Month in Review March 2024

Updated on October 21, 2024 by Angelika

I always see March as a month of new beginnings, which is not only due to the first signs of spring, but also because my birthday is in March. This time, March had some very special moments in store for me as an enthusiastic connoisseur of art, culture and cuisine. But it wasn't just about celebrating and enjoying; March was also a month of reflection, writing and sharing.

Culture and Culinary Delights for My Birthday

My birthday is on March 8 - and I celebrated it with loved ones on several occasions. For a few years now, I've been celebrating my birthday in stages. In my circle of friends and family, we've switched to giving each other as birthday presents experiences rather than things (which you can hardly find room for anyway). I think that's wonderful - you enjoy a nice day or evening together and create lasting memories.

Cinema and Menu à la Française in Rottenburg

It started even before my birthday - on March 2, my friend Ute invited me to the Cinema for the palate in Rottenburg. It's a great event concept: first you go to the movies (in Rottenburg it's the legendary Waldhorn cinema), where you are welcomed with a glass of sparkling wine and a snack. The enchanting French comedy Maria Into Life from the year 2022. After watching the film, Restaurant Martinshof offered a 5-course French menu matching the movie with French delicacies such as vineyard snails, French onion soup, Coq au Riesling, Boeuf Bourguignon, sea bream on ratatouille and a dessert buffet that left nothing to be desired. For me, the evening was a feast for the eyes and the palate in the best of company.

Birthday Trip to the Black Forest's Gourmet Capital

On March 8, my birthday, the next culinary highlight followed: my father invited my sister and me to the restaurant Dorfstuben at Hotel Bareiss in Baiersbronn. In the original farmhouse parlors from the 19th century, we were spoiled by Mrs. Jedlitschka and her team with delicacies from the regional Black Forest cuisine. As a starter, we were served delicious home-baked farmhouse bread with radishes, quark and lard. Then, in keeping with the occasion, I had Murg Valley wedding soup, followed by roast fillet and dumplings of salmon trout with crayfish sauce, young vegetables, morels and homemade pasta. I shared the dessert - vanilla cream with rhubarb compote and hazelnut ice cream - with my sister. That was perfect, as the dessert portions are big enough for two. To finish, we ordered cappuccino, which was served with a large bowl of cookies and chocolates.

After this sumptuous meal, a digestive walk through the beautiful grounds of the Hotel Bareiss and the village of Mitteltal was urgently needed. This was not the first time we had been to the Bareiss and certainly not the last. It is our first address for special occasions - you can always rely on the quality of the food and the friendly, unobtrusive service!

Celebrating continued on March 16 with my friend Gudrun, who took me to the Sindelfingen Theater cellar to Rendezvous with Rilke invited. Before this literary and musical reading, Gudrun treated me to her legendary raspberry and cream cookie roll at home. At the performance in the theater cellar, three actors took us on a literary journey through Rainer Maria Rilke's life and work. The recited texts were accompanied by the band If You Wanted To whose lyrical rock music wonderfully suited Rilke's poetry.

In mid-March, there was another birthday get-together at my house, where I cooked for my friends Susanne and Ute and their partners. It had been a few years since we had met in this group. All the more reason for us all to enjoy this lovely and relaxed evening.

March ended with an Easter dinner at my home with my family. Unfortunately, my daughter Anna couldn't be there this time. But I'm going to visit her in Innsbruck for a weekend in April.

First Blog Parade, an Update and an Epic Blog Post

It wasn't until I looked at my WordPress dashboard that I realized I hadn't blogged as little in March as I thought I had. I published four blog articles, enriched one post with new content and made good progress with my big new post about the most beautiful regions in Germany.

Anna Koschinski's Blog Parade: A New Experience

Blogger coach Judith Peters made Anna Koschinski's blog parade Writing about Writing a topic of the week in her annual blogger program The Content Societywhich I'm taking part in for the second year in 2024. I didn't participate in a blog parade last year - I was still too busy writing the first - sometimes very extensive - basic articles for my newly founded travel blog. I now blog much more routinely than in 2023 - and blog parades are a great way to increase your reach, discover new interesting blogs and expand your network in the blogosphere.

Anna's theme brief Writing about Writing left a lot of leeway, and so with my post The Common Thread in My Life: The Joy of Writing I looked back at my life as an author, which actually began when I was a child, because reading and writing have been my favorite pastimes for as long as I can remember. I very much enjoyed looking back on my journey to become a blogger and to reflect on my life. Anna's blog parade resulted in many interesting articles from a wide variety of bloggers. I even convinced my friend Silvana Goldbach,who recently published her biography Struffoli and gingerbread house* to also participate. I will certainly take part in blog parades more often in the future and possibly even organize one myself - in July, the blog parade is the topic of the month at The Content Society.

