Trip to Loffingen

Catching the train to go to
Loffingen.

Sunday went to a town called Loffingen, higher in the Black Forest. The person who owns our townhouse invited us to lunch. His name is Fritz and he's the minister at a church there. So we attended the service. It was kind of weird because it was all in German. I recognized the Apostle's Creed and the Lord's Prayer.

This is the outside and inside of the Lutheran/Evangelical Church in Loffingen

Town of Loffingen

After a huge, delicious lunch we went for a walk around the town. Oddly, we saw lots of witches.



Witches in Loffingen. Which witch is which?

We walked by the big Catholic church that had a huge steeple. When we got next to it, I looked up and I thought it was falling on us. But it was actually the clouds moving so fast behind the tower. Katie made fun of me because I held my arms over my head instead of running from it!

Steeple of the Cathlic Church in Loffingen.

Today, my mom and I took the train into the Freiburg marketplace. It goes on every day until 11 in the morning except for Sunday right next to the Münster. It has vegetables, flowers, fruit, honeys, all kinds of different olives and spices, baked goods, different kinds of bratwursts, and other wursts, wooden toys and crafts.

Market place in Freiburg.

Madison, Wisconsin is a sister city of Freiburg, Germany. This emblem is right next to the town hall in the old city.

I bought this wooden crossbow that shoots corks in the Freiburg marketplace.

Everywhere we go there are big snails, especially after it rains. These are the biggest ones I've seen. Some are real small. I wonder how long it takes them to get across the sidewalk?

My hand next to some of the big ones.

Wild Boars

This is part of the trail from Kirchzarten to our little village of Burg Birkenhof.
I'm hauling up a load of groceries.

I finished the last of my math today! Hurray! I also finished my Germany animal report on the wild boar. I have posted it below. Both Katie and I spent the last few days doing lots of homework. It's been cooler and cloudy so only thirteen kids were at the pool yesterday when I took a break and rode down there on my bike to check it out. I helped my mom with groceries, too.


These are the goats we pass on the trail to Kirchzarten.

I am going to be taking care of my neighbor Johannes's guinea pigs for the next few days while his family travels to Italy for vacation.

These are two of Johannes's guniea pigs.

Every Saturday morning I take the train into Freiburg to have breakfast with my dad. Sometimes we visit the International Market which has fruits, vegetables, fish and baked goods. It's pretty cool.

Here's my animal report on Germany's wild boars. The blog format won't let me indent paragraphs, but believe me, Mrs. Mantooth, I did it right on my final copy.

Germany's Wild Boars

Germany’s wild boars are amazing. First, my animal is a mammal. It has stiff bristles (hair) that feel like a brush. Wild boars can be 110-200 pounds and up to six feet long! Its colors are dark grey, black, and brown. Those aren’t very bright colors are they? Wild boars have continuously growing tusks. They can grow up to one foot long! The head is large and the legs are small and short. The babies have stripes when they are born, but after a little while when the babies have a chance to grow up the stripes fade off.

The wild boar is a unique animal for its unusual habitats. They make a shelter by forming a canopy with the grass they’re using. Wild boars also use mud wallows to keep the parasites away and to protect their skin from the sun. They live in the forest and grasslands. Wild boars are found in Europe, Asia, Australia and throughout Germany.

Wild boars are like our own Idaho bears. They are omnivores! Wild boars eat roots, fruit, nuts, fungi, amphibians, birds, reptiles, small mammals, and carrion. It catches its prey by smelling it then the boar sneaks up on it then pounces. By the way, they grunt a lot while feeding.

Could you imagine fighting a wild boar? When it’s defending itself it lowers its head, charges, and slashes its tucks upward skewering the enemy. It’s only enemies are humans and wolves. Wolves usually go after the piglets.

The males fight for the females. The way they do it is they slash each other with their tusks on the shoulders as hard as they can and whoever gives up first loses the match and the other one goes home with a female. This is similar to Idaho’s elk.

