germany day 6....

day 6

we slept in. we were just so tired from the day before, that we took it easy and didn't rush.

we had lunch with oma and opa (grandma and grandpa).

i had the brook trout...this was so yummy...and really beautifully presented. i didn't eat the red hot peppers though!

we played cards with Tante Petra. i was busy playing, so no pics....

we wandered around O'gau (Oberammergau) in the rain. i didn't want to get my camera wet...

and then Tante Baerbi and Onkel Franco came up from italy. Baerbi made us an amazing dinner that included fresh buffalo mozzarella....so fresh that it was still warm when she bought it that morning! no pics to share, sorry....

sorry day 6 wasn't very exciting, at least it was easy to blog about!

germany day 5.....

....so we've been back from germany for months and months and months...and after being sick and getting better and being sick and being sick and having surgery and being sick....i'm FINALLY feeling pretty darn good! but with feeling better, you have to play catch up on everything you've been neglecting....and it seems that blogging gets neglected the most....

so, if you are interested in our germany trip still....feel free to read on, if not, just skip this post and hope i have something more interesting to write about later....

day 5

we got up and headed out of Ammerthal and to the 'german ranch'. (before we left the states i googled and searched and emailed people in germany to try and find a german angus ranch that was somewhere near where we were going to be.) one of them wrote back and were more than happy to have us stop by.

not only do they ranch, but they have a hotel, restaurant and sell their beef to local places....lots of work!

this is what we saw on right outside of the town the ranch was near. seriously....it looks spooky....people live CLOSE to this thing! well, too close for me!



we got to check out a bunch of cows....notice how their cows are in a shelter? they baby their cows a whole lot more than we do here. i think they put their cows in at night, every night...but they don't run 100's and 100's of cows either.


the babies are cute there too!


even a ranch dog. i think there was two running around....


we chatted...well, i should say that they chatted. most germans speak really, really good english but they get nervous. so there was a lot of german spoken. i think that evi learned more about ranching from having to translate than she knew from talking with hans. but that is kind of the way ranching is here, people just expect you to know things. i like to explain things to people. every time i talk to my grandma, i explain what we do, how we do it and why we do it. mostly because everything is new to me and i like to know things. so i explain them to my grandma and she really likes it because she's never been on a ranch and all of the terminology is new to her too.


this is a great photo to show you a little of germany...notice the sky, this might have been the best weather we had. and the semi in the background, a very rare sight in germany....and flat...here anyways, i'll have more pictures of mountains for you later. :)

these girls were curious...they even licked me....

i thought they had such cute faces....to me, a cute face is an important trait in cattle, especially females. no one wants bully looking cows!


this is one of his fields where a few of his cows were and one big bull. flat, flat....nice soil...not rocky like ours.


oh yeah...i know you've all been waiting for this....after we were done looking at the cows, we went back to their restaurant to chat. this is what they served us as a snack....holy moly...it was so amazing! i finished mine and our host promptly got up and got me another....i could have had a third, but i declined. it was soooooo good.....his wife made them. nothing beats homemade yummy-ness in germany.


and then after our chats and photos, we left....drove past the creepy nuclear power plant and saw this. it was just too crazy to pass up, so we stopped and snapped some pics. i think it was an artist's sculpture garden, but it just looked like a radioactive accident. i would have got the nuclear plant in the background, but there were trees in the way.

storks! they must have already dropped the babies off....

here's my favorite sign we found in germany....frog crossing. so apparently, they put up these signs to warn people of the migrating frogs. (squished frogs are slippery??) and once they really start migrating, they put up a little frog fence to keep them from crossing the road. then someone come by and picks up the frogs on one side and puts them on the other side of the road, all safe and sound. there was no fence yet and no frogs but the sign totally cracked me up.

finally, we made it to O'gau. visited with the grandparents, stuck our stuff in the house we were staying at and went to grab some grub.

and here's a cell phone pic to prove that i didn't just eat dessert the whole time. but check out this salad....veggies, a little lettuce (not the crappy iceberg) and a little dressing. you don't get to choose your dressing, but it was yummy. germans don't eat a ton of fruits and veggies, but they sure know to stay away from piles of iceberg!

scroll down

since i'm still fairly new to this blogging thing, my 'new' post, is below my 'old' post.

so, if you'd like to see/read about germany day 4, scroll down below 'pics by request only'.

sorry!

pics by request only....

i haven't been posting lately....i've been working on day 4 of the germany trip for so long now that i feel silly.....but things happen....

like you get sick, repeatedly and at first you think it is in your head, that the pain you feel is somehow fake. and somehow being awake all night puking from the pain is your fault and not a medical condition.....and when you finally confess why you are not feeling good to your family, your mom tells you that your grandma had the same thing, only they could never find anything wrong with her......so you think, great, its all in my head.

but then super-dad shows up.....well, actually he goes out of town....and he randomly chats with a guy who has similar health issues and figures out that your gall bladder needs to be removed.
so you freak out, because you don't want to have surgery and you pretend like you aren't sick.
but you keep getting sick....you just quit telling your family....

and finally, when you are so sick for so long that your husband threatens you repeatedly, you give in a go see the doc.

and he tells you what you already know.

you need surgery.

but during the time you are told this and the time you actually have surgery about 10,000 people tell you and your loved ones that they have had their gallbladder out too and that it is "no big deal"......"no big deal".....

but when surgery day comes around and you freak out as soon as your mom and husband are out of sight, and the anesthetist gives you 'something to calm your nerves' that puts you completely out.....

