elsewhen and away: Rustic Rövershagen

The area surrounding Rostock consists largely of vast expansive of flat green farmland. They grow stuff like potatoes, carrots, strawberries; stuff that does well in cool soggy environments. Some years ago someone decided to add more entertaining activities to their strawberry farm, kind of like Young's Farm back in Northern Arizona, where my mom always took me as a kid to pick our Halloween carving pumpkins, before the place unfortunately closed down.

Anyway, this whole strawberry experience - which includes not only a delicious cornucopia of strawberry preserves, liquors, and various other predictable products but tons of household items, a cafe, alcoholic drinks, ice skating, an aquarium, and so on - is something that Hannes thought I'd find cute, so we went shortly after arriving in Germany and had a really nice time, because he was totally right.

The first thing we noticed after walking into Karls Erdbeerhof, or Karl's Strawberry Barn, was that for some reason this original location decided to get into The Guinness Book of World Records by collecting over 27,000 ceramic coffee pots. Alrighty then.
Then I had a strawberry latte macchiato and Hannes had a Chai tea.

Solid chocolate tools, presumably from Santa's workshop

Strawberry gluhwein, definitely a winner

This strawberry-bearded guy is also a definite winner

Anyone who's known me for a while would understand my weird temptation to get one of these large blue ceramic lobsters, on clearance for only 2 euro. I didn't of course, but I mulled it over for a while.

This was a big, postapocalyptic, Fallout-esque decorative contraption

Another area, which was almost completely closed down in winter but in summer has various other animals, food stalls, and probably little shows and stuff, just had some super derpy but very friendly goats when we were there. I say "very friendly" because they understand the universal gesture for "stop" when you feel like they're getting a little too munchy with your pants or shoes.

Hurr

Seriously though, they weren't fucking around with that whole coffee pot thing

The fruit jams, chocolates, etc. are made right in front of you

This thing right here was both a fantastic idea and a terrible one: giant glass bulbs of various kinds of liquor ranging in alcohol content from around 14% to at least 42% that you can try as shots for 50 cents each.

50 cents you're supposed to put in a little lockbox as part of an honour system.

So, you know, like, 21 or whatever cents each.

I think I got through 6 of them before I decided I needed to stop.

These are minerals and crystals but look like rice crackers or something here.

"Bitch say whaaaat?!"

So many teas to try as well~

Check out their mead and mead horn selection!

The other kitschy, rustic thing Hannes took me to do outside his hometown was making candles at another interesting specialty barn, der kerzenscheune.

Actually, the lady who's running the place isn't very good with customers, and making candles mostly just involves waiting, but it was still nice. I'm pretty much just happy to be here, on an extended vacation, doing the most leisurely activities I possibly can.

Here's some of that waiting I was talking about, lol

At one point we took a coffee break (myth confirmed, that happens a lot in Europe), and once the candles were the desired thickness and needed some time to harden, we took a short walk around I guess what you'd call the tiny village or hamlet in which the candle barn is situated. And before leaving we had a snack break, because we'd been there a while and were pretty hungry.