Breakfast and shopping

I corrected the post below, the beds do have fitted sheets, but there are no top sheets.  They look very strange this way, especially because there are no ordinary blankets, just down comforters.  The beds, in this hotel at least, are very firm.  I mean, I’m used to sleeping on the floor and I find these beds firm!

The hotel serves breakfast.  I suppose it is what should be called “Continental”, but if this is the model that American hotels were thinking of, they have failed miserably to immitate it.  There was a large assortment of breads – mostly whole grain, one white bread for slicing, yogurt, cereal, especially granola (I had some granola that had chocolate chunks in it!), jam, nut butter, sliced meat and cheese, cottage cheese, and soft boiled eggs.  The hostess brought me a pitcher of coffee and a glass of orange juice.  There was a toaster, and I toasted some fresh white bread, interestingly, it only toasted the bread on one side.  The nut butter, called Nutella, is made from hazelnuts and chocolate.  They had whole peanuts set out but SGT Claspell told me yesterday that they don’t have peanut butter and you can only get it at the Commissary.  I only had a very little bit of the cottage cheese, but I don’t think I could have eaten much more, it was very rich.  The sliced cheese turned out to be much softer than I expected, I don’t know how they can possibly slice it, and it was also very rich.

After last night walking around the village, I decided I needed gloves.  I have only military gloves and I’m missing one of the dress gloves, one glove doesn’t do much good.  I took my military dress glove to the hostess and asked her “was ist dis in Deutsch?” and she told me “ein Handschuh”, asking her where to buy a pair was a bit more difficult as I didn’t know the German for “where can I buy this?” and she couldn’t really understand English.  Finally I held up the glove and said something like “where shopping?” and she understood and circled several places on my map.  One of them, “Hohner”,  she said was very big and said what I guess was the name of a store or the word for “department store” maybe.  I looked puzzled and she said “uh Woolworths?” I thought this was an interesting choice of stores but I got the picture.  Another store she said was even bigger – “Karstadt”.  Then she circled another called “Handschuh Gründ” and she said it was a small place that had “Lederhandschuhe”.  All of these places were on the other side of the river or canal “Linker Regnitzarm” in what she called “the city”.  The area I am staying in is called Alt Bamberg, i.e. “Old Bamberg”.

I decided to go to the specialty store first.  I walked down “Richard-Wagner Straße” to “Hainstraße”, then to “Lange Straße” and easily found the shop.  They had only a few pairs of mens gloves, the shop being mostly womens handbags, which was slightly dissapointing.  The shopkeeper spoke almost no English.  So I held up my hands and said”handschuhe?”  and the lady showed me about four choices.  The gloves were high quality and very expensive, some nearly  €100.  They were a bit tight but the lady assured me that within one hour they would fit just fine.   I bought the cheapest pair which still cost nearly €50.  Then the lady wrote out a receipt and explained the gloves were guaranteed for two years and if the seams ripped out to bring them back with the receipt and they would repair them!

I then went back toward Hainstraße to Promenadenstraße which I followed to Franz-Ludwig-Straße and then to Grüner Markt, where I found Hohner, and yes it was like a large Woolworths.  Unfortunately, it did not have what I was looking for or at least I couldn’t find it.  I needed an adapter for the outlets.  My universal powerstrip with European plug wasn’t working, I suspected a bad fuse, and my other converter wouldn’t work because the European plug wouldn’t fit into the socket, the sockets here are recessed, rather than the flush ones they had in Iraq, so the whole plug, not just the contacts, must be the right shape.  Many electronic products will work on 220, if you have an adapter so you can plug them in, laptops generally ar fine.  So, I went to Karstadt, and they did have one plug that I thought might work.  Although it was rececessed, it appeared that an American plug could fit it if it were small enough.  I bought one and then went to another level to look for a scarf.  It was difficult to find a wool scarf, most were acrylic, and none were cheap, but I did find a rather nice wool one.  There were several Cashmere scarves which had been reduced to about the same price as the regular wool one, but they were too thin for my taste, so I bought the wool one.  I noticed some bedding on beds and it too appeared to have no top sheets.  My boys will be happy to know that the toy sections of both Hohner and Karstadt had nearly an entire wall of Legos, including some Star Wars Legos.

I was pleased to find I could navigate back to my hotel without once referencing my map, but when I got back I realized that the extension cord on my MacBook has a three pronged plug!  This is strange, because you don’t need it, the normal cord has a plug right on the power supply and it has only two prongs, but it can only be used if the outlet is flush – I might have been able to cut off the recessed portion on the adapter I bought, but I couldn’t find a part to my MacBook that is needed to use the powersupply without the extension cord; so, I set about rebuilding the universal powerstrip that I bought in Iraq.  I found there was an extra fuse, but that didn’t help, the problem was a wire had come off the back of the place where the fuse is.  I now have it jury-rigged, basically, the wire is simply stuck under one of the contacts and left exposed because if I try to put the cover back on the fuse the wire will most certainly come out.  I’ll just have to keep an eye on it and unplug it from the wall when I leave.   At least now I can use my laptop and charge it up.

One thing I discovered is that Bean Hunting Shoes are not the best thing for walking here.  I thought they would work well and they are a lot warmer than my Timberland boat shoes, but something else entirely is needed and I’m not sure what it is.  There are asphalt roads in the city, but even there many areas are cobblestone, as is the entirety of Alt Bamberg.  Asphalt with a light coating of slush on it is bad enough, especially in a city area where it has picked up a coating of oil over a long period of time, but cobblestones are very slick; my boat shoes seemed to do better last night, but it has snowed lightly since then.