Klassik am Berg

A very long time ago my mum and dad used to play music. Mum played the flute and dad played the tuba with an orchestra. We visited a practise of that orchestra - if you ask me it's too loud! On Thursday they played a concert in Erlangen, not inside a concert hall but outside on a bandstand. The area is called Der Berg which means mountain and it is sort of a hill. Inside the hill are a whole bunch of cellars. Mum told me they were originally for keeping drinks cool (especially beer), and when we walked past the cellar doors, we could feel a cool breeze. Today of course they have fridges, but in the olden days the breweries had ice cut in winter from ponds and stored it in icehouses or cellars for the summer so the beer wouldn't go off. Today the area around these cellars has tables and benches and there are rustic restaurants. Tizi and I went there with mum and dad who wanted to listen to the concert and just look in what they served our drinks!

Of courses we also need something to eat:

Kletterwald Pottenstein

Have you ever been to the Adventure Forest in Whangarei? A Kletterwald is the same kind of thing, just in German. Or cousins tagged along for the trip - by the way, they don't have iPads but they would like to have some, so we have taught them how to play games like Minecraft etc.

When we arrived we had to put on special gear, special climbing gloves and harnesses.

Here you can see me with my cousin Marius, who is 11, on the left and my younger cousin Simon, who is 9, on the right.

Then we had an intro session. It was in German but we understood it. Our first course was Panda, but it proved harder than it looked. At one place there were metal stirrups on ropes (like on a horse's saddle) and both my dad and my brother fell off! Not really, though, because we were secured by our two carbiners. Mum got some nasty bruises from that place, and one of the stirrups crashed into my left cheek (ouch!). Once we had gotten through it we also conquered Koala, Sloth, Maki and Lemur. 

There were wobbly bridges, some of them you walked across, some had scooters or a little push car to ride across. We also crossed a void on a torpedo! We scrambled across giant spiderwebs and surfed on a wooden skateboard. It was fun!!!

After 2 hours our time was up, we had iceblocks and Spezi to cool us down. Spezi is a mixture of Cola and Fanta. By the way, German Fanta is yellow, not orange like ours!

Friday 12 July 2013

Today we travelled by car to Forchheim. It was hot (like every day!). Here are some of the things we saw:

(Oops, you can see mum's finger in the photo!)

Can you tell from what year the crest up top is?

Yasha practising for being on stage :-)

This chain is heavy...

Can you see the pennyfarthing?

On the way back we stopped in a small town called Effeltrich:

This tree is estimated to be about 850 years old.

This church has a fortified wall around it and was defended when attacked. The villagers would gather here to be save as the village didn't have its own defences.

Funny things we see

* Frankenbus

It's not Frankenstein's bus, but the area here is called "Franken".

* Do "not fall" otherwise you might end in the "wheel chair"!

(Notfall actually means emergency in German)

* Bamberg - pronounced in German "bumberg" (mum went there to university)

* Despicable Me 2:

We will not watch it here, we will wait until we get back to New Zealand.

Bells

Tizan says Germany is obsessed with bells. Church bells seem to be ringing all the time. They are telling the time: 1 chime for quarter past, two chimes for half past, 3 chimes for quarter to, 4 chimes for the full hour and then another bell tolling as many times as the o'clock, so when it's 8 o'clock there are 4 of the one bell and then 8 of the other.

Sometimes there are more bells, e.g. to call people to mess (they seem to have a lot of mess here!). They also ring the bells lots at 11am and at 12pm. You have to know that in Germany they have their main (hot) meal at lunchtime so the 11am bell used to tell the farmers' wives to go home from the fields and cook lunch, and the 12pm bell called the farmers home for lunch.

We even saw a fire station with a bell on top instead of a siren! We have a little video from the church in Effeltrich from from last Friday at 12pm but we need to figure out how we can insert it here.

Ruine Burg Neideck

On 6 July we drove through the summery countryside. Unlike in New Zealand you rarely see any fences around paddocks because they don't have any stock grazing outside. Instead you see buildings like houses and clocktowers - did you know every town has a clock tower? In between the towns there are meadows and fields of wheat etc.

After we arrived we had to climb the track up a steep mountain to get to the ruins of the wrecked castle "Burg Neideck" (burg is the German word for castle). We explored the remains: A bridge reaching across a moat without water, a tower that looked like Weathertop off Lord of the Rings, some dungeons (we just looked in from the outside), a kitchen area, old walls etc. all perched on top of that mountain. The view from the top was spectacular and breathtaking (mum was worried we might fall off!).

