Easter Experience

The castle in the village I visited

Experience.  Thats the only way I can describe how I spent Easter Weekend.  Having known that I would be in Germany for Easter Sunday and that my 21st birthday was going to be on Easter Sunday, I spent the last couple months thinking about what the coolest way I could spend that weekend would be.  I thought about Paris or Prague, Berlin or my home church in Bremen.  But, I think I found the best way I could have possibly spent it.  I spent Easter/my birthday weekend staying with a German family in a tiny village (population 250) in East Germany!

To some people Paris or Prague may sound more exciting then that...but, not only do I love to travel, I love to experience culture.  I don't like going somewhere just as a tourist and just going to the tourist sites.  I like to see how the people live, even spend time living that life with them for a few days if I can.  I like going to the places that the locals go, doing things that the locals do.  And to add to that, Easter is usually a family time for me, and I always thought my 21st birthday would be a family time too.  So having a family to spend the weekend with helped ease the homesickness :).

Walking through the village

Here's how my weekend went:

Thursday:

Thursday after noon I jumped on a train and headed to the village, with a 30 minute stopover in Hamburg.  The village I was going to is called Charlottenthal.  The family I was going to stay with picked me up from a train station about a half an hour from the village.  When I arrived in Charlottenthal, I went on a tour of the house and village.  Afterwards we sat outside in the sun and drank coffee and ate cake.

Friday:

A look out on our bike ride

Friday was "Good Friday" or "Karfreitag" as they call it in Germany.  Karfreitag does not mean "Good Friday".  There isn't really a set definition for it, but it means something along the lines of "crying" or "caring".  We rode bikes to the next village for church. The service was in German, but I did my best to sing along with the songs and pay attention.  We did communion in a way I never had before.  We all stood around the stage and were each handed a cracker and we drank the juice out of the same cup.  After church we continued to ride our bikes along the lake and stopped at a sea food restaurant for lunch.  The fish there were mostly ones that were taken out of the lake we were biking around.  After lunch half of the family went back to the village for Fire Brigade sports(which  I will tell you more about later) and the other half and I continued onto a 7.5 mile bike ride around the rest of the lake.  We rode threw fields and villages as well as along the lake.  We stopped at a lookout and an old church.  It was a beautiful bike ride.  At the end we stopped for some delicious ice cream.  That night we sang songs around a campfire in the back yard.

Saturday:

In front of a castle in Gustrow

Saturday morning the family I was staying with took me to the "big city" (population 25,000) a few miles away from the village I was staying in.  That city has a castle, and some really neat buildings.  We explored the castle and walked around the city.  That afternoon, three more people arrived, including a very cute two year old.  We spent the afternoon painting Easter Eggs.  We painted 60 Easter Eggs.  Now I've painted Easter  Eggs before, but this was a little different for one reason: drinking was a big part of this.  Each person got a small shot of whatever they wanted(I had Bailey's) and drank it.  This was the first time in my life I had really drinking alcohal(other then a couple sips of warm wine my first 

day in Germany) and happened to be the day before my 21st birthday....

Fire brigade sports practice

Saturday afternoon half of the family again had Fire Brigade sports practice.  I went with them and watched for about a half an hour.  It was very interesting.  One of the two sports I watched is a relay race.  The two people who start have to race and stick a large hose into a large bucket of water then hook it into a machine that will suck the water up.  The next couple of people run, stretching out a very long hose.  The last person kneels in front of a tall metal structure that has a small hole at the top leading to a bucket.  They have to spray the water into the hole and fill the bucket up.  The other sport I watched involved using a ladder to climb up a tower.  The person starts by holding the ladder and runs to the tower and climbs up to the first window as fast as they can.  Then they pull the ladder up and climb up to the next window.  These sports are very common in German and some other European villages.  They even have national and international championships.

