Castles visit

I forgot to include one more from the Meersburg castle. We had dueling cameras between Sister B and our daughter.

We spent some fun days in the house. It rained solid for over a day, including a dusting of snow the next morning. It was fun spending time together in the apartment, playing games and watching movies. Mother and daughter actually were able to finish watching the new Hobbit movie without going to sleep. (It took several tries, but you know how boring the movie is ;-)

Now I have the pictures from the Neuenschwanstein and Hohenschwangau castles. It was overcast that  day, as you can see from the pictures, but it was still a wonderful thing to see. These castles are very popular, though we came at a good time so there were not a lot of lines or crowds. Both castles did not allow pictures of the inside areas. They really showed the opulence of the time with these kings. King Maximillian built the Hohenschwangau castle as his private residence and did not entertain guests there, though the composer Richard Wagner came there often. The king's son, Ludwig, as the next king, had the Newenschwanstein castle built, up until the time the people revolted over how much it was costing, so it never was finished. King Ludwig was removed from power and died a few days later. The purpose of both these kings was to build "authentic" medieval castles, both on the ruins of real medieval castles, but they had no clue what real medieval castles were, and only built according to their fantasies. Here are the pictures.

 Hohenschwangau (above and below)

 Neuenschwanstein (above and below)

 Sister B with grandson. He is about to make an astute remark about the opulence of the castles. 

 At the entrance of the castle

The nearby falls and bridge.

The very long exit hallway. We were tired from all the stairs already and how we had this long passageway to leave the castle.

Overall, it was a beautiful experience. We learned a lot about the kings of Bavaria. 

Here is a view of the valley which was watched over by these kings.

Visit from our daughter and grandsons

We are having a wonderful time with our daughter and two of our grandsons, who are visiting from Hungary. We love seeing our grandson, born in Hungary last December, for the first time. It is wonderful!

She posted several blog segments about their visit and included many photos.  (See thesingingbees.blogspot.com) I will post a few here and give some comments about our experiences.

They communicated with their family via Skype.

We had some nice sunny days and some very rainy days. Everything worked out well and we were able to visit some wonderful places. One day we travelled to Austria and Liechtensten. We spenta day in Ravensburg city and saw some beautiful sights in the country and visited an amazing castle in Meersburg. On the day we took them to the train station, we visited the King's castles in Swangau (Neuenschwanstein and Hohenschwangau). One of the beautiful experiences was our Sunday meeting when we had a number of visitors, including some new investigators. They had a very inspiring Gospel Essentials class (taught in English).

Here are a few pictures of our visit to the Ravensburg Humpis museum and to the Meersburg castle. Our daughter's blog has many more for you to see.

The Humpis Museum was in a set of buildings that were originally built and used by the Humpis family, some artifacts and structures dating back to 1400s.

There are many towers and city gates in Ravensburg. You can pay to climb the towers, but they are not open in the winter times. We went up into the Blaserturm (trumpet tower) where we could see the city and the whole area.

Sister Buchanan did not come up. It was too much of a drop and edge for her.

The Meersburg castle is am amazing and authentic fortress that has existed for centuries and has been continuously occupied - Germany's oldest inhabited castle. The oldest record they have is from the Merovingian king Dagobert the first who was in the castle in 640 AD.

Here are a few pictures and a video of the armor and weapons room.

There was a prison AND a dungeon AND a torture chamber. I guess they were serious about this. I only got pictures of the dungeon. It was a hole in the floor where they lowered (dropped) the prisoners. There was a small little stairway that could be used to get up and down.

Here is a video of the armory room.

This will be continued in the next blog entry.

Beware of Transpiration

Our hotel room in Munich had, as one of the guest supplies, a small can of men's antiperspirant. Notice, though, that people in Germany must be like trees and plants, which transpire.

Grüß Gott

The common greeting heard here is "Grüß Gott!" - greet God (literally), but really means God bless you. We often greet people with "hallo" and sometimes with "Guten Tag," but most reply with the common Grüß Gott (pronounced groos gott). The greeting was first promoted by the Catholic priests and is common mainly to southern Germany (especially this area) and Switzerland.

I found it interesting that one train station we passed on our way to the Munich conference had it prominently displayed on the wall. This is the town of Bad Schussenried. (The train was moving so it is a little blurry).

