THE HALLS AND HUNTS VISIT EUROPE

Our Southern California friends Pat and Dave Hall came to Frankfurt last Monday as part of their Europe family history search tour.  We bonded with  Pat and Dave on our Israel trip a couple years ago.  Here we are at the Frankfurt temple where they stayed at patron housing. We shared a  tasty dinner and enjoyable evening together during their quick visit.

 Joan and Hollis Hunt arrived Wednesday evening from Prague.  We arose early Thursday for a quick trip through Western Germany and over to The Netherlands. We traveled down the Mosel River Valley to see well restored castles in Cochem and Eltz (Burg Eltz).  This is the Cochem castle.

 View from the castle parapets down onto the Mosel Valley below.  While I always say its good to be king, the Cochem castle took 10 years to restore in the 1800's but while the owner was overseeing the work his wife back home being unfaithful.  He died 2 years after the restoration was completed.  I'll pass on being king.

 These Delf tiles (300-400 Euro a piece) illustrate stories from the New Testament and were used to teach the Bible stories.

 

 Took a 45 minute each way hike through the forest to reach Burg Eltz and afterward enjoyed a picnic lunch roadside.  Found out afterward there was a parking lot much much closer :)

 We stayed our first night in a sports arena basement hotel -a lovely facility in Luxembourg, Luxembourg. (That's what you get when ordering from a small picture off the internet.)  Here is the old town in the foreground with modern Luxembourg behind.  The clean modern city impressed us as being progressive.

 Hollis' dad served under General Patton who is buried here just outside Luxembourg in the American Cemetery.  An emotional visit to see those who sacrificed their lives in World War II.

 The Frederik Steenblik store in Velp, Netherlands has been converted into a home which is being refurbished.

With our second cousin once removed, Jan Steenblik, age 73, who showed us the original homestead just outside Geersteren.  The barn is attached to the house with green fields full of contented cows across the herringbone brick road out front.

 Jan introduced us to pflannkuchen - a huge pancake covered with yummy vegetables.  He spent the entire day with us showing us the land of our forefathers.
A widower, he keeps an immaculate house and raises singing canaries who have won awards.

Near Holten where Grandma Janna
Templeman Steenblik was born is a town that makes wooden shoes. We found one here that would fit Gordon Springer.

Jan treated us to delicious creamy Dutch ice cream.  We were so grateful to learn he could speak German.  His mother died when he was 3 days old and his father's second wife was German, so he chatted away with us going between Dutch, German and English at will and within each sentence.

Our Sunday dinner guests included friends of Joan and Hollis,  Jack and Joan Pferdner who work in the Frankfurt mission office and Marilyn and David Kidderman our new Church History missionaries.

Goodbye dear Hunts who fly home in the morning.  Thanks for coming and see you in a few months!!

WORKING HARD IN FRANKFURT

We had quarterly zone conference in Friedrichsdorf on Wednesday and captured the latest images of our faithful senior missionary force at the chapel.  Elaine was  the expert photographer and had us in and out in less than 5 minutes.

We were not there, but had our senior missionary spies that got to the Mission Presidents' seminar in Paris keep an eye out for the McConkies, seen here standing with a fellow mission president couple seated left and our friends the Smiths (Infield Rep) seated right.

 Last Saturday the Kagels got us tickets to the International Auto Show held in Frankfurt biannually.  We were there with every single male in the western hemisphere to get a look at the cool new cars and coming soon to a showroom near you, as well as a few wild prototypes.

 This turned out to be my favorite - a retro Triumph Bonneville for only about 9,000€.  I think I missed my chance to own one about 40 years ago.

 We got to the show when it opened at 9:00am but were exhausted by 2pm.  When we left we were absolutely the only ones headed away at such an early hour as the crowds just continued to grow.

 We said good bye to our friends the Livingstones from Provo this week.  These departures leave us feeling a little abandoned for a time, but we plan to get together again as they don't live far and are people you just want to hang around to see if some of them will rub off on you a little.

Elaine visited the area translation office this week where they are busily preparing for upcoming General Conference weekend.  So who gets to be President Monson's voice in Poland, Albania, Italy, Czech Republic... this time around?

INDEXING AND RAIN

To make more productive use of our time in the office we have started indexing.  We indexed over 200 Canadian border DOL immigration forms from the early 1900's in just a couple of days so have a set a goal of getting a 1,000 done by the end of the month.  We selected the easiest level of records but still find deciphering the hand writing much like detective and plain old guess work.  We are anxious to see what % success rate we achieved when our work is duplicated by someone else and then differences are reviewed and reported by an arbitrator.



P-day turned wet and rainy early.  We took a chance and beat the rain on bikes to the city and flea market, but were glad we had our umbrellas once we got there.  The vendors did their best to keep their goods dry so it was otherwise business as usual.  During the worst of the storm we took in the Staedel Museum along the river.  They actually have some of the paintings we studied in school, including some by Rembrandt, Cezanne, Renoir, Van Gogh, Manet.  We enjoyed it immensely but found it easy to get sensory overload after a couple of hours.

Martin needs to remember to smile for pictures, we actually were having a great time and found the trees above the outdoor market to be beautiful after the rain

 These trees seem to be the inspiration for camouflage.

