Shopping in Freiburg

Freiburg, Germany is just about an hour down the road from Strasbourg. On Saturday, October 21, a several of the ladies conspired to head down there to go shopping. Theresa, Gabi, Lucia, Cindy, and Mindy were the conspirators. Joe Grabczak, who was visiting from Indy, and I went along for the ride. Picture below is of the group (with Gabi behind the camera) after sucking down a lunch of traditional German food.
Theresa and I had been to Freiburg before, for the Christmas markets. On this October day, the weather was a marked improvement from the last trip. It was sunny and in the 70s - a welcome change to the rain and the cold and the fog of the past few weeks. It seemed that everyone in else was out enjoying the weather too. The town center was buzzing with people.Freiburg is one of the great university centers of Germany and the town has the artsy-fartsy-upper-income feel of most centers of higher learning. It's kind of like Madison, Wisconsin except the people have a stronger accent. The town center has a long pedestrian boulevard with tons of shops lining the street. The intro picture gives a glimpse of this strip with the old town gate tower in the background. Just off to one side of the boulevard is the Cathedral. The picture above shows the Cathedral with crowds milling about. In the surrounding plaza, there were a number of markets stalls selling new wine, sausages, baskets, and farm produce (as shown below).There was almost a carnival atmosphere because of all the street musicians and performers who were taking advantage of the warm day to try to earn a few coins from the shopping crowd. Some aerobat had errected a 250 foot tower next to the Cathedral where he was performing tricks and doing high-wire acts.
Wherever there are street performers, we always seem to find the ubiquitous Peruvian Pan Flute Dudes. When ever we travel, we seem to find these guys. Lo and behold, they were in Freiburg on Saturday.