Oma and Grandma

Hi everyone

It's 7am here and Lyn and I have both been up for an hour or two - seems the jet lag hasn't quite finished with us yet! We have been pretty early to bed!

We had a lovely day yesterday - a slow start over good german breakfast of bread, sausage and cheese, and then we headed off to Landshut to Gisela's for lunch. We all fitted pretty neatly into their wee car, with carseat, pram and all!

Gisela hasn't changed at all, she was very welcoming and it was lovely to see her. She had cooked us a beautiful meal of goulash, dumplings and red cabbage. We all squeezed into her wee kitchen, and had a lovely time together, Glen and Claudia working hard on the translation and all of us doing a bit of handwaving. Gisela and Timothy are clearly devoted to each other, a mutual admiration society of two! She is working very hard at teaching him to say 'Oma' for his first word - not with much success at this stage!

After lunch we went for a walk through Lanshut, which is a lovely wee town (well not that wee actually, I think Glen said about 50,000). The old buildings in the town centre are gorgeous, all pastel colours and vwey decorative architecture. The catholic cathedral has the tallest brick spire in the world, and inside was decorated with frescoes from the 1500s, and had a huge crucifix hanging in the middle dating from the 1400s I think, as well as lots of other really ancient but beautul bits.

We had coffee in a cute wee coffee shop with the most magnificent kuchen (cakes). They are all home made by people in their own homes, for the cafe. I had chocolate - so rich and really delicious. Lyn had boysenberry cheesecake, and Gisela had something a bit like a flash louise cake with meringe on top and fruit in the middle. Glen and Claudia both had different varieties of cheesecake too, and Timothy seemed to enjoy getting his version of it a few hours later!

After this Gisela took Timothy home in the pram, and the rest of us walked down through the town to the local beer fest, which is on this week. Apparently all the Bavarian towns have their own beer fests at different times, and some more than once (Landshut has 3 a year!), something like the way all the Canterbury towns have their own A&P shows I guess. It wasn't a bit what I expected - there were rides and sideshows and stalls like a fair, and an area like a market selling dirndl skirts and cheap plastic kitchen things, even a whole stall devoted to different varieties of finger and toenail clippers. Then further in there were lots of food stalls with things like half metre long sausages in bread, and whole smoked fish on sticks. It seemed that you bought your smoked fish and a huge twist of bread shaped like a pretzel, and then went inside the enormous beer tent and ate it with your fingers with your beer. This enormous tent was jampacked with people, and waitresses were rushing around with 4 or 5 glass litre tankards in their hand. There was a band playing bavarian music ith their lederhosen, and it was just fantastic! Unfortunately we were far too full of goulash and cake to sit and have fish and beer, but I would have loved to...

Today Glen, Lyn and I are going into Munich on the train to do the biking tour. Claudia and Timothy have opted out of this one - probably wise as the forecast is for 3 degrees, and anyway Timothy's feet might not reach the pedals!

Timothy has just been the perfect child so far, so easy to take out as he doesn't ever seem to make a fuss.

It's a shame I can't seem to get the photos to download, but we're taking plenty - you'll just have to see them all when we get home.