 This is Frankfurt's old town touristy center.  We think they are setting up for campaign rally speeches.  Elections are next week and Germans are far more politically active than Americans.  They have multiple viable political parties including some with a single purpose in life - like the "Get out of the Euro" party that actually has a chance to be heard if Angela Merkle is forced to make a coalition with them to stay in power.  Obviously we know nothing about how politics work over here, but the Germans seem to have strong opinions and are ready to voice them.

Pretty sure this is a booth for  the environmental "Green" party.  We think Germans are naturally pretty green in spite of an apparent lack of interest in this booth at the moment.

The famous Zile shopping mall strip.  It seems its always packed and tells us Germany's economy is doing pretty well these days.

Not sure if these are Christian Democrats or the Christian Socialists.  But pretty sure no one remembers when or why the "Christian" party of their name came into being.

Really - there is a party for everybody. Can't find what you like, why not join the Pirates?

Elaine thought you'd like a picture of this grill at the flea market. The charcoal basin must be about 6 feet across and the aroma from the many varieties of wurst was almost irresistable.  Ever careful to live healthy, we had found a tomato and cheese on a bun and wished we had some salt.

BACK TO SCHOOL?

September brings new missionaries to Frankfurt.  Four new senior missionary couples and about 30 new young elder and sisters.  The Frankfurt mission had a record transfer on Thursday that required over 150 missionaries to be at the main train station at the same time.  Sorry we don't have a picture, it looked like something like a flash mob.

Things have been slow in the office.  We were kicked out for a few days while they redo the air conditioning in our ceiling.  We tried to work from another office one day and attended the temple and had a genealogy lesson on another.

Lately our bicycling goal has been  to find new places to ride bikes on the weekend.  We found a little forest southeast of Frankfurt about 8 kilometers from the apartment on Saturday.

Our dear friends Theresa and Steve Heath sent Elaine these handsome and beautiful kitchen aprons for Elaine's birthday.  Elaine's is hand made, reversible and a work of art.  Mine is very manly and just vat is vanted for grillink der bratswurst.  Danke danke dear good friends.

On a recent outing to Strasbourg with our friends the Eyres we stopped at a little French town with a German name - Souffenheim. Seems its known among clay pot connoisseurs for ceramic art.  We found dozens of little shops in the town and each one had a different art style and color theme to their work.  We got to watch them a small shop in action at Ludwigs Atelier We came away with a few souvenirs which by the way is a French word meaning "to remember".

Not a very flattering picture, but a good meal at the Nouvelle Poste restaurant on Rue du Parchment in Strasbourg.  Am I really sucking my thumb in public? No, I think there is a phone in there somewhere.

The most famous building in Strasbourg is the Cathedral with its 140 meter steeple and 300 year old astronomical clock. The clock still works and tells all kinds of things about what is happening in the solar system, but is was all in French and wasted on us.

These doors rival those of Notre Dame de Paris for grandeur. (trying hard to intersperse French words where I can).  By the way, we have decided that our spelling is now absolutely shot as a result of seeing so many German, French and English words similarly but not quite spelled the same as in American and especially when we read English signs and instructions which use English spelling rules instead of American. 

The highlight of our outing was a trip around the Le Petit France portion of Strasbourg on a tour boat.  We got to experience going through several locks that are required to keep the water deep enough for navigation.

French bread is an art form, coming in many shapes, sizes and flavors.  We splurged and treated ourselves to Pistachio ice cream cones, pain au chocolat and mille feuilles.  The mille feuille reminds me of the old missionary days when we would reward ourselves with one after a hard week of tracking.

Sunday we invited two new missionary couples over for dinner,  The Jacques on the left are mental health missionaries and the Footes are Young Single Adult coordinators.  Sister Foote is holding up our visual aid we used to teach how to sort garbage into 5 different cans.

We went to the temple this week and found the gardens at their pinnacle of beauty for the summer.  In their German way, the equal of the Salt Lake temple grounds, as you would expect.
The two flowers in front may look past their prime, but they have left seeds that far eclipse them.

BLACKBERRIES

Elaine's wild birthday party with German
 chocolate mousse cake

It is feeling like fall in Frankfurt.  We see people bringing apples home from their community gardens and we see the myriads of what we thought were wild raspberry bushes along the bike paths turn from red and bitter to black and sweet. Turns out they were really blackberries.We rode out to the farm fields last Tuesday night with the Swifts and picked a few.  We thought it would be like strawberry picking, but black berries have double the thorns of a rose and we paid a price for trying to reach up high to get the big ones others left behind. The Germans have an easy mix for jam in 3 minutes and so Elaine was able to make a quart or so of delicious homemade blackberry jam that we are now enjoying - more so because they were so painful to pick.

This week we sang in the choir for a funeral in our ward.  We went hometeaching and a dear inactive sister let us in so we felt like successful missionaries.  Had one mid-week day off because workers are installing new A/C and used that to explore the way to our Offenbach chapel by bicycle.  Friday was temple night and we got to do ordinances half in German and half in English depending on the ordinance worker's language capacity - pretty fun. Then Saturday we used our knowledge to ride our bikes the the Ward BBQ, which took about an hour but the route is along the Main River and very pleasant.

Homemade blackberry jam on a thin crisp rye cracker!

                                      The worker bees, hard at work in the Area Office