!

There are a number of parking garages near the old-town neighborhood of “Petite France”. Both times we tried to leave Strasbourg, we had a tough time with sudden lane changes and poor signage, despite a GPS, so be alert.