Advertisement
Published: September 24th 2018
Edit Blog Post
Today, hopefully our last full day in Germany, Manoli remembered the statues of soccer players (football or fusbol in Europe) that we'd seen a couple times on our way to the base, so we headed in what we hoped was the right direction. Along the way, we passed a General Dynamics European Land Systems compound. I'd worked for General Dynamics 22 years before retiring last year. I knew they had offices around the world, but was still surprised to find one here. Since it was a different division than mine, Information Systems, I just sort of gawked, took a photo, and continued on. We found the first set of statues called Fussball ohne Grenzen, which means Football without Borders. It is a sort of reenactment of a soccer game with players from all around the world in different poses, plus a referee. Kaiserslautern is very enthusiastic about soccer, having won the German championship 4 times that I know of, and having been the smallest town and stadium to ever host a World Soccer Championship, in 2002. This wasn't the set of statues Manoli remembered, but after looking around, I figured out where the other one was... just around the corner and
up a block or so at a nearby roundabout. Sure enough, there it was. This won is of 11 Kaiserslautern soccer players from there past, called Elf Freunde Kreisel (or Elf Friends Kreisel), all lined up in a semi-circle.
After taking a few photos of both, we headed to the Tourist Information Office that hadn't been open Saturday or Sunday, to see what else was worth seeing in Kaiserslautern. We found it without much trouble and got a map of local points of interest. We'd already seen most of them over the last couple days, but had passed up on the Japanese Gardens, so we headed there first. Unfortunately, they are closed on Mondays. Another thing we hadn't seen yet was the Kaiserbrunnen or Emperor's Fountain. On the way there we passed the Fruchhalle or Fruit Hall, that used to be the town's market place. The fountain was very impressive, with a lot of different statues of different things and creatures, most of them spouting water. It was getting close to lunch time, so we headed in the direction of the K in Lautern Mall that we'd visited before. They have food court with quite a few selections. We
passed the Stiftskirche or Collegiate Church that Manoli had tried to visit before, but again, the chapel part apparently wasn't open.
After checking out all three or four floors of the mall, we went up to the food court and I decided on an Indian place called Manju Indian Cuisine. They had a Chicken Mango plate that looked good and was only 7.50 Euros. I ordered that and we sat down to eat and relax. Manoli had eaten a bit of a breakfast and a tasty street vendor item, so she wasn't hungry. The Chicken Mango was delicious and filling. After lunch, we went back to the apartment to rest for a while, then around 4pm went out looking for the nearby cafe/bakery we'd seen yesterday that was so busy when it was raining. We found the Konditorei-Cafe Krummel, where we each picked out a variety of cheesecake and ordered a cappuccino to go with it. The cheesecake was delicious, although not quite as sweet as in the U.S. The Germans don't seem to like pastries that are very sweet. They were quite tasty though. After our "snack", we returned to the apartment to spend the night watching NetFlix.
We'd bought some assorted food at the nearby Lidl supermarket earlier in the day, and munched on that for dinner.
Tomorrow, after leisurely packing up, we head to Ramstein Air Base, for the last time we hope, to catch the currently scheduled flight to Charleston AFB at about 5pm. I hope my next blog will be from our home in the U.S.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.064s; Tpl: 0.019s; cc: 10; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0364s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb