Eating Sparrow and a town smaller than Sherman?

Okay, so the rest of our time in Baden-Baden was really enjoyable. On Tuesday we went into the center of the city and toured around, we saw the "world's nicest casino" from the outside, since you had to pay to get in and the tour was only in German and I'm not that good.... yet :D. We climbed this part on a mountain and got some really good pictures (the first picture above) of the city. We saw several other sites, like the Trinkhalle, the Roman and Roman-Irish Baths, and some really expensive stores. My favorite part of the day was when we went up this hill called Merkur and took this tram thing up to the top where we could see the entire city and surrounding areas(Pictures 2&3). It was breathtakingly beautiful! We had our first completely german meal there, of sausage of course, overlooking the town and watching the hang gliders jump off the hill and float down into the city. That 4th picture is proof I'm actually in Europe with my parents and not just making this all up!
Wednesday we drove through the black forest (picture 5) on our way to Staufen which is a small town on the outside of Freiburg, which is a "nicer place to stay than Freiburg." I thought we were going to spend the day in Freiburg, but I think I slept through that part of the drive. Anyway, we stopped a clock museum, which was cool, for about 5 minutes, then it just got kind of redundant. Chris, it would have driven you nuts with all the thousands of clocks ticking away. I felt like I was at Oma's house, times 10 thousand. Anyway, the black forest was really beautiful too. I wanted to go wandering through the forest for a while, but we never stopped to do so :(.
So Staufen, was like the east side of 75 of Sherman except exceedingly more beautiful (like everything else, also I need a new word for beautiful), everything was closed by 6, and was either residential or a restaurant. There really wasn't much to do there, so we left right after breakfast this morning, after accomplishing the impressive feat of getting out of the parking area which was designed originally for horse drawn carriages.
It was pouring down rain all day, the scenery was very very pretty (ha! I didn't use beautiful), well what I was awake for anyway. Now we are in Ruette, Austria for a couple of days. We just got out and walked around the city some. Another small, quite town where everything closes at 6, but tomorrow I think (and hope and pray) we are going up to the Ehrenberg castle ruins. We probably won't get to luge since it rained and they close the track when it rains, but maybe if we get lucky!
Anyway about eating sparrow, so on several menus we saw Spaetzle, and we couldn't figure out what it was, so I busted out my trusty dictionary and the closest thing we could come up with was.... sparrow. Anyway, the sad news is, it's not sparrow, it's actually sort of a mushier version of udons noodles and kinda looks like sparrows intestines.... it wasn't very good. But if I didn't remember what I was eating, the liver I had for dinner last night was really good! Something tells me I'll never try that again!
So all is well here, we are having a great time!
Love and miss you all,
Ann