I disappeared for a while because I have been sick. As in cancel our weekend travel plans sick. I’m mostly better, minus the nasty cough.

In any case, this means that I’m several posts behind so it’s about time to catch up. We’ll start with a short one. Last Saturday turned out to be somewhat of a double feature. It didn’t mean to be. Saturday was supposed to be our day of touring Freiburg and watching a soccer game. But, we got the added bonus that it happened to be the 2019 Vogel Gryff dance.

This is a day of celebration of Kleinbasel where the Vogel Gryff, the lion and the Wilder Man dance around the city. We only caught parts of it. The morning starts with the Wilder Man’s cruise down the Rhine.

The lion and the Vogel Gryff apparently dance around the city while people collect money for the needy. We missed that and went straight for the procession across the bridge.

We didn’t follow the festivities much longer after that. Things got packed on the bridge and we had a train to Freiburg to catch, so we left the event shortly after noon with a quick stop by the cheese festival in Markthalle along the way.

In any case, the main event of the day was our soccer trip and (hopefully first) foray into the Bundesliga. We met with some folks from the office from the office first for a short tour of the Old Town.

This included a trip to the Freiburg Münster, where I saw the best nativity scene ever.

From the Münster, we decided to start walking to the stadium for the game. And I mean that we walked to the stadium. We were supposed to catch one of the trams, but they were absolutely jam-packed with people. We were told that it takes twenty minutes to walk to the stadium from old town, but it ended up being a nice frisk 50 minutes. It worked out, though, as we made it to the stadium just in time for the game.

The game was a lot of fun. Hoffenheim is a bit of a regional rival for SC Freiburg. We were told that their games are almost always high-scoring and this one was no exception. Well, except that Freiburg lost. There was the bad goal the hurt my heart in a way I haven’t felt since I’ve been home at my Quakes games and a pretty lame penalty kick call. It was fun, though, and was accompanied by glühwein, which was good but primarily served the purpose of warming my hands.

After the game, we got our SC Freiburg scarves from the fan shops. There was some chaos getting shuttles back to Old Town, where the group got separated, but we all eventually found each other. We ended the night at the Feierling Brewery for schnitzel and some very delicious beer before making our way back to Basel.