Maulbronn Monastery and St. Anton

We have been busy bees this week!   There are LOTS of pictures to share of our adventures and fun times.
First of all and most exciting....we finally have high speed internet installed in our house!!  It has been a long 6 month wait, but it is in and it is fast!   We hope to get the video phone hooked up to it today or tomorrow.  We still need an adapter thing to make it work.  

Here is a cute picture of Mike and our landlord, Horst applying for our contract online.  It was all in German of course, so Horst had to walk him through it all.  We are so lucky to have such a wonderful landlord! 


I went to another fantastic German cooking class and this week's menu included an Apfel-Feld Salat ( apple field salad).  And then a Pikantes Paprika Gulasch ( a spicy pepper goulasch).  Karin also made a really good dumpling called "Speckknödel.  You can drop these into the goulasch to cook, but she made it in a loaf shape and cooked it in oven roaster bag...it was so yummy.

Thursday night was the Relief Society Birthday Dinner.  It was lots of fun and decorated in a Bloom Where You're Planted theme...Cute!!

On Friday, Mike went skiing with a friend from work, Jerry Youngblood.  They went to St. Anton in Austria.  They drove down on Friday and skied on Saturday and then came home.  

 That night was the Green and Gold Ball at the church.  I went by myself and helped in the kitchen.  Travis stayed home with his friend, Chris.  The internet had just been installed and so he was trying to set up his X box live.

I spent Saturday on a USO tour with friend, Karma.  It was a rainy day, but we had so much fun and the tour took us to two different villages with three very interesting guided tours.

First we went to Bruchsal to visit the Bruchsal Palace.   It is a large complex that was built for the Cardinal of Speyer, Damian Hugo von Schörnborn.  He wanted a residence and garden just like Versailles.   During WWII, the village and the palace was 80 percent destroyed and so they have been restoring it.  We toured the center portion of the palace. The paintings are amazing and all the gilded trim..WOW!

The pictures of course just don't do it justice.  After the palace tour, we went into one of the wings of the complex and had a guided tour of the Deutsches Musikautomaten Museum.  A museum full of automated music players.  It was like a history of player pianos and much much more.  I really found it interesting!   Here are a few pics of my favorite items.

This one was for use in a pub.  Notice the coin slot on the side. And the one below was just a fun music machine also used in pubs.

The one on the left is a player pipe organ.  It was commissioned for the first class dining room on the TITANIC!  However, it didin't get completed in time for it's maiden voyage.  Remember...you can click on any picture to make it bigger!

After the museum we were able to wander into the village and find a place to eat lunch.  Karma and I found a nice little Italian place that had a sign board advertising Deutsches Spargel.  Here in this area of Germany there is a popular specialty that is only available for a very short season..white asparagus!   They use it in anything and everything while it is in season.   We had the asparagus soup, some pizza and a spicy but delicious pasta dish.


We hopped back on the bus and drove about a half hour to the Maulbronn Monestary.  This was my favorite tour of the whole day!  It was literally like stepping back in time.  This is a medieval Cistercian monastery.  A complex built in the 1100's.  It has been amazingly preserved and is even a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Sight.  It it the most completely preseved monastery from the middle ages north of the Alps.

We had a very interesting and knowledgeable tour guide who really made this place come to life.  Although it started out as a Catholic monastery, after the Reformation, the catholic monks were forced to leave and relocate to Colmar, France and it was turned into a Protestant school.  Herman Hesse attended school here.

This is the chapel which is located in the center of the complex. These hand carved wooden compartments were for the monks to stand in when they prayed eight times a day.

This is where the drawbridge crossed the moat into the walled, fortified, monastery.

In the the inner courtyard.  

Looking from the transept into the inner courtyard.

Above is the monk's dining room.  The guide told us about the legend of the 11 finger wine.  On one of the columns there is a hole with a groove that goes down into a little narrow channel around the base of the column.  Wine would pour out of the hole and fill the channel.  The monks would dip their fingers into the wine and then lick the wine off of their fingers.  One monk said "The wine is so good, I wish I had eleven fingers!"   So from then on it was called Elf Fingern Wein.  Eleven Finger Wine.  There is still a company today that produces it.

Here's me sticking my fingers in!!
Well that's a lot of pics...I hope they all loaded okay for you.  We aren't always this busy..but hey..it's spring and when it rains...it pours!
Speaking of rain. We have had quite a bit the last couple of days. But you know what the song says...Rain..it makes the flowers grow.

Happy Spring!
love and miss you all,
-corri