We had amazing weather yesterday. It was so nice outside that I couldn’t bear to stay at home. I thought maybe we’d hunt for a festival or something, and we would have found one if we had gone to Frankfurt. There are several going on right now. But, for some reason, we decided to go to Mainz. Bill missed a turn to go to the downtown area, and we ended up in a part of town we hadn’t seen before.

As we were passing through, I noticed an interesting looking bar called Sixties. It advertised a lot of craft beers, which is kind of an unusual thing in Germany. So, although our plan had originally been to go downtown, we wound up parking and trying out Sixties, which also advertised music. When we walked into the bar, there was no music. Instead, all of the televisions were tuned to football– aka soccer– and the waitress warned us that pretty soon, a bunch of people would be crowded in there to watch the game.

I took a look around and noticed that the bar looked kind of “Irish pub-ish”, with low tables and stools, stained glass windows, and booths. We found a table with no reservation card on it and ordered a couple of beers. I had a Leffe Blonde and Bill had a Eulchen Marzen made in Mainz. Then we ordered snacks. Sixties has a rather limited menu. They have bar food, pizza, a couple of pasta dishes, and schnitzels, but it’s really more of a place to drink rather than eat. We had chicken strips, jalapeno poppers, and pretzels with Spundkaese.

One thing I noticed was that the waitress brought us wet glasses, complete with a little bit of water in the bottom. I can’t say I liked that very much, but at least the glasses were clean. We were impressed by how many beers they offered, too. They even had a beer from Sweden, as well as a number of British and Irish beers. I was surprised they didn’t have more Belgian choices other than Leffe, but a lot of German bars don’t even have that, so it was cool.

Here are a few photos from our visit:

After a couple of hours at Sixties, we paid the kindly, English speaking waitress, and headed down the street to our car. On the way there, we stopped in a fancy looking grocery store that appeared to have all natural “whole foods”. Of course, we were there to buy wine and look for Calvados, since the neighbor’s apple tree has been dumping apples in our yard and we need to do something with them. We didn’t find Calvados in that store, but we did pick up some wine.

We enjoyed Sixties. I don’t know how often we’ll visit there, since there are a lot of other places in Mainz we haven’t yet tried. It did look like a popular hangout for the locals. If you want to watch football and drink beers that aren’t German, it’s a good bet. I can’t comment on the music, but I did notice that there was a lot of memorabilia on the wall, particularly regarding the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. So it does look like they have good taste when it comes to music, anyway…