I kept it relatively local last weekend after I decided to cancel the planned weekend in Nuremberg. It was a knee jerk reaction to the stories about the train strike that happened earlier in the week (although I was later assured that I would not have had to worry on the weekend). It’s fine, though. There was an important meeting on Monday that I didn’t want to come anywhere remotely close to missing, so it worked out in the end.

It also gave me a chance to finally explore Freiburg a little, which I had not yet visited despite how close it is. It was a quick but fun trip and I certainly didn’t want to spoil the tour I’m getting of the city next month. The train ride from Basel to Freiburg is pretty short, clocking in at just around an hour (there are fast trains but I was cheap). When I got to town, I was completely inundated with the feel of a university town. There were people tabling. It brought me back to my hippy UCI days.

I started at the big farmers market in the Münsterplatz. It was lunchtime, so I fell in with my aforementioned habit and lined up at a food stall where they were selling some wurst that smelled delicious. Also, the Historic Merchants’ Hall looks like the Rathaus in Basel!

I walked walked around the farmers market aimlessly for a while before going inside the cathedral.

Now, I didn’t mean to do this, but I ended up going from one market to another and quickly found myself at the Freiburg Christmas market. The Christmas market takes quite a few blocks of the city and, most important, is the first time in my 2018 Christmas tour that I have encounted rosé glühwein. It was an achievement of pure basic status and I’m beginning to think that I’m not ironically basic, but actually basic.

After some window shopping and actual shopping, I also knocked out chimney cake from my Christmas market to-do list. It was pretty amazing.

From the Christmas market, I continued my explorations of the old town and saw some of the city’s canals along the way.

My next destination was actually Schlossberg Hill and it took quite a bit of walking in one direction before I realized that I was going in the absolute wrong direction. After re-directing myself, I found the hill and made the climb up the hill. It was sweaty, and not pretty, but as you can tell from the photos, the view was worth it. I may taken a long contemplation break to think about what I had done, but at least I felt like I worked off a small part of that chimney cake, right?

I made my way down and was going to stop by one of the city’s big breweries, but ultimately decided against it (mostly because it was crowded). I did run into more canals and even met Freiburg’s famous crocodile along the way.

Having bypassed the brewery, I did realize I was a little cold, so I ended up warming up at a cafe for a while with some hot chocolate.

The cafe actually took more time than I expected, so I had to make my way back to the train station for my train back to Basel. It was starting to get darker around the time, but I did catch some good lighting on the way out.

So, there we go, it was a quick but fun tour around Freiburg, which is a very charming and cute city. I’ll actually be back there next month for soccer and have been promised a tour of the city, but I also had fun exploring on my own. This was a somewhat quick post, but I wanted to get this one in and hopefully queue up one more in between the long list of things I need to do before I fly back to the US tomorrow. At least I have Elvis Costello to keep me company through all this, right? While packing…not the flight. That’d be weird.