Painting Easter Eggss

Saturday evening we had a barbecue.  We ate delicious chicken and bratwurst.  After the barbecue we went to the village Easter Fire.  This again is very common among German villages, where either on the day or a couple days before or after Easter, they burn all of the branches the villagers have cut down from their trees.  The whole village was out drinking, cooking sweet bread and hanging out around the fire.  After an hour or so of being there we went back to the house and sat around talking for a few hours.  Some people knew that my birthday was coming, and so planned to sing happy birthday and drink a shot with me at midnight(it was my 21st, after all).  It was nice to be with people to celebrate my birthday at midnight.  A couple of friends from Bremen also called to wish me a happy birthday, which was very nice.
  

Sunday:

Sunday, of course, was Easter and my 21st birthday.  When I woke up the whole family was sitting in the living room waiting to sing me their family birthday song.  It was in German so I don't know the exact words, but it was something along the lines of "Its your birthday, there are flowers on the table, if you have a cake the size of a mill invite us."  There were flowers on the table, and the family gave me two presents.  The presents were really nice books about 

the area of Germany I was in!  

Easter Egg hunt!

After celebrating my birthday, we went out to have an Easter Egg hunt!  In the family, this is a big competitive event.  There were 60 eggs hidden, and we found 54 of them.  I found 5 :D (with some help from the family...).  After the egg hunt we ate breakfast.  With the eggs they found they make a really delicious breakfast treat involving vinegar, oil and mustard.  After breakfast we went to have the next family competition: the ping pong contest!  We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing, everyone took naps(we were up pretty late the night before) We tried to go to the animal park in the next town over to watch the bears eat Easter eggs, but we decided not to because there were so many people.  We ended the day by playing board games(of which I lost, terribly...).

Monday:

Me in front of the ruins of a castle
destroyed by the Communists

Monday was my last day in East Germany.  I bought a train ticket for 5:30 pm that night.  In the morning we went to the animal park.  It was amazing!  I felt like I was walking through the forest and simply running into these animals.  When you get to the animal park, you walk through a gate that looks like its meant to keep animals from getting out(which it is).  The first thing you see is a giant herd of deer, which you can pet.  The park has only native to Germany animals.  They have owls, bears, wolves, and a few other animals.  The dangerous animals are caged, of course.  (Although I was a little concerned that they might not be).  There are bridges going over the cages, and some of the bridges also have obstacle courses.  We spent a couple of hours exploring the park.

Monday afternoon we went to an old water mill to look at where one of the family members and his fiancée were going to get married.  The water mill was left from when lords ruled over the lands.  It was beautiful.  We also went on a walk to the ruins of a castle.  The castle was destroyed by the Communists during the 1950's. 

My time in East Germany was a great experience. The people I stayed with were all either born under or grew up under communism.  They told me about the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or German Democratic Republic, which is what East Germany was called before the fall of Communism in 1989).  They also told me about the first time they went to America, and how crazy it was to be able to go to the USA after years of not being able to leave the communist run countries.  

Me with members of the family I stayed with

It was great to be able to experience this families culture.  Every day at 4 pm we sat in the sun and ate cake and drank coffee.  I also got to learn about German culture.  One thing that stood out to me was the meals.  I have found that this seems to be common in at least some parts of Europe.  For breakfast every day we ate rolls with cheese, meat, butter and other condiments.  For lunch we would eat a big meal.  Dinner would be pretty much the same as breakfast, but usually with different bread.  It was all great food, although it took some time to get used to lunch being big and dinner being small.

Prayer requests:

~Pray for me as I readjust to being in school again, and not traveling constantly.

~Pray for me as I have a lot of work to do in the next 2.5 months before I get back to the states.

~The Euro to Dollar exchange rate continues to get worse...please pray that it will improve, at least long enough for me to get money out before it goes back up.

~Things seem to be improving with my landlady, but please pray for continued improvement in our relationship.

Praises:

~Praise God that my road trip to Amsterdam and Belgium went great!  I was the driver, and God gave me wisdom while driving and kept us safe.

~Praise God that My relationship with my landlady has been improving, the last few times I talked to her she had nothing bad to say :)

~Praise God that I was able to travel a lot over Spring break!