Weinmeile practice

A few weeks after Männertag comes Pentacost (or Pfingsten in German), which gives us a holiday on the Monday. It's also the weekend during which the annual wine festival in the region north of here takes place, the Saale-Unstrut Weinmeile. (You may remember blog posts from the first one, when I went with just Calin and Susanne as Jeremi was in Canada, and we got incredibly drunk and got into trouble on the train on the way home, or last year when I went with Jeremi and my friend from Belleville, Pam, when we got rained on and Pam drove her bike into mine, causing me to fall while six months pregnant. Always a good time!)

We were already looking forward to the Weinmeile this year, but I was a bit concerned, because it seems that I can no longer drink red wine. At Christmas I could, but sometime this spring something changed, such that when I have 1-2 glasses of red wine with supper, I wake up with a brutal hangover. I can still drink beer, but it's really not worth it to drink wine. I wasn't sure about white wine though, which is what we usually drink at the Weinmeile, because it's what they grow best in this region, so we thought it was best to do a practice run before drinking several glasses of wine and then wanting to die the next day.

We had just wanted to buy a bottle of wine the weekend before and have it with supper, but we forgot to add it to the grocery list, and it was Sunday so everything was closed. But bars and restaurants aren't closed, so we did our own little Jena pub crawl, going to a few different places over the afternoon and having some food and a glass of wine at each. It was so much fun, and Béla really enjoyed it too!

We only got pictures at one bar, the Grüne Tanne (which was described in the last post as well). Here he is, after crawling away, almost onto the road. (Not to worry, we were watching, and there's very little traffic on this street.
And a close-up, to show how darn cute he is. You can still see some of the bruise on his right cheek from the fall on Männertag.

Sitting at his papa's feet, which makes him look tiny (or perhaps makes Jeremi look like a giant?).
A good time was had by all. And best of all, I woke up Monday morning feeling fine. White wine is officially okay, and the Weinmeile was a go! (More on that shortly.)