29 March 2015 - Speisen Wieserfest in Ahausen made us smile in our hearts!

It was oh so good to sleep in this morning and wake to the distant church bells tolling 8 O'Clock!  Their sound is gentle and distant and not as alarming as the Muslim call to prayer we heard in Turkey. We managed a slightly gappy Skype call to my parents and it was good to touch base.

My parents were wondering why we chose to stay in Bermatingen! The very basic answer is that it was cheap (AUD$50 per night) for a spacious house in the countryside where we can gather our thoughts and energy and the kids can catch up on their school work.  This is the advantage of slow travel.  It is unsustainable to race about continually changing places and countries for the long haul.

Before I go further, apologies to my readers from the other day when I referred to The Sound of Music. Captain von Trapp was supposed to go to Bremerhaven, on the North Sea, a long way north from here rather than Friedrichshaven on the Bodensee!  Friedrichshaven is close to Austria so I figured that would have been easy!...and here I was thinking I knew the movie script off by heart!  We are still planning to watch it soon enough while the mountains are still fresh in our minds.

Today, Palm Sunday, was going to be a fairly mundane day.  It was a grey sky, slightly drizzly day and as nothing is open here in sleepy Bermatingen on a Sunday, we figured it would be a quiet one! But we were wrong!!

Footy in the local park.

The kids wanted to go to the local soccer field with their Aussie football for a run around and kick.  That done, we decided to walk to the next village, Ahausen, which is 2 kms away.  Country air is so invigorating!

Pretty river running through Ahausen.

Roadside chapel which may have been built by the Catholics to annoy the Lutherans, then in the middle of the road

 It is a peaceful rural area with very few people or cars about. We ventured into Saint Jacobus Church in Ahausen and saw faded frescoes from 1600's!  I was much more thrilled about these than the kids were!  It was a beautiful little church, cold inside and enveloping in an old churchy type of way.  The bells started tolling for midday and rang on for a while, heralding I don't know what....maybe Palm Sunday, may be the Aussie visitors!

Kirche St Jacobus

Faded frescoes in the church

1600's fresco

...and then the bells tolled for midday!

Their was a memorial for fallen soldiers of the two world wars and a simple iron cross nailed to a rock.  Most had died in Russia in the second World War. The Iron Cross originated after 1219 when the Kingdom of Jerusalem gave the Teutonic Order the right to combine the Black Cross with the Silver Cross of Jerusalem. It became the symbol of the German army.  But we don't mention the war here....

Iron Cross memorial for WW1 and WW2

 We walked on through the village and saw some cars parked..mmm...may be there was something going on...and then we caught the aroma of sausages on the crisp air....and followed our noses!  And there it was: The Speisen Wieserfest 2015 - Countryside Dining festival 2015 - complete with steins of beer, a German Folk band and a bier hall set up for lunch.  The smell of wurst and pommes drew us closer and we took a seat!.  Annika and I managed to order lunch without giving away the fact that we didn't really speak German!  Following the wurst gobbling (4.50 Euros for a generous serving of wurst and pommes) we lined up at the cake table and had trouble choosing from the most amazing selection of homemade cakes (a generous slice for 1.50 Euros).  We enjoyed every mouthful of Blackforest cheesecake, apple and walnut cake and pear and almond cake and MORE...but enough was enough. What a find!!!  Tour groups never have this kind of experience and there we were joining the locals and enjoying every minute of it and smiling in our hearts!  The music was wunderbar and some of the band members were decked out in their lederhosen!

Menu!

German folk band - note the lederhosen

Cakes which were unbelievably delicious!

Blackforest cheesecake

Apple and walnut cake

There were plenty of farm vehicles to try out.  One of my faves was the robo mower which was mowing the grass all by itself!  Luke had a great time driving German vehicles.

Luke driving a tractor.

 It is always nice to wander through pretty streets and check out the houses and gardens.  Lots of people have colourful eggs hanging on bare tree branches for Easter.  The bulbs are all starting to bloom and in the few weeks we are here, there will be even more flowers.  Everyone seems to take care of their gardens and shopfronts so well and everyone is ready to welcome spring time with flowers.  Spring is a real celebration!

Pretty and fairly typical garden.

Old shingles tiles on old house.

Our street.

Back to our house, feeling happy, fed and ready for schoolwork (sort of).  The internet was fixed in our absence so we feel things are getting into order.

It was a quiet afternoon of homework and games and remembering Palm Sunday in the absence of a church to help us.  I wondered what the little Grace Community Church of Bodrum did today for their Palm Sunday celebration and how the people of Christ Church, Bangkok, marked the occasion.