Seniors Conference, Spring 2013

We took the train to Munich last week and attended a conference for the Senior Missionaries. There are 20 couples serving here in this mission, plus two sister missionaries who are serving in the mission office. The first evening, we had a talent program where all participated. Here is a picture of one couple who played alp horns for us. It was beautiful. They are serving in Switzerland.

On Friday, in the morning, we went on a tour of Munich, led by a member of the local ward. The Rathaus (town hall) has a glockenspiel with 43 bells that plays every day at 11, 12 and 5. We watched the characters move and heard the playing of the bells. The top set of characters depicts a wedding between the local Munich prince with a princess from norther Germany. The bottom group shows some dancers. The top group also shows a joust of a knight in blue, representing Bavaria, and one in red representing the kingdom of north. In the process of the playing, the jousters miss each other the first time around, but the red knight gets defeated on the second time around to everyone's cheering.

They also have a story of the dancers. They were coopers, or barrel makers (for beer). Between the 1300's and 1650 Munich experienced 25 different outbreaks of the black plague, one of the worst was the last one that happened at about the time of the end of the 30 years war in 1648. The people of the city boarded themselves up and would no let anyone come in because of fear of the plague and the coopers could not sell there wares and were starving. The coopers came in to the town and played music and danced and the people finally opened up and the fresh air came in and helped eliminate the plague. They have dances every seven years in honor of this and the dancers in this display represented that saving action of the coopers.

There was an interesting statue in the center of the plaza. The center statue was of Mary who is the patron saint, but on each corner it depicted angels each defeating an enemy. The Brother who gave the tour said that this represented the four angels sent to protect the Savior as described in Psalms 91:12-13 the lion, the basilisk (adder) - see the statue, the young lion and the dragon.

This is in one of the churches:

 This is in the church entryway. They say it is the devil's footprint.

Here is a brass depiction of the old city:

We ate lunch at Hofbräu ( a famous restaurant).

There were more sessions at the class in the afternoon and a testimony meeting in the evening.

We checked out the next day and rode with the mission president to the mission office and then to the mission home and had a tour there. They showed us the "Monson Room" where President (then Elder) Monson liked to stay when he visited. An elder from the office drove us to the train station. There were many dozens of police cars, trucks and buses all around the train station. We never did find out what it was all about. We got onto our train and arrived home without difficulty.

Then and Now

I have been reading my old mission journal and letters home and found it interesting how there are similarities and differences between what it was then and what it is now in our mission in Ravensburg. I thought it might be interesting to have you see the two views. THEN was spring of 1970 in Gelsenkirchen (in the Ruhr valley in northern Germany) and NOW is spring of 2013 here in Ravensburg.

THEN
"The streets are quite often cobblestone streets. The sidewalks are almost always made out of stones (big flat stones, like tile squares). The bike riders have to ride in the streets usually and when we hit the cobblestone streets we feel like we're going to shake off. The church here is inside of an office building. It just has a name plate on the outside of the building."
NOW
The streets of the inner cities have cobblestones and the sidewalks are more often cobblestones or larger stones. The curbs and gutters are all stone (not concrete). The main roads are asphalt. We drive a car and most of the elders are on the buses (not bikes). Our church here is inside an office building. Both then and now the church was on the top floor of the building.

THEN
"Right now I can hear the chimes of the nearly Catholic church. It rings for about 15 minutes, about 3 times a day, calling the people to "beichte", confession."
NOW
We love to hear the church bells. They ring often on the hour and often during the day.

THEN
"The places over here are different. They don't have doorknobs the way we do. Everything has a door with a knob on the outside to pull on but it doesn't turn. The door has to be opened from the inside or with a key on the outside. On the inside the door has a handle to turn to open it. Inside doors in the houses have handles on both sides. All doors on the inside have keys setting in the locks - the old type of key like that for grandma and grandpa's house in Oak City. All cabinets and closets can only be opened with the key in the lock. There are no handles on them. The windows of my apartment here have shutters on the outside and when the wind blows they flap around."
NOW
The doors are the same as they were. In our apartment, and on all that I have seen, you open your main door with a key from the outside. The inside doors have locks and keys with skeleton keys. The cabinets and closets are more modern now, usually. Our windows all have shutters, but they are more modern. Here are two pictures, one of our bathroom door and one of our bedroom window with the roll-shutter partway down. They don't flap in the wind.