then you wake up in more pain that you've ever been in. EVER. and you are so out of it that all you can say is that it hurts when the stupid nurses want you to rank your pain on a scale of 1 to 10. if i'd been more coherent i would have said about 1,000.....so the give you more meds, you think or you just fall back into a stupor only to wake up again, in horrible pain and repeat yourself....and beg for your family....but they don't let you see your family right away. nooooo......that would be "no big deal". they make you wait until you are lucid enough to move from your bed to a chair before you see your family.....so you fight the meds hard enough to become coherent enough to ask to be moved. which promptly puts you back in so much pain that you have to beg for more pain meds....and again you have to rank your pain.....but now you are scared that they aren't going to believe you that it hurts soooooooooooo bad, so you say 7. you get a shot of demerol.....

and now you are sick....the vomiting lasts from the time you attempt to sit up in the chair, get dressed, leave the hospital and lay on the couch for 3 days while your mom (bless her heart) holds your head, your hair, rubs your back and brings you a cool washcloth. puking for 3 days...."no big deal".....

when the puking stops, then it seems that you are able to notice the pain again. only this time, instead it being your stomach, its your shoulder....and there is no sleeping with the shoulder pain....

and your mom leaves.....

and you feel lonely and yucky....

but at least your mom got to come and stay and take care of you. because it was a big deal!!!!! and still is! seriously! i have no idea why people say that it is "no big deal....."

and for the really curious people out there, my mom took pics of my stomach and my 2 gall stones that they let me keep....but i thought it best to not post them here....

germany day 4

day 4 started out much better....

we had to go to Amberg (Ammerthal is little!) to do some shopping for Tante Isabella. which was just fine, because the shopping would be a good excuse to get to wander around and check things out.there's always a cool town square.....(do you like the sky in this one? i used a new thing i learned in my weekend photog class!)

another view of the square....i like how all the buildings are connected but very distinct....(yeah, i ps-ed the sky in this one too....i really like doing that! makes the sky look soooooo much better!)

some amazing buildings! (i hope you like to look at pictures of buildings....this won't be the last one!) yeah, i didn't make the sky cool in this one...can you tell the difference?

crazy old churches.... that's a fruit or flower stand in front of it, i can't remember now. we were a little early in the year for all the fruit/veggie/flower stands, but there still were quite a few. it was neat. i bet that during the summer the stands are just everywhere!

another neat building....and you can see how these old building are shops....i call this pic 'yellow purse' but because people are so jam-packed here, i'm sure those are apartments above the shop.

i just don't think that they build them like they used to....it is just so pretty to look at all the architecture over there!i liked how the canals are built right through everything....or everything is built right up to the canal......

this gives you a pretty good idea how things were, beyond the square....yeah, it is a little claustrophobic sometimes....and see how the building is curved? its not an optical illusion because of my camera, they really built them like that. you'll see more of that when we go to munich. oh and yeah, that's a church steeple....

when you walk behind the church....

you get to check out this. so, that's jesus at the bottom in the tomb.....and because i can't remember very much from my years in catholic high school, i'm not quite sure who the 4 others are....but i find that jesus (and mostly dead/dying jesus) is everywhere in germany.

right as we were walking away from dead jesus and the 4 dudes praying for him, i found the coolest wall....

i love it.....

this is possibly my favorite pic that i took the entire time we were in germany.....i have no idea why, but i just like it so very, very much....

then we went meat shopping!!!

are you ready for it?

because seriously...meat over there isn't like meat over here....especially if you come from a ranching family.....

you go to the "butcher" but really, its more like a meat-store. it seems that germans like processed meats.....

this is evi taking pics of the meat too. note: this is the view of evi that i had for most of the trip, camera up to face, snapping away....but if she had a pic of me taking a pic, she'd probably say the same thing...

here's some sausages...a whole wall of them. in the bottom right are the famous 'white sausages' that are not to be consumed after noon. or actually it is some saying about not letting them here the noon-day bell or something like that. both times we ate them, we ate them after noon, yeah, we're risky like that. but the story is because they make them fresh everyday, without preservatives and refrigeration was lacking back in the day, they'd spoil if you let them sit too long....now if you trust your fridge, you can eat them any time of day.

this is a horrible pic, i'm so very sorry about the crazy color. the napkin is suppose to be white...*sigh* anyways, this is something that we ate a LOT. it was our snack almost everyday we were out and about. i call it 'hot baloney'. that's what it is! a big thick slice of processed meat, similar (but better) than bologna served on a roll. hans and i shared this one, so it is cut in half, and on my half, i asked for some mustard. this mustard is sweet, it is almost like a jelly or relish than mustard and it makes the 'hot baloney' taste pretty good!

here's a selection of processed meats....i'm not sure which ones are what, but i'm pretty sure i ate a few of those in the pic. although nothing with anything green or red in it.....but possibly the large slices in the bottom right was consumed for breakfast on more than once.....it is kind of like bologna with chunks of real meat.

this was something i didn't eat. who eats this? i have no idea....but it is some meat, some veggies? and an egg in a gelatin-like substance....

oh yeah, here's more of it....and look, some in slices!! i personally have never seen any member of hans' family eat this. or buy it. thank god.

this was not in the meat store. this was in the window of a shop that sold little tourist-y things. if i remember correctly, hans' cousin said it was called a 'whopple-dinger'. they don't all look exactly like this, but i like to think of them like our 'jack-a-lopes'. creative taxidermy.ahhh...now here's a sample of what i think bavarian architecture looks like....when i think of bavaria/germany, this is what i think of.the last pic of the post....this was hans when we got back to the car after running all around ammerthal. i told him to pout for me, i say it was a stuck-up accent. one day i hope he'll crack a smile and i'll get a really good pic of him....not that this one is bad....