A week in Ulm

Normally, my business trips are to sunny Southwood. But this time, the destination was Ulm, in the midst of the Swabian Alb. I already went there once this year, and quite liked it. I was again joined by Cliff, as well as Steve from my team in Southwood. I joined up with Steve and Cliff at Stuttgart airport, from where we headed down to Ulm in our Hyundai rental car (once we figured out how to start it – the clutch did the trick!). We eventually even managed to find our hotel - not so easy, since we had neither map nor GPS – thankfully we had the address at least (I even tried to ask for directions in my very limited German – and obviously led us astray).

After checking in, after asking for advice about local restaurants, we headed out across the Danube (next to which our hotel was located) down to the Barfüßer restaurant/bar/brewery. A pretty decent place for having a few hefeweisse beers (shockingly cheap compared to the Cote d’Azur, I’ll tell you that!) and a nice schnitzel ;-).

The next day, we were joined by our colleague Dmytro at the office, who works in our Brisbane office (didn’t even know until quite recently we had an office there!). After a day of hard work (honestly – we finished around 7 PM!), we made our way back to the hotel, dropped off our things, and made our way for dinner again. After a nice stroll along the Danube, we ended up in the historic Fischerviertel quarter, with its cobble-stone streets and half-timbered houses. Rather picturesque… We ended up dining in a rather nice, cozy little restaurant called Zur Forelle. I had fish, for a chance (since I figured the diet would be a bit meat-oriented this week…). And some of that Hefeweisse beer, naturlich!

On Wednesday, we were joined by Sinhung, who unfortunately couldn’t join us from the start due to a training course he was planning to attend (which , worst of all, was cancelled!). Matthias, our German host, also joined us for our “Ulm by Night Tour Mark 3”. This time, I had done my restaurant research on Tripadvisor – so we ended up in the Nr. 1 rated restaurant in Ulm, “Zunfthaus der Schiffleute”. It’s also located in the Fischerviertel, and has the added bonus of having a nice beer garden out on a courtyard (handy, since it was rather a nice evening). The usual rounds of Hefeweisse ensued, food-wise I decided to go for a bit of an exotic choice this time – Bison steak. And what an excellent choice it was, I think it might’ve been the best steak I’ve had this year. As a nice “digestif”, we decided to have the strongest beer on the menu, the Eisbeer, after which it all went a bit downhill (according to this site , “A rich Eisbock is best sipped like a Sherry, Port, or Madeira; it is never guzzled.” – that’s where we went wrong I think!). Don’t get me wrong, we had an excellent time, even managing a couple of hours in a late-night bar, but the next day in the office was pretty tough, I tell you that!

So, the Thursday was quite a hard day in the office, then. And I feared the worst for the evening too, since Sami (the older half, I believe, of the notorious Mikkola twins) was coming out finally. Things kicked off with an “aperitif” (a hefweisse, what else?) in the Barfüßer bar (same chain as where we went on Monday, but this one is in the town centre), after which we decided to have a “light dinner” at John Benton. Not so light, you should’ve seen the size of the starters. And as for main course, there is only one realistic option, apparently, which is spare ribs… Oh dear… No beer this time though, we decided to go all sophisticated and have some Rieslig white wine. Excellent choice, actually! Probably the 1st German wine I’ve ever had?

That brought an end to my Ulm trip. I did have time to explore Ulm a bit Friday morning (including admiring the very impressive cathedral in sunshine), before driving down to Stuttgart to catch my flight. All in all, a very nice week! And we got a fair bit of work done as well, believe it or not!