19 November 2012

special visitor


Our friend Lucy thought that Flat Stanley might like to come visit us in Kandern.  He arrived comfortably tucked away in a green envelope.  He was tired from such a long trip and took awhile to get over jet lag (its 9 hours later in Kandern than in Oregon!), but he was happy to arrive.


It was a nice fall day, so he started with a walk along the Kanderner, the river that the town is named after.
 

This part of the Kanderner had a cool covered bridge. 

  

Right by the covered bridge was the Rathaus.  At first he was excited, thinking it was a place to go see pet rats, but he was wrong.  Its the city hall, where everyone who lives in Kandern goes to register and pick up their recycling bags.


On another day, he took a walk past this big old church. His camera couldn't even fit the whole building in!  There's a clock tower at the top with bells that ring to count down the hours and quarter hours.  That means there are bells ringing every 15 minutes.  Sometimes they ring extra, like to wake everyone up at 7 in the morning, or to let everyone know there's a wedding or a funeral.


Next to the church he found these cool bells sitting outside with the year '1949' on the side.  During WWII, the German army came through and took the bells out of the churches to make weapons.  In Kandern they left the smallest bell behind, so the people from the city took the small bell down and hid it in the hillside.  That way, when the army came back, they couldn't steal the last bell.  While the little bell was hidden, it got broken.  But when the war was over, the people hung it up anyway so they could have a way to tell everyone when it was time to come to the church.  It didn't sound good, but people were happy to still have a bell.  After the war was over and they were rebuilding everything, they made new bells - but not fancy ones.  This is one of those bells.  One year ago, everyone from the church decided to put in new bells out of nice metal so that the bells would sound pretty ringing through town.  They had a special ceremony and the bells had special writing on them, saying "Peace" in several languages - including Hebrew, the language of the Jewish people who had been mistreated in the war. 

 
 

He got pretty excited when he spotted a library, and he thought these books looked like lots of fun to read -- if he could read German!

'I'm with you, you're with me'
 
'Why?'
'And me?'
He was feeling a little homesick and decided to make a quick call home from the T-mobile booth.
 He saw these huge snails and decided to climb the wall to check them out.  It turned out they were just made out of stone.  He'd never seen somebody glue stone snails to the side of their house before.



He was also a little bit surprised to see how many buildings had this fancy old writing painted on them.  This one tells the story about a blacksmith.


All these German names!  It was hard to keep track.  But he spotted the word "museum" in this one and was curious.  When he found the museum, it was closed for the winter, but he found out how old it was.  It opened as a museum in 1776.  The USA was about to become a brand new country the same time Kandern was old enough to have a whole museum about it's history!


It turns out Kandern is REALLY old.  In some historical writings its mentioned as early as 776.  That means the museum opened on the 1000 years later!  And it means that right now, Kandern is more than 1200 years old.  That explained why he kept finding so many old things.  Like this watering fountain/trough.


It was kinda hard to see, but it says 1766 on it.

Or this old sled that looked kind of strange to him with the animal head on the front.


And this old building had huge doors!  It was probably for bringing horses and wagons through.  People turned this building into offices and apartments, but it used to be part of brewery, where farmers brought in the ingredients for making beer.

 
Flat Stanley liked Kandern, but he's ready to fly back home!  He was kind of disappointed he couldn't find Lederhosen in his size or eat any sauerkraut, but he did have Fondue and Swiss chocolate!  Yum!  Kandern is in Germany, but its so close to France and Switzerland that they eat lots of Swiss and French foods like Roesti (kind of like hash browns) or Tarte Flambe (a tiny bit like a pizza with creme instead of pizza sauce).

Thanks for coming, Flat Stanley!

06 November 2012

Overdue summer entry #2

August.

After all of the crazy pace we kept for months (well, to be honest, I think I was keeping a crazy pace that sadly dragged John into the whirlpool of my crazy), August brought time to slow down.  There was certainly a phase of 'recovery' for me after Tallinn... with weird stages like having anxious dreams about the conference after it was all over, getting weepy and grieving a variety of things, absolute exhaustion in the form of feeling like I could sleep for a week.  It made me realize just how much grace the Lord had been providing, carrying me through until there was time and available energy to process it all internally.  And I'm grateful not to have simply skipped the processing part.  It's so fascinating to me to see how much that part of the work is just as important to the Lord; He didn't remove those steps just because the work was done, but He did time them for me to be able both to cope and to glean what He wanted me to learn.  Hmm, I could ramble on about some of this, but I don't know that I'd end up saying a whole lot more, so I'll move on.

As I was saying, some down time in August was GREAT.  Europe knows how to take breaks, and if you aren't in major tourist hotspots, it sort of all shuts down for the month of August.  Sometimes that's annoying, but mostly its just this great easy pace of life for awhile.  It wasn't a month off - we were working - but we grabbed some quick weekend adventures.

