Fish & Friends

Elisabeth and I like to eat fish, although finding a good choice in Freiburg is tough. The city is just too far away from Germany’s coasts, where it is a tradition to eat seafood often. 

In the States, I always found a good selection of fish, even in places like Knoxville and, particularly, lobster in Oak Ridge.

English still is the preferred language in Germany.

The only chance to eat fresh fish in Freiburg is a German restaurant chain called Nordsee, where we quite often eat grilled filets of plaice caught in the Pacific, even though it tastes entirely different from plaice found in the North Sea. This is why whenever I am in Hamburg, I try to eat Speckscholle, a plaice caught by men on fishing cutters harbored in Finkenwerder, a village on the left bank of the Elbe river. Remember my blog of last January? I nearly missed the boat.

Coupons; this is just the first page

The local Nordsee restaurant tries hard to convince Freiburgers that fish is healthier than their traditional Schäufele (pork shoulder). It issues coupons that will cut your bill in half. Sometimes it is hard to find those coupons, so Red Baron joined their customer club, Fish & Friends, to be confused with neither the craft beer Fox & Friends nor the early morning show on Fox Television.

Note, the restaurant is open, not geöffnet.

Yesterday I had a strange encounter. With some difficulty, I created a QR code on my iPhone using the Nordsee app, giving me a price reduction on our favorite dish. When I proudly presented the above image to the man behind the checkout counter, he panicked, “I don’t need that,” handing me not one but two sheets of coupons, thus avoiding the electronic gadget like the plague. He nearly fainted when a young man waiting in line behind me showed him his mobile phone with a barcode too.

So much for digital competence in Germany.

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