Weimar Zwiebelmarkt

I´ll actually write more about this market later, but for now just enjoy the sights. :)
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Okay, so here´s the scoop on Zwiebelmarkt. As you already know, it´s held in Weimar, a city very close to here(about 20 mins by train). I went there in the early afternoon on Saturday, because somebody had mentioned it to me during the week. I was interested in what it had to offer, and I wanted to check out Weimar, too.

Anyway, it is a weekend-long festival where you can buy just about anything. There are stands (food, clothes, pottery, art, knick-nacks, wreaths made out of onions and balls of garlic) set up around the entire city, oh, and several stages of varying size, too. Also, a lot of the stores are open and put stuff on the sidewalk to attract people.

Some of the sections of the city have themes-for instance there was a kids section where a magician performed and told funny stories, and a medieval section where all of the stands looked old and made out of wood and there were candles providing light at night. They also had homemade wine in old-fashioned barrels and jugs. I tried a honey wine called ´met´(I think it´s meade in english) that was served warm. It was very sweet, but good, and the fact that it was warm was even better, because once darkness fell it was COLD.

The music covered a wide range of styles, including this one band that played in the midieval section that had an instrument i had never seen before. It roughly looked like a compact guitar with some kind of slab over its strings, and it had a little hand crank coming out of the bottom.

Though I went there by myself, one guy I work with lives in Weimar and I ended up running into him and his girlfriend there. The sun was just starting to set and I wasn´t sure how late the festival went or when the last train left, so I was thinking about heading back, when out of the corner of my eye I see someone throw a piece of paper at me. When I turned to look, there was James! It was actually really great to run into them, because since they´re from there they showed me around. I don´t think I would´ve ever found the midieval section on my own.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the streets in these towns seem like they have no rhyme or reason. There´s no sign of a grid-layout like a lot of neighborhoods in the u.s. I think it is a mix of building in the mountains and that the towns are so old. Anyway, needless to say, if you´re not familiar with a place, you can easily pass up a lot of little interesting streets-especially when there are a billion people walking around. Before I ran into them(James and his girlfriend), I felt like I had covered pretty much all there was to see, but they showed me a couple of places I didn´t even know existed(like the kids and midieval sections).

All in all, I´m very glad I went, and suggest it to anyone who happens to be in the area when it´s happening.