Onions and Garlic and Beer, Oh My!

Weimar is a small university town in East Germany famous for 3 things:

• Goethe
• Schiller
• being the place where they declared the Weimar Republic

Guess who these statues are. Go ahead, guess.

When I told people I was going to Weimar for the weekend, they were like, “….why?”

“For the Zwiebelmarkt!” I replied. What is Zwiebelmarkt? It’s a traditional onion market festival, held every October in Weimar. I guess you’re supposed to stock up on onions and garlic so you can season your food for the long, cold winter? You can buy the plaits of onions and garlic with flowers (pictured front and center below), or weird figurines made up of whole heads of garlic (on the table in the background), if you’ve got a vampire problem that just won’t go away.

They also have delicious onion cake, which is really an egg-based baked good like quiche, plus all sorts of snacks that are heavy on onion and garlic (yay, flavor!), including garlic schnaps (boo, not a good combination!). Plus you have all your traditional German festival fare: fruity wine/punches, glühwein, beer, bratwurst.

Thüringer Rostbratwurst, a specialty of the region, on a roll that makes me think that maybe they don’t quite understand the purpose of a bun in the whole sausage situation

But I didn’t really come for the onion market. I went to visit my best friend who lived in Wrocław for a year and has now moved back to Weimar to finish her master’s thesis. Because truth be told, their question of “why?” is warranted because there aren’t a lot of tourists here, especially not English-speaking tourists. When two drunk teenagers heard me and my friend speaking English on the bus, they tried to mock us in their drunken stupor, which is like, haha, ok, hope you’re having fun drinking Jack Daniels back there, kiddo.

I arrived in Weimar on Friday night, excited to see my German BFF and get stupid drunk and party like we used to in Wrocław, only… we were both sick! Make no mistake, we still made it out to the market and had our beer and glühwein and even some garlic schnaps (because, we figured, it would be good for our immune systems??? but it was also gross). We just didn’t go as hard in the paint as usual.

Friday: night drinks and ferris wheels and meeting friends at bars, which unfortunately did not help the sickness because you can still smoke in bars in east Germany.

East German, post-industrial blues

Saturday: daytime sight-seeing and tea and soup and Rachel Bloom videos and 80s movies and movies that were made in 2009 but take place in the 80s (Adventureland, in case you were wondering). You know, balance.

Schloss Belvedere, palace and music school on the hill overlooking Weimar

Not sure who this is, but probably Goethe. Yeah, probably him.

The onions might be good for your immune system, but your BFF is good for your soul. (And also your abs, because you’ll be laughing so hard.)