Do you know what Kurbis is in English?

Maybe I should give you some guesses...

(photo from Pau).

Last weekend we headed to Klaistow for the pumpkin fest- which rather oddly runs for several weeks (is it just me who thinks that one weekend full of pumpkin is enough for a year). Pau, Andy and I, and Aga and Alicja hopped on the bus and took the 1 hour + ride to the south west with high hopes for pumpkin frivolities.

Apparently, you can also ride from Potsdam. If you take two houseguests who aren't really regular riders, and get a little lost on the way and accidentally ride 35 instead of 20 km, it only takes about 3.5 hours. So I hear.


I'm going to be honest- I was a bit disappointed by the number of foodstuffs with pumpkin. We all ordered pumpkin soup for lunch- except for Pau, who got some sort of fried pumpkin fritter- but it was generally watery and poorly flavoured.

They had a few biscuits with pumpkin, and some pumpkin seed things, plus pumpkin alcohol (it tasted like rockmelon)- but not much in the range of cakes and scones and so on. Turns out, pumpkin is just not really a thing in German cuisine... but seriously, for a nation who is confused by the concept of a savoury (meat) pie, you would think they could at least embrace pumpkin pie!



Second honesty: my favourite part of the day was finding this little fellow, who- in honour of the festival, we shall call KurbisKitten.


He was chasing bugs through the wilderness, so I grabbed a bit of pussy willow and lured him back to the main area and then spent several of the happiest moments in my life making him run in circles and dart under and over my legs.


Eventually, I had to give KurbisKitten up to the hundreds of toddlers now surrounding me and clutching at her.

We headed towards more pumpkins...






  (from Pau, and below also)

I did manage to find some pumpkin flavoured icecream (it's hard to see it under all the frooferies that are obligatory in german Eis culture), but again, I didn't feel like it was particularly pumkiny- and overall I preferred the chocolate.

 (also from Pau)


They wouldn't let us go on the bouncy thing, so we spent our time posing with pumkins instead...

And the girls managed to find some fairy floss...


Andy pretended to be a spaceman, went head-on with a bull, and danced with a Kraken in the pale moonlight.








Before we left we headed into the Maize Maze, which is... exactly as it sounds.





(these two are from Pau again, above and below)




Plus- I managed to buy some more plants (teheehee)!