Bautzen Senfwochen & Saurier Park

Hands down, the best mustard in the entire world is Bautz'ner Senf.  Its yellow (kind of a standard), smooth and spicy.  You get it everywhere and they have it in giant dispenser tubs at every bratwurst stand.  Bratwurst stands can be found every 500 feet along the streets of Dresden, so that's a lot of mustard.

Bautz'ner Senf comes from the town of Bautzen, Germany.  We found out a couple weeks ago that Bautzen was having Senfwochen (mustard weeks) and that mustard would be featured in nearly all the restaurants in Bautzen.  Of course, we had to go.

Bautzen was a really beautiful town and also one of the oldest in Germany-- over 1000 years old!

We decided to do some sightseeing to build up an appetite.  Here is a view of the old watertower.  Along our sightseeing route, we scouted for restaurants with the promised "Bautz'ner Mustard Dishes".  As tasty as mustard is, we figured it would be a challenge to find something mustardy to eat.

Sure enough, menus with crazy mustard dishes were posted outside many restaurants.  Here you could get salad, veal, ham or a vegetarian dish- all with different types of mustard sauce.  Where are all the pretzels in this town??

The last stop on our tour before hitting the famous Mustard Museum was this leaning tower.  Its not nearly as leany as the tower of Pisa, but I suppose any leaning for a tall tower is worthy of the "Leaning Tower" title.  We climbed all the way to the top of this tower along a very scary, very steep spiral staircase.  The view from the top was excellent, especially since it was a sunny day after a week and half of rain.

Last stop before lunch:  mustard museum!  Here Bob is standing next to one of the vats they use to make the mustard.

We tasted about 10 different mustards and went on a mustard-buying spree.  We bought so many jars of mustard that we had a hard time carrying them back to the car!

Good thing we found a mustard pizza to give us lots of energy!


After we left Bautzen- full, happy and mustard-laden, we drove a few miles (well, it was supposed to be a few miles, but we took a detour... a "we don't know where we are" detour...) to the Saurier Park- a wooded park filled with life-size dinosaurs.  We climbed on a bunch of them, took lots of pictures, and even played on their amazing playgrounds.  They had a giant rope jungle gym and this awesome slide!

Here I am on and in some dinosaurs...