Germany

July 21, 2011 Right now I'm sitting on flight Delta 14 to Frankfurt for the second time today. After driving 2 and a half hours to Atlanta and then flying toward Germany for about an a hour, I found myself heading back to the Atlanta airport. I have to admit, I felt a little surge of fear when the captain announced that we were heading back to Atlanta due to something that we couldn't fly over the ocean without having checked.  Obviously, I'm glad we turned around if there was something wrong with the plane. They gave us all snack vouchers and scheduled us to leave on a different plane two hours later. So, here I sit with a belly full of pineapple smoothy compliments of Delta, and my second pair of Delta socks on my feet for the day. Hopefully everything will go perfectly smoothly this time and I'll be in Germany in about 9 hours. And I hope my ride will still be able to pick me up! Well, I arrived in Germany with no further delay or problems. Our sponsor's husband was there to pick me up. One of the first things he said was, "so, there was a mouse on the plane!". This was news to news to me, but he said that's what someone in the know told him. 

We had a nice long drive to the house and I got to see how beautiful this part of Germany is. The house we are staying in is set back from the road, in the woods, in a small town outside of Dillenburg. The bedroom and living room have sliding glass doors as the outside walls, so we get a gorgeous view of the lovely back yard at all times.  Most of the time has been spent teaching and then the show, so we haven't done a lot of site seeing. We did visit an old castle, which was really interesting.  The main room of the castle was built in the 1200s and the rest of it was built up and added on to over the years. There was a lot of battle armor and weapons from hundreds of years ago. Full suits of armor, swords, lances, and even armor for the horses.  The rest of the castle was full of original art work from Italy, Spain and Germany, as well as beautiful old furniture and tapestries.  One of the highlights for me was seeing an original Ruebens painting.   We then went to another location where an old castle that was destroyed was rebuilt into a tower that overlooks the town. It was after closing hours so we didn't get to tour the inside but it was interesting to see the site.  The weather has been quite a surprise the whole time we've been here. Even though it's summer, it has been pretty cold most of the time. It was rainy and very cold the first few days, then it warmed up a bit, then got stormy and cold again, etc.  Today it's cold again. This is my last day here so I was planning to walk around Dillenburg, but the weather is threatening to dampen my enthusiasm a bit. Not enough to stop me though.  (very long break in writing here) It turned out that our friends Hannele and Axel were in town for the Teacher Training session, so Axel and I did some sightseeing while Hannele was in the class. We did get to go in the old tower after all. The view of the town from the top was amazing, and the history was quite interesting.  All in all, it was a lovely trip.  Our sponsor, Gabi, was really sweet and I made some new friends while adding another country to the list of places I've been so blessed to be able to visit.