If I’m perfectly honest with you, the Black Forest wasn’t always a destination that increased my heartbeat from excitement. Growing up with parents who never travelled any further than a maximum two-hour drive from home, and before any internet was available, most information came from books or TV. That’s why my first encounter with the Black Forest was restricted to an old-fashioned TV show called “Die Schwarzwaldklinik” (The Black Forest Clinic) which was broadcasted on national TV Saturday evening just before prime time. You can imagine it like the kind of soap opera that includes everything for the heart, built around clinical life: a family, doctors, nurses, intrigues, love affairs, medical disasters, heartbreak, last minute rescues… and the occasional landscape shot of forested land. It was a mandatory show in my family for 45 minutes weekly, it was cheesy like no tomorrow, and the Black Forest burnt itself deep into my brain as a place that you CAN visit but not really giving me the feeling of missing out if you didn’t.


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