Wild boars have groups that only piglets and females come to. It adds up to about 50 boars. This is called a sounder.

Germany has recently reported a surge of wild boar populations. According to a study by the Hanover-based Institute of Wildlife, “Germany’s boars have six to eight piglets average, other countries have four or five.”

Dessert

Cheese cake in Germany is excellent!

May 26, 2010

Well, I have a sunburned back. We went to the pool again yesterday afternoon and my mom still hasn’t bought sunscreen yet. So, Katie and I both got burned.

I got ahead on math yesterday so I can work on my animal project today. Our internet is so slow, it will take awhile. All the websites come up in German first and then we have to search for English.

Katie and Dad enjoying wine and cake.

We’ve been seeing these fantastic desserts at every bäkerei and restaurant we go to. So finally, we went to a gasthaus here in our village and ordered cheesecake. It was excellent just like I expected. We sat outside about 9 o’clock in the evening and talked. My mom and dad had wine instead of dessert.

Outdoor patio at the gasthaus.

We’ve been playing a lot of games and cards after dinner. Sometimes I check the German TV and I see cartoons, some of the same ones that are shown in America, only they are in German. My mom and dad can watch CNN in English.

Last night we ate dinner outside on our patio. Our house is a townhouse connected to other houses. Most of the houses here are like that. It has four stories including the basement, but it’s narrow so each floor only has two or three rooms. The top floor has a balcony.

Our laundry is different. No one has a dryer so my mom has to hang up all the clothes, towels and sheets. When it’s sunny she hangs them outside and they dry fast. When it is rainy, she hangs them in the basement and sometimes the sheets and towels and my big hooded sweatshirts take three days to dry.

I will take photos of our house and the pool and post them later.

Black Forest Trip

May 24, 2010

Yesterday we took the train to a big lake called Schluchsee in the Black Forest (Schwarzwald). “See” means lake. “Schwarz” is black and “wald” is forest.

Skipper Sasha and Captain Katie taking turns driving our paddleboat on Schluchsee.

We rented a paddleboat and toured the lake. Then we got back on the train and went to a very busy tourist town called Titisee. We had ice cream cones and walked around. We saw lots of cuckoo clocks for sale. Then we got back on the train again and came home.

Dad and Mom relaxing in the back of the boat.

Today is a holiday in Germany. It’s Pentecost Holiday. The German kids go to school until the end of July. But these next two weeks they have vacation from school.

After lots of rain, the weather finally got warm. So today I finished my math assignments and now I will ride my bike into Kirchzarten and go swimming at the pool this afternoon.

I read all my Idaho mining history information. It was interesting. We are going to tour the salt mines near Salzburg, Austria in June when my sister’s friend, Cassidy Baumgartner, will be visiting us. “Salz” means salt and “burg” means town.

The mines are some of the oldest in the world. People used the salt to preserve food like meat and pickles. They have been mining the salt near Salzburg for 7,000 years! The salt mines made Salzburg one of the richest cities in the world at one time.

This is a picture from the internet of tourists going down the big slides in the salt mines near Salzburg.

My mom has been there and she told me that we go down big wooden slides to get to the different levels underground just like the miners did hundreds of years ago. Salzburg is famous for the “Sound of Music” movie and it is also where Mozart is from.

I am standing in front of the church in a nearby
village called Buchenbach.

One day my mom and I went on a walk to a little nearby town called Buchenbach. Then we walked on some trails through farmland and saw rabbits on one of the farms. We also saw little bighorn sheep only they were really small and were on a farm, they weren’t wild. We also saw some goats on another farm. There are cows everywhere and gasthauses (guest houses) where people stop on their bikes or from hiking and have a snack and drink outside.

The rabbits on a farm outside our town.

We stopped at a farm and bought apples and dried apples and giant, plate-sized spinach leaves. They were huge!

Daily Life & Freiburg Trip

I am standing outside the "Munster" in Freiburg.


