This and that

This is the Japanese garden made in honour of the doctor, and his house is  on the right

Idle thoughts...What did I think of Germany? Well let us start with breakfast, self service in the two hotels we stayed in and no kettle in the bedroom for that first cup of tea!!!!!! Yikes did I miss that first civilised cup of tea of the day, to actually add to my woes, the tea bags on offer in the dining room were mostly of the tisane variety with only darjeeling being the black tea..  But the rooms were beautifully warm and clean, and it is not the hotel's fault that we can't speak German and had to resort to CNN for news. Stuttgart was a bit of a scary place, as someone who does not like shopping, the enormous shop lined street we walked down to get to the museums were not interesting in the least, they had not got to the 'Westfield' (the big shopping mall next to the Olympic stadium) stage at least in providing covered shopping malls.  To be quite honest I haven't been to Westfield yet but will undertake it one day if my grand daughter Matilda wants to go, as surely she will.
Everyone was so kind to us in Bietigheim that I can only praise the people, we met a German doctor and his Welsh wife who had relatives in Fishguard, and it was a shock to be asked by him, had we got into The Old Pharmacy restaurant in Solva, this is a restaurant known for its culinary skills, and yes we had last year...
We had two meals out with everyone in German restaurants, and the first thing you notice on the menu, that it is mostly meat with noodles - spatzle (something I shall come back to one day) and a help yourself salad, that is a great deal better than the salads you get in this country.  But neither of us are large meat eaters, so we managed on the salads and found chicken in one of the restaurants. But when we were invited to Regina's house we ate the noodles with fried onions and a salad.  One of the things I liked and would like to do in these dark winter months would be to line the path with little candles as Regina had done for the museum for her 'soiree'.

Just to prove that not all my photos are in monochrome these green bamboos  did stand out

This is the witches lane,  and people had little doll witches in their backyards just to emphasis this 'hexed' place..