And the trip begins

   Hello once again everyone! Sorry for falling short on my promise to get caught up, but I’m back. I’m gonna try to keep my posts a bit shorter after this one, so they can be read more quickly and enjoyably. I’ll try once more to get caught up to today, but first I have to cover my fantastic vacation throughout Northern Germany from October 12 to October 20. I’ll just cover the first three days in this post, and then split the other parts into two posts. Enjoy!

   After the fun beginning to my fall break, it was time for the real fun to begin. For our trip, we (my host-mom, host-sister and I) were going to take a “tour” of Northern Germany, stopping at many major cities and seeing many places. We began early Wednesday morning, October 12. The plan was to leave at 8:00 in the morning, but my host mom had come down with something and wasn’t feeling up to starting the trip. Luckily she was feeling much better come 12:00, so we packed everything in the car and started the journey. Our first stop was the Müritz, a lake about an hour North of Berlin. It’s the largest lake in Germany, and we would be staying in the town of Warren with a friend of my host-mom. It’s quite a ways from Köln, so the drive took a little over 6 hours. We arrived quite late (10:00), but managed to find a pizza place that was still open, so we got a quick dinner. After the long drive, we all fell asleep right away.

   The next day we had a bit of a tour of Warren planned, and we were going to see some of the more interesting things around the area. Our first stop was the old town, a small town with very old buildings, many from the 19th century. First we stopped at an old house now occupied by a family of potters and sculptors, and we spent some time in their public sculpture garden. After this we headed to the larger part of the old town, complete with a fantastic looking palace, historic buildings, and a wonderfully maintained garden.

   After walking around and exploring the old town for a while, we moved on to get a personal tour of a historical 19th-century mansion. The entire thing, and all it’s 25 gigantic rooms, was occupied by only one person. She bought the entire thing for less than €500,000. After we were all inside, she took us around the mansion on a tour. While a large part of it was in disrepair and still had Soviet-era appliances, it was still very cool.

Afterwards we headed over to the harbor, where we ate dinner.

   The next day we started with an early breakfast, and then headed to a town famous for it’s medieval witch trials. THey had a museum there, which documented many of the various trials in the town and all over germany. It was very interesting, however also a bit disturbing in some ways. They had various torture devices on display, and many examples of what were thought ot be witchery signs.

     

   Afterwards we headed to another sculpture garden. This sculpture garden was out in the middle of the countryside, and it was a really beautiful sunny day. This sculptress worked almost solely with terra cotta, and had her entire garden full of her art. It was nice to see all these beautiful sculptures, hiding in almost every available space in the garden.

   After spending a while in the garden, we got to meet the sculptress and see her process. Then we went outside to see some the animals she kept here in the countryside.

   We had heard of an abandoned mansion nearby this area, so we drove to see it. Luckily enough it was open, and we went inside to see the state of it’s disrepair.

   The next day we were on our way, headed on to see a different city and more of Northern Germany. I’ll cover that in the next post, but I hope you liked this one. See you next time!