Atherton Family Notes

Hello guys!  I just wanted to send a picture of my Christmas gift/birthday gift/Mother’s Day gift and any other gift for the next year as per Ken.  I just picked it up today and am beyond thrilled with it!  The colors are amazing and I am totally melted by the fact that the artist painted 3 little girls in there just for me. We found a local artist in our tiny little town here and asked that he make a painting for us.  His work is amazing!  I had to take the picture at an angle to keep the glare from the oils down.  The girls are painted a bit older than they are but one does have curly hair! I am also sending along Sadie’s birthday picture. Hope you enjoy!

We are packing up here in Germany and will fly back to the states (again) on the 31st of January.  The computer will be packed up so we will be off line from the 26th on.  Things for France are looking very good and Ken has met with his future boss.  The company is making plans for our move and it will be a year to a year and half assignment this time.  A big note here: no paper work has been signed as of yet so things could still fall through.  We will let you know when things are more definite.

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As I’m sure everyone knows by now, we are leaving Germany at the end of this month. So we decided to spend the last few days discussing the “Best Of” we’ve encountered while living here.

Today, we are going to start with the topic of “Favorite Big City.” For our purposes, we are including anything that wasn