Rocking in the Mud and a Football Cake

Tonight (Saturday, June 19th) is Mary Joy's recital. While she and Bernard went to church to finish her preparation, Marika and I went to the Benedictine abbey at Beuron, about 25 km. (15 miles) away. Because one of the highways is under repair, we took an indirect route, through Neuhausen ob Eck. It happens that Neuhausen is the site of the Southside Festival, a three-day rock music extravaganza. There wasn't much traffic, but just before Neuhausen we came to the festival grounds, with hundreds of cars parked in two or three inches of mud. Late yesterday, the rain had ended and the sun had come out, but now the rain had come back. We went on to Beuron, a baroque monastery set in a picturesque valley. It was built by Augustinians in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, but shut down by the government (secularization) in 1802. It was revived by Benedictines in the 1860s and decorated by the "Beuron School" in the early twentieth century. The church is an uneasy mix of typical south-German baroque (in the nave) and a sort of simplified, non-decadent Art Nouveau (in a large transept chapel).

We went from there to lunch with Mary Joy, Bernard, his daughters and a friend named Ute. Ute was a refugee from an offshoot of the Southside Festival: five rock bands in the Marktplatz in Tuttlingen, blasting her apartment so that the radiators rattled. She said that she had been swimming earlier at the public pool and outside there were fifty pairs of boots so muddy that all you could see was the mud, not the boots. Festival-goers had discovered that the on-site shower facilities were inadequate, so they had gone into Tuttlingen to wash off at the pool, filling it with mud.

After lunch, Mary Joy needed some exercise, so she, Marika and I went for a walk in the rain on a forest trail starting at the Lippach Mill cafe, then had a coffee and cake there. The only cake they had was a "football cake"--one in the shape of a soccer ball--so we had a couple of slices of that, then went back to Tuttlingen so Mary Joy could rest before the recital.