German Eis Cafes

I cannot sleep. I keep thinking about my vacation and how I wish I was still on it! Sometimes I have a hard time shutting down my train of thought long enough for me to fall asleep. Tonight is one of those nights and I'm thinking about my recent return to a little town in Germany called Hattingen. When I was in high school I did a student exchange to Hattingen and lived with a host family there for 3 months. Just 2 weeks ago I returned and met again with the girl who was my exchange partner. It was a little surreal to see her again and spend an evening with her and her husband. All in all it was a great reunion but I was reminded of so many things about her that I had forgotten in the last 15 years. And tonight that is what I am thinking of.

While we were in Hattingen Husband and I spent our first night with my exchange partner and her husband. They took us to a nice Italian restaurant in the Alt Stadt or Old Town. It was really a very nice meal with plenty to drink and in true German style we capped the night off with some schnapps. The next day Husband and I went on a fantastic walk along the river Rhur and hiked up to the Isenburg ruins just outside the main city. It was a very hot day and once we got back to the city I insisted that we go for an ice cream . If you haven't had ice cream in Germany put it on your bucket list. These people know how to do ice cream. It is one of the things that sticks out in my mind about the food in Germany from when I was there on exchange. I went with a group of other Canadian high school students who were all sent to different families then halfway thru the exchange we all met up for a trip to Trier organized by our exchange foundation. One of the first things we all said to each other was "Can you believe the ice cream here?!" . We were all in love with it. So I was pretty excited about indulging in this once again. Deciding what to order what really difficult but I decided on a chocolate, strawberry, banana masterpiece that looked amazing. Husband didn't order an ice cream despite my attempts at persuading him, and He was sorry when my ice cream came. He definitely was a little jealous of my treat while he sat there with a smoothie.

The ice cream in Germany is so creamy and so smooth and soooooo tasty. Keep in mind that the Eis Cafe we went to was not even a top notch one. When I was living there my exchange mother would drive us into Essen to go to a REAL eis cafe as she described it. The ice cream there was in-frigging-credible and would blow my icey treat I was trying to re-live the glory thru out of the water. But still, this was enough for me to get my fix, as you can tell by the look on my face in the photo.

If you are lucky enough to visit a German Eis Cafe, I'm going to recommend at least one person in your party order some strawberry ice cream (erdbeer = strawberry). It's unbelievable. You'll never want to eat shitty North American strawberry ice cream again that's for sure. Let's just say that in 3 months in Germany I gained 5 kilos that I have to this day not lost. Erdbeer Eis is responsible for at least one of those kilos.