the best way to start any day is with breakfast. and apparently in germany, breakfast is catered to kids, just like here. only here we have sugary cereals with cartoons and marshmallows. they don't eat cereal for breakfast in germany. you get rolls and cheese and cold cuts. marshmallows are not allowed. but this is completely acceptable:
teddy bear meat. it was pretty much like bologna, only in the shape of a teddy bear.
he looks cute enough to eat! hehe!tante baerbi and onkle franco left after breakfast. we missed them immediately. but we were off to sight see!
we headed to the ettal abby or kloster ettal, depending on where you are from. and the cheese factory behind the abby.
this was a mural that i saw from the parking lot. just on some one's house. i thought my dad would like it. actually, i think that if my dad didn't have a house with plastic siding, he should put these all over the outside. dad? what do you think?
so here is a little history of the abby. for those of you who don't read german, just check out the numbers. the abby started in 1330! it (i think) burned down a couple times and is currently a school. pretty impressive.
here's the view just as you step into the courtyard. it is beautiful. and if the day had been clear, you would have seen some pretty impressive (even by montana standards) mountains. 
this is the inside. i'm going to take a big guess, since i'm not totally up on my abby-language and layout, but this seemed like the main alter.
much more exciting to me was the ceiling. it was so amazing. really, really beautiful. and i'm sure that if you were to attend mass, it would be quite acoustic. but the coolest part was the fact that the bavarians had their own style. and when they did big mural type painting like this, there was always one part that they sculpted. there was a leg that stuck out on this one. and i thought the style was called baroque, but when i googled it, i didn't see where it mentioned a painting and a sculpted piece. (apparently, i was not an art history major) anyways, it is pretty neat because unless you are looking of the part the isn't painted, you don't notice it right away.
here's the view as you are leaving the courtyard. which we did and headed around back to the cheese factory.
on the way to the cheese factory, i saw this. and i took this picture because it was funny. and i think that you don't need a translation to get the meaning. very good advertising. but i also took it because i thought it looked like dewey from malcolm in the middle, which is one of my dad's favorite shows. and i thought he'd like the picture.the cheese factory was an amazing place, full of decadence. it is a fairly new place, so the building just looked like a regular building that you'd see anywhere. and they have special monk cheese. and they have cheese that monks put bacteria (the yummy kind) on everyday for three months, by hand. we got to watch a movie on it, in english.
we indulged in the best yogurt i have ever had, super stinky cheese (but it was soooooo good) and cheesecake. the funniest part about the stinky cheese, was that the cheese factor had a pretty strong odor, so there was no idea how stinky the cheese was until we unwrapped it the next day. holy moly! stinky enough to about knock you over. but it was probably the best cheese i've ever had. darn monks know how to make cheese!
then we headed to murnau to see tante petra and her two boys. we saw the school were tante petra teaches art. we had a nice italian dinner with her and the boys. and just had a nice evening visiting with them.
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