What about castle toilets you might ask? If you used one of their toilets back then you would have to go into a small room overhanging the castle walls. Your business would fall through a hole and into the moat so it's not a good idea to go swimming in there!

On the way back we looked into a little cave called a Grotto. We saw a few stalactites, they are hanging rocks formed by dripping water.

After our adventure we cooled off in the freezing water of the pools at the bottom of the hill.

(Photos to come).

LEGOLAND!!!!!!!

Today is Taran's birthday and we took off early for Legoland. The trip there took forever! It took so long but it was worth it once we reached Legoland. We had to go on several motorways, they are called Autobahn. There are some places without speed limit! There were a few funny things on the way like a drive-through bakery, lots of solar panels in fields and on roofs of houses and some humongous wind turbines.

At Legoland there were loads of activities. Some people stay the night at the holiday village, but we just visited for the day.

Entrance area

The first thing we ever did was check out the Lego Ninjago Mini Land. It showed some of the scenes from the Ninjago TV episodes, it looked so accurate!

Our first ride was in the Techno Teacups. They looked like giant pieces of Lego Technic in the shape of cups and worked just like actual fairground teacup rides (turning in three different directions). All three of us, in one cup, kept on crashing into each other! It was pretty awesome, a good taste of what was to come.

After that we went on the Project X roller coaster with our Dad - it was our first roller coaster ever! Yasha kept his eyes closed for most of the ride because it was very scary, Taran enjoyed it, and Tizian wanted to do it again! The most annoying thing were the speed changes that kept on pulling and pushing us around.

Atlantis Expedition

We had to queue forever AND it was raining. Once inside we watched a short video about Atlantis, it was in both German and English. Next we checked out the aquariums that housed fish and lego models. Yasha took lots of photographs but they are darker because you weren't allowed to use a flash.

Pirate Land

Taran and Tizi entered a Pirate School Ship. The ride looked quite scary but they said it wasn't really.

From there we continued to explore and came across some battle ships:

We battled other ships and people on land - it was excellent!

We continued to the Adventure Land. We didn't complete any of the activities there, but this is one of the rides some people took:

Kingdom of the Pharaohs

The Kingdom of the Pharaohs had a giant pyramid-like structure. We entered it and hopped onto little cars that were following a track. There were two guns in each car for you to shoot at colourful targets and the car display kept track of your score so you could compete against each other. Yasha beat Tizi, and Mum beat Taran. We really enjoyed the ride! (no photos, sorry!)

Huge tower

From there we continued to a ginormous tower with a platform that lifted us up above all of Legoland. It span around slowly so you can see everything and descended gently back down. He are some of the photos:

The Knights' Kingdom

A castle in the Holiday Village (we didn't go there)

Project X roller coaster in the back and Miniature Land in front

The Kingdom of the Pharaohs

Firedragon Roller Coaster Tracks

Knights' Kingdom

Or next stop was the Knights' Kingdom. We started out on yet another roller coaster:

This was less scary than the last one. We entered the castle but that only led to the Fire Dragon Ride which Tizi and Dad took (photos on a different camera, sorry!). Tizi loved it! There were lots of funny activities, some Lego pigs grunting with their snouts in their Lego bucket, a ride on horses through the trees etc.

Next we boarded the Lego city train. There were some little kids' activities and if you had lots of time you could do your Legoland Drivers Licence.

The Lego Fabrik (factory) was AWESOME! They showed us a short movie clip, then we could walk through their factory with lots of interesting displays. In the end we got through an area that sold all sorts of different individual bricks. This is the Souvenir brick everyone got:

Miniland

Miniland had replicas of real life stuff but in miniature and made of Lego. They had amazing models of the Munich Airport, Venice, Switzerland, Berlin (the German capital), a sports stadium with a huge audience etc. with lots of automation like ships floating on rivers, trams and trains running, cars and trucks driving, a ferris wheel turning etc. We also discovered a Star Wars area:

At 3pm we watched a short 4D movie with Clutch Powers. 4D is like 3D, you wear these funny glasses, but in addition they splash water, spray smoke etc. It wasn't all that impressive because we were sitting in the last row and didn't really get much of these special effects.

Last but not least we ended at the Legoshop. It was breathtaking! There were all sets imaginable and we had a hard time deciding what to spend our money on. This is what we finally settled on:

Yasha's choice and

Taran's choice. 

It was a long journey back, but we stopped at McDonalds on the way. Their Happy Meals taste the same, but their toys are different. Today was the most awesomest day of our holiday yet!