For instance, one Saturday afternoon we were in the grocery store when the newspaper by the checkout caught our eye.  Front page feature - Rottweilers!  I grabbed it to see what it was all about.  They were having the Rottweiler Weltmeisterschaften (World championships) that weekend in Rottweil.  Yes, Rottweilers get their name from a town in the Black Forest where they were bred to herd cattle.  I think they have all these links to the Mastiffs that were brought into the area by Romans.  As a dog trivia side-note, there are really only a few original ancient dog breeds that all dogs come from, one of which are Mastiffs.  Virtually every large dog breed is linked to Mastiffs. 

The newspaper article said it was day 2 of a 3 day competition. We used to joke before we came that we would take Nia to Rottweil someday, to her 'homeland,' so we decided to head out early the next morning to catch the competition.  Not great weather, but so many great dogs!!!!

Clearly for people who are not Rottweiler fans, the appeal is lost, but we were eating it up.  The competitions - Schutzhund (protection), Obedience and Tracking - were really interesting.  All these people in the stands were keeping track of all the scores, dressed in their country's flags.  And dogs all over the place - curled up by people in the stands, walking around the field, waiting for their turn.  We saw so many ages sizes and shapes of Rottweilers.  I think the owners love being at a place where they know other people love their dogs too. They don't have to worry about people being scared of the dog they know really just wants to give everyone a big wet kiss; they're with other devoted admirers like us.

Obedience competition.
Getting the judging results. The judges read ALL of their comments.
Protection competition.  We'd never watched anything like it before. It wasn't scary.  Clearly these dogs are so precisely trained, and it was more fascinating to see how athletic they were.
We headed back by the vendor booths and this one extra huge Rottie was standing calmly while this 4 or 5 month old pup was trying to play with him.  He indulged a bit, but was mostly just really cute about it.  The pup was working so hard to be submissive, licking his chin, flipping over on his back, jumping back up to play.  Several people were standing around to watch.

I about jumped out of my seat the first time this Swiss spectator next to me rang his cowbell to cheer a Swiss dog on.



I quick cruise through town brought us to the bronze sculpture in the town square.  We are unashamedly smitten by Rottweilers.....

Another Saturday morning we woke up and said, "Let's drive somewhere!"  We packed a lunch, a couple of things in case we decided to overnight somewhere, our trusty Rick Steve's guides (helpful for bargain hotels and restaurants if needed) and headed out.  It's a little tricky to explain just how close we live to these spectacular locations that are a world away from the US.  It's not lost on us that locations people dream of seeing are closer to us than Seattle is to Portland.  And sometimes we just have access to some pretty amazing opportunities.  I think that we'd love exploring no matter where we lived; it's just this huge bonus from the Lord that at the moment some of the places we are within range of exploring are so extraordinary - well, at least from our perspective.  I've met people who really don't find Europe all that interesting. :)

We headed south towards Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, planning to make a decision then if we'd continue on somewhere else or call it a day and head back.

There was something so funny about watching these elegant swans dive, tails straight up in the air.

Gorgeous weather... and lake Lucerne didn't disappoint.  We pulled over to eat lunch, and this party boat was coming ashore.  John was pretty taken with it's ingenuity.  This may be as 'pieced together' as anything I've ever seen in Switzerland, but clearly it's still so solid and well thought out.


The beautiful weather and the road had us hooked so we continued on another hour or so to Lake Como.  So stunning.  And it was amazing to suddenly go from Switzerland and all the Swiss/German style we're used to to this Mediterranean style everywhere.

We took pictures, painted, enjoyed the view, found a reasonable place to stay, and soaked it all up until the middle of the next day when we drove back.


Hot afternoon - but these kids were out on the balcony for a nap in the cooler shade, ingeniously protected by the tight wire fencing someone had attached to the inside of the balcony rails.


 Oh yes, the drive back.  So there's this famous tunnel in Switzerland that's really long - the Gotthard tunnel, approx. 17 miles long.  Its on the primary autobahn through that part of Switzerland, and it's narrow.  That means it's a traffic bottleneck with legendary backups.  Yep, our drive home was going to double in length.  So, we thought we'd beat it by going over the Gotthard pass instead - longer in miles but shorter in time at this point.  Let's just say it's very apparent to us now why they built the tunnel! 

As we were driving up, we spotted the road above us, curling out from sheer mountain faces like some sort of roller coaster ride and said with trepidation, "Is that where we're going?!"  And it was raining.  And you may not know that John, who was driving, really isn't okay with heights.  He white-knuckled his way up and down the other side, but we were rewarded with some of the most spectacular views.  So other-worldly...  I'm not quite sure John would vote for doing it again, but wow, I don't know how else you'd see some of that splendor.  No photos from that part.  There was no way we were stopping the car and pulling over.

So enjoy vicariously some of these great gifts that surround us.