THEN
"One thing that is interesting is that everybody lives in apartments, no private home (hardly any). To get in we have to push one of the outside door bells (there's one for every apt.). then the person in the apartment pushes a button which allows the outside door to be opened. Then we can enter and talk to the people."
NOW
Most homes have more than one apartment. The doorbells are in a row by the door. People have a button at their apartment to unlock the outer door, all the same as back then.

THEN
"It rains here all of the time. It's always wet. Also the sky is never as blue as it looks on this card. Every once in a while we can get a glimpse of the blue sky.
… The weather here is usually always rain (drizzle). We all wear shawls around our necks to keep us warm. The air isn't as dirty as I had expected. I washed my hair this morning and it was really quite dirty (collected rain from the week). We have a pretty good place. The place even has its own bath tub, so we can bathe twice a week."
NOW
It is pretty gray a lot of the time. There are a number of places where we could see the Alps if the skies were clear enough, but there have only been a couple of days that we have had that experience. It does rain a lot. The people are always bundled up. We are too, but hope for days when we can leave our overcoats home.
My apartments as a young missionary almost never had bathing facilities. Now such is unthinkable. Then we had to live with it. My first place back then was the only place that actually had a tub. The rest of my mission we had to visit the city bath facilities once a week and splash-bathe in the sink the rest of the days. Of course we have a nice apartment here.

THEN
"Here in Germany, the bicycles have the same rights and laws as cars. We ride along with the traffic (as you see on that post card that I sent you, the streets are quite narrow). You can see the cobblestone streets in that post card, and also the street cars. The traffic and cars are really quite interesting. The traffic light turns yellow with the red before it turns green. Also every car is quite small, Volkswagen size or small sports car size. Our car would really be awkward and gigantic on these streets. The Germans don't paint lines much either."
NOW
I have already posted some movies and pictures of the streets.They are still quite narrow in most places and don't always have painted lines. The drivers really know how to get around. Cars are often parked along the road leaving only enough room for one car and drivers wait for the others to pass and are very cooperative. The signals are the same. There are some bike lanes and they are part of the street, not off the side as we have them in America. We really have to watch out for bikes. Lots of people ride bikes, at any age, too, almost.

THEN
"Last Friday after our meeting (we were at a member's house). We stayed a little and ate a little snack and talked to the lady there. She really had a miraculous conversion. It's really wonderful too because she has a really big family that is growing. They are about 1/3 of the branch here. The branch is made up of about 3 families and a few other members. These families talk about immigrating to America and the others are quite old."
NOW
We have had some wonderful experiences visiting people. Almost always they provide us with a "tea," something to drink and to nibble on. It is not usually the best to drop in on people. They really like to have an appointment and then, they insist on feeding you something. They are wonderful people. Our branch here has quite a few old people. But we are old too, so that works out great. We have quite a few in their 80s and they are quite an inspiration. Many of the older women are in care centers and really appreciate our visits to them. There is not really any immigration to America like it once was.

THEN
"The Germans have quite a holiday for Easter. On Good Friday everything is closed. Even our church here had a meeting and we also served the sacrament. Then they have Easter Sunday and Easter Monday. Sunday is for church and Monday is for visiting relatives."
NOW
All the stores were closed on Good Friday and again on Easter Monday. Most stores are closed anyway on Sundays so that was not much different. A lot of restaurants were open on Sunday, though because people go out to eat. Easter service was nice. We enjoyed our services, but the meeting was sparsely attended because many were away visiting family. We did not have any service on Friday and they never do that here any more.

THEN
"Sunday, Apr. 5, 1970 - We returned in time to get ready for church. From church we went to Duesseldorf for conference. … First we saw the 1st session auf deutsch, then we saw the direct broadcast of the Sunday morning session in English. We got home quite late and went to bed."
NOW
We will be watching the sessions of conference over the internet. Priesthood session will not be available over the Internet (yet) so I will drive to Dornbirn, Austria with the elders and a few others to hear a re-broadcast of it  at 11AM on Sunday. I am looking forward to seeing our youngest son in the choir at the conference center. Our other son-at-home was supposed to also be in the choir, but had his operation last Monday so he is still recovering from that.

Local versions of home products

Here are just two items of interest to Americans. One is a movie showing the drive-thru at a local Macdonalds. They other is the German version of Mr. Clean.