To that wedding in the vicinity of Neuss, Germany. We took a plane to Düsseldorf, and were met by the young couple. She is hercousin (aka sister-by-aunt, her mother, i.e. Inge, being Oma's sister), and he is a programmer, having a little outfit which writes pieces to be used within Autocad, most probably designing them straight for manufacturers.
A nice geek's place. Few framed photos in the lobby, holographic, in real 3-d. One of them was of an old Leica camera, the other of a pistol (profile, not pointing at the camera), and third... some old car. Looked quite realistic, except it was monochrome, tinted somewhat. There was largish TV with about a hundred buttons on the remote, with teletext. Same Fuji dot-matrix printer as we had in the office, 132-columns A3 DL-3400 (larger version of dl2400), the indestructible. Went out to have a pizza; before leaving we almost forgot to turn the TV off, and I was nearest to it so I took the remote and, amazingly, found the shutoff button in two seconds. "Did you find how to...?" "Hey, we're geeks - anything with buttons..."
We walked in the nearby park. A guy on a bicycle had a dog running around. Seeing us with the kids, you could see him rolling his eyes and calculating what he'd have to pay if the dog bit anyone, called the dog and leashed it. Gooood.
Later, we were accomodated in the Kafe Schwarz ("black coffee" or "Black café"), which is an old house in the center of the village, across from the church, where the ground floor was turned into a restaurant, and what upstairs and attic it had into guest rooms. We got two rooms all the way up; the girls got the big one, which didn't really have a ceiling as such, it had roof. The side walls were tall perhaps 60cm, so yes, we banged our heads a lot. My room was some space above the staircase, with a bed perhaps a whole meter off the floor, and the space under the bed did not belong to the room. It was the size of perhaps 1,5x2,5 meters, and it also didn't have a complete ceiling, but at least it had a small TV which would catch some dutch channels - with subtitles, so I watched a bit before I dozed off. Even had its own little window, where I could see other parts of the roof.
There were some rooms which were stuck in the space left between the staircase and the roof, including its corners, probably just as crazy as mine. Not a bucket of space was left unused.
For breakfast we'd go down in hotel's own restaurant all three or four days that we were there. The breakfast was czar's. The buffet (called swedish table here) was already a regular thing, we understood the way it worked right away (and possibly have already encountered it somewhere and had first hand experience, who'd know that now). The assortment included various dry meat products, starting with pašteta in a gut, formatted at inch in diameter and two-three lenghtwise, various sausages in chunks of similar length, sliced ham and few other items, and fairy rye bread, somewhat different from what the russian [one] but excellent all the same, with rich fragrance. And it was all high quality, you couldn't spot that the majstor was sparing the materiel anywhere. And, on top of all that, coffee, filtered or instant, the hotel way from a tall mug, pour at will, and milk to add. I could dine that for two months and not get bored with it.
There were no plates, we ate off some wooden boards, and for flatware there was just the knife, short kitchen type, to slice and spread on bread, exactly the kind we'd use at home. We liked the boards idea, and later we did that ourselves (as late as 2014. or so).
I don't know why did these folks get a whole ham from SFRY, when they'd visit Oma, if they had such good stuff there? Was it too expensive for them?
Somehow the first negative got lost, so no shots from this part, except what photos they sent us later.
11-XII-2013 - 13-VII-2026