Hasede, Germany

 

Hasede, Germany

We used up the two "joker" days allowed per school year to take the kids out of school on Thursday and Friday and fly to Hannover, Germany to visit family friends.  The Loefflers live in Hasede, a small village about 30 minutes away from Hannover.  Wencke lived with my parents and Aaron and Kate for one year during high school.  Ingo lived with them for a few months one summer while he did medical training in Springfield, and Siren visited them in Springfield the year she lived in Wichita, KS.  Kate has lived/visited with them in Germany several times, and when they heard we were in Zürich, they invited us up for a tour of North Germany.  Jochen is full of information about the area, having lived there most of his life.  His brother farms the family land just across the river from their house, and Jochen and Ingo have a family medicine practice in the village of Giesen.  We learned about the history of the area (Niedersaxon) and its relation to the rest of Europe, the different regions of spoken German, Platt Deutsch (the old dialect spoken in north Germany that has more similarities to English), and lots of stories about the neighbors, farmers, and people living nearby.  It was fun for the kids to hear the family and their papa speaking German and try out speaking a little bit themselves.  We took a walk through the sugar beet fields to Giesen to see their office and the family farm/barn/houses.  Then we went on a coach ride behind 3 horses with the neighbor farmer, Franz Ernst.  Franz took us up to the nearby forest where there is a former military training ground, now a natural area.  He also filled us in on his family history and stories about the area (all in German so sometimes papa had to translate for us).  The ride was so smooth and relaxing that Elisabet fell asleep.  We had gotten up at 4:45 in the morning the previous day for the flight, so she was still catching up on sleep.  Monika and Siren spent the weekend feeding us elaborate breakfasts with all sorts of local meat, sausage, cheeses, fresh rolls, and more.  We had homemade cheesecake, apfel kuchen, and zwetschgen kuchen (plum tart).  For dinner one night we had local venison, squash soup, red cabbage and dumplings.  We also ate out at a restaurant owned by their friends and sampled more of the typical German dishes- containing lots of potatoes and meats, or fish from the North Sea.  They got a laugh out of the kids devouring their wiener schnitzel - I don't think they realized they knew what it was and had loved in it Austria.  On Saturday we visited the Hannover zoo with Ingo, his girlfriend Katrin and their neighbor's little girl Antonia.  My parents, meanwhile, had a more detailed tour of the city of Hildesheim, a 1000 year old church, and the farmer's market.



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