We have had just a few festive happenings since my last mail that have included the Heinerfest, which is the local Darmstadt equivalent of the Oktoberfest in Munich. They blocked off the whole city centre for 4 days to cater for a massive sprawl of carnival side shows, beer tents, beer caravans and sound stages.
I took a wander down on the Saturday night with my friends Frank and Nicole and partook of a variety of foaming beverages along with a few helter-skelter, topsy-turvey show rides to settle it all down. Gad what it is to have the legacy of an Aussie iron gut constitution! The actual evening went through till 3am but we had already retired to the AnSibin Irish Pub for a Guinness or two by 1am having tired of jostling with the milling crush of the crowds and the endless queues attached to each beer stall. The festival finished on a Monday (which needless to say has been designated a local public holiday) and they had a firework spectacular to wind it all up that night.
Bettina and Thomas having weathered many of these fests in the past basically gave it all a big miss with the exception of Bettina on Sunday afternoon, ducking into a stall on the fringe of the bedlam to purchase a bag of special ginger bread pieces which only become available for sale during the fest. Armed with said bag of ginger confection we scurried off home to enjoy a few quiet beers in the sanctuary of own back yard, far from the madding crowds, the streets of broken glass and the weaving stumbling antics of the inebriated citizens of Darmstadt.
I spent an hour on the Monday night poised on a section of flat roof on our house with a camera and tripod getting some time lapse photos of the fireworks barrages emanating from the city centre and exploding high above the silhouettes of the neighbourhood tree tops. Le grande finale and farewell to the beer barons of Hessen.
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