Germany's Most Beautiful Cities: Update of My Post about My Favorite Cities

It's been on my mind for a while - I had to add more cities my article about the most beautiful cities in Germany .

In June 2023 I visited Lübeck:  for the first time during a one-week stay on the Baltic coast of Schleswig-Holstein and immediately fell in love with this beautiful city. The water, the brick Gothic, Nobel Prize winners, fish restaurants and Café Niederegger ... there are many reasons to be enthusiastic about Lübeck and to include it in my list of the most beautiful German cities.

In the summer of 2022, I visited Erfurt for a day from Weimar. Despite the bad weather, I liked the city so much that I really wanted to get to know it better, which is why I went there for a whole week in December and took the opportunity to see for myself that not only is the Thuringian capital worth a longer stay, but that its beautiful Christmas market also attracts numerous visitors from all corners of Germany, as well as from our neighboring countries. Erfurt also scores with Germany's newest UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Jewish-medieval heritage in Erfurt - It's worth taking a guided tour of the Old Synagogue and the Mikveh. Erfurt definitely deserves a place among the most beautiful cities in Germany!

I have also finally included a paragraph about Würzburg, one of the most beautiful cities in Bavaria, in this article. My big City-Guide Würzburg was one of the very first articles on my website. Since I already had the big article about Würzburg, it was more important to me to publish more new articles before I added a paragraph about Würzburg to an existing article. But now it really was about time!

In 2023, I visited many beautiful German cities I didn't know yet, and about which I will write new paragraphs in the next few months in the article The Most Beautiful Cities in Germany - so stay tuned!

Half-Time: My Longest Blog Post to Date Will Hopefully be Finished in April

A few months ago, I started working on an article about the most beautiful regions in Germany. I suspected that this would be a mammoth task, but not how much effort it would actually take. It starts with the selection - because there are actually far more than 50 interesting regions in Germany. In the meantime, however, I'm fairly relaxed about it and am pleased that I've already completed about half of the article. I'll be focusing on finishing this article over the next few weeks, and I'm already looking forward to publishing it, because it's going to be great and enormously helpful! 😁

My Blogging Achievements in March

As a former controller, I eagerly await the latest Google statistics every month. Fortunately, the trend has only known one direction from the start - it's going up.

I hit a milestone in March - more than 1,000 clicks within 28 days via Google search! If that's not a reason to celebrate ... 🎉🥳🥂

Even the English version of my article about the sights around Würzburg was read 61 times. What I hadn't really realized before: 20 % of my readers read the text in English, but almost all of them access my website from Germany.

My article on the differences between castles and palaces was the shooting star among my articles in March - although it is brand new, it has already been read 47 times.

My Reading in March

In March, I read two powerful new literary publications, which both impressed me very much.

Haruki Murakami: The City and its Uncertain Wall

In The City and its Uncertain Walls , Haruki Murakami takes us to a mysterious world between dream and reality. The novel tells the story of a nameless protagonist whose childhood sweetheart suddenly disappears one day. In his search for her, he finds himself and her "true self" in a strange city surrounded by an insurmountable wall. Murakami's story, steeped in symbolism and profound philosophical questions, explores the boundaries of memory, identity and reality in the style of magical realism. Readers are taken on a journey that forces them to question the construction of their own perceptions. As usual, it is a surreal and captivating tale by the now 75-year-old Murakami, whose novel South of the Border, West of the Sun* once tore the Literary Quartet apart, when it came to a scandal between Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Sigrid Löffler on the ZDF program on June 30, 2000.

Barbara Kingsolver: Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her eloquent, almost 900-page novel. Demon Copperhead* is a powerful and emotional coming-of-age tale set in Appalachian Virginia, dealing with poverty, addiction and survival of the so-called Hillbillies. The novel, inspired by Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield", follows young Demon as he struggles against the adversities of his life, often failing and always getting up again. Kingsolver's masterful characterization of her first-person narrator, who never loses his dreams and his courage to face life despite all the injustices, abuse and precarious living conditions, make Demon Copperhead a moving, sometimes almost unbearable, but in any case unforgettable reading experience. We learn a lot about life at the bottom of society in the "land of opportunity" and about the opioid crisis, which cost the lives of over 100,000 Americans in 2020 and 2021 alone. On Audible* download the German version of the work read by the congenial Fabian Busch, the English version is read by Charlie Thurston.

My Blog Articles in March