May 18, 2010

This is like a Lewis & Clark journal. We do homework every morning, I just finished writing my last page in my Lewis & Clark journal today.

But before homework, I get up and walk to the Bäkerei (bakery) and buy hard rolls for the family for breakfast. The Germans eat these fresh every day with jam and butter or cheese and deli meats. Also they often have soft boiled eggs.

It’s my job to get up early, take some Euros (Germany’s money) and walk the two blocks to the Marktplatz (downtown area) in Burg Birkenhof. I say the number like, eins (one), and point to the kind of roll I want. When they give it to me I say “danke schön” and they say “bitte schön.” That is “thanks” and “you’re welcome”. My favorite roll looks like a pretzel, but they’re bigger and soft on the inside.

Then we do math, Lewis & Clark journal, mining history and write on this blog. We are having trouble getting an internet connection in our home, but my mom makes me write anyway. Once I get the internet, I am going to do my animal report on Germany’s wild boars.

We walk everywhere or bike everywhere, even to get groceries. It’s about a two mile walk to the big grocery store in Kirchzarten. I help my mom carry the groceries back up the hill to our home in Burg Birkenhof.

Sunday we went by train to Freiburg. We walked around the old part of the city. We saw a huge church called the “Münster”. It’s big, it has lots of stained glass windows with pictures. The pictures tell stories.

The first picture is Katie, me and my dad outside the church in Freiburg.

Inside the church there are organ pipes everywhere. It was huge inside!

The outside is covered with gargoyles just like the cartoon movie “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”. One of the gargoyles had some humor. If you look closely you can see a guy leaning against the wall with his bottom in the air.

The top picture is a regular gargoyle. The next one is the gargoyle with humor. See the guy hanging off backwards on the upper left?

I’ve made some friends but one of them doesn’t speak English. So it’s kind of hard to communicate with him. His name is Timt. The other one is Johannes. We play hide and go seek and play with their guinea pigs. Timt has two guinea pigs and Johannes has twelve. They leave for school at 7:30 on their bikes. They ride into Kirchzarten. They get home at 1:15. So I try to be done with my homework by then.

Yesterday I saw a weird mallard-green beetle that was sitting by our garbage can.. it kind of reminds me of a dung beetle, the kind that rolls poop.

This is the bug I found in our backyard.

Munich to Kirchzarten

See the blimp above my head?

May 15, 2010

We landed 10:00 in the morning Germany time which was 2:00 AM Boise time. When we landed my mom’s foreign exchange student came to pick us up. His name is Peter Schäfer and he is very kind. He lived with my mom for a year in 1971-1972 when she was a freshman in high school and my Uncle Steve was a senior like Peter. They’ve seen each other many times over the years between.

Peter had pillows for us in the car in case we were tired from the long plane ride. He also had snacks. It is a five hour drive from Munich to Freiburg. We stopped for lunch at an Air Museum cafeteria where Peter is a tour guide. He has retired from the German military where he was a helicopter pilot.We sat outside and while we were eating we saw a big blimp leave and come back with tourists on it. This is a picture of me with the blimp way above my head.

Our house is in a small village outside Freiburg called Kirchzarten. Actually we are in a tiny village called “Burg Birkenhof” about two miles from Kirchzarten’s downtown or “Marktplatz”. It was nice to see my dad. He went ahead of us and we hadn’t seen him for ten days!

Leaving Boise on May 10th

May 14, 2010

Leaving Boise was a hassle to get through. Everybody was stressed and in a hurry.
Finally were off the ground to Germany! We went to Chicago then to Munich, Germany.





















Katie and I at the airport in Boise.


The plane ride to Chicago wasn’t so bad but the plane ride to Munich was long and cramped. We were in the middle of the plane so we couldn’t see anything. Luckily we had a T.V. in front of us so it wasn’t that bad. There was a map on the screen to show how fast were going, how much altitude we have, and where we were.

On our flight to Chicago. It was a long trip to Germany!