Ode to Esslingen

You may remember my friend Nicole, who very sensibly decided when she visited me from Germany that travel via public transport to the east of Senegal was not something she particularly wanted to do (http://www.traveling-stories-magazine.com/on-the-road-again/#more-638). Nicole lives not far from the airport in Stuttgart, in a quaint medieval town called Esslingen along the Neckar River. There is evidence of the town’s history everywhere you go: from the old gates such as the Wolf’s Gate (ca 1220) to the Burg to the oldest champagne cellars in Germany to the half- timbered houses, many of which date back to the fourteenth century. Despite all this, Esslingen is a very modern place, with exclusive boutiques and lovely eateries. At one place called Emil’s I enjoyed a gargantuan plate of Maultaschen, a specialty of the area which is vaguely reminiscent of ravioli or canneloni, but without tomato sauce and with a heartier German twist. This was accompanied by a ‘Rhabarberschorle’ or rhubarb spritzer, a drink I have seldom seen on any menu and certainly nowhere in Senegal.

To top it all off, Esslingen even has a cinema located in a big industrial chimney (for you, dear reader, the cinema may not be thrilling enough to warrant inclusion, but I can assure you that seeing a film there was a big event for me, as there is no movie theater to speak of in Dakar. Having come from New York, home of the Angelika, the Film Forum and all sorts of other landmark cinemas which I was accustomed to attending fairly regularly, it came as quite a blow to learn that I would have no real opportunity to see recent films during my stay in Senegal). As it turns out, this trip to the cinema was my only one throughout my entire stay in Germany – there always seemed to be other things that were far more compelling, like coloring with the kindergarteners, hiking through the vineyards, watching my cousin’s daughters practice riding their unicycles and so on.

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