Day 6

On May seventh, after breakfast, we started off the day with a tour of the castle we were staying at (Colditz Castle). In the second world war, the castle was used as a jail for important people or people that had escaped from other places; We were still in Germany, so the Allies would be imprisoned there. During the tour, we were told about many escape attempts, some successful and some not so successful. The tour was long and got boring after a bit; the tour went right through lunch. One time, we all went out onto a balcony and my mom and I smelt something weird; The tour guide said it was the smell of people making ice-cream flavouring for their ice-cream business. When my brother and I heard this, we found an easy way down and started to look for the shop. Our mom soon put an end to this by threatening that we wouldn't get ice-cream if we didn't come back up right then. We came up. For the rest of the tour we all were hungry and bored.

At the end we heard a really funny story; here is one explanation "After Mairesse-Lebrun's escape from the park, prisoners in solitary confinement took their exercise on the northwest terrace. During his walk on this day, Flight-Lieut. Don Thom of the Royal Canadian Air Force suddenly leapt over the terrace's balustrade and grabbed a hold of the crossbars in the windows of the guardroom. He dropped to the bars of a lower window, which he held for a moment before dropping to the ground. As the guards opened fire on him, he got over a barbed-wire curtain and ran into the woods before being stopped by coils of wire. Security officer Reinhold Eggers called it 'the maddest attempt of all'."

(source: http://www.mikekemble.com/ww2/colditz.html)

The picture on the right shows where Thom climbed down, but the castle was grey back then.

This is me getting a lift from my dad to try to ecape over the wall of the prison yard, as a prisoner did once.

After lunch we went to Leipzig (another German city), where we went to the Friday night service at Saint Thomas's church. There, a boy's choir performed and a person told a sermon, but everything was in German, so we couldn't understand much at all. Bach conducted the boy's choir at that same church only a few hundred years ago. One of the tunes they performed was actually written by Bach.

Day 2,3,4

On May third, we went to explore castles. Then we went to Sooneck castle, but it was closed; because it was a Monday, we figured that it was the day off for the day off. Next we tried a Roman museum, but one of the people who worked there told us that all the museums in the world are closed on Mondays. We started touring around and my dad looked on our GPS for something to do. He found this thing that was called an "attraction", but it turned out to be a cemetery. So, Monday was kind of a not so great day.

On May fourth, we saw many castles! Most were at least 700 years old! They were very big and pretty cool too. They were built in the medieval times. One of them was called Sooneck castle (the one that was closed the day before). Here are some pictures of what we saw.

 To see more stuff about Sooneck castle visit

http://www.loreley-info.com/eng/rhein-rhine/castles/sooneck.php

Yesterday, we travelled to our next destination that is also located in a castle. It is a nice and clean youth hostel in Colditz. On our way, we stopped at a village called Eisenach. There we went to two museums: Bachhaus (a museum about the famous composer, Johan Sebastian Bach) and Lutherhaus (a museum about the famous German evangelist that caused the Reformation, Martin Luther). At the Bachhaus we saw a demonstration of instruments from the time of Bach's life. Also, we listened to lots of his music. At Lutherhaus the building was really old and that was the most interesting part. Driving took up a lot of the day.

May-02-10 Day one in Europe

Today my family and I arrived in Frankfurt, Germany. I woke up last; we had an over night flight. We basically skipped breakfast and for a long time I felt pretty crummy (as you can see). We started driving to Bacharach, a small medieval town near Frankfurt; the youth hostel that we are going to stay at is located there. Along the way, we saw many ancient castles. When we finally arrived, I looked at the youth hostel and realized that the youth hostel was one of the castles that we saw from the road! (I was told before that it was a castle.)
He is a picture I took from the car as we were approaching Bacharach; this is the youth hostel we are staying at.

My family and I started to walk around the little medieval town. I was amazed at how old the buildings were; some houses and shops dated back into the 14 and 1500s! We ate lunch at an old restaurant; we had schnitzel, except for my sister; she had soup. I didn't know what to expect, but I thought the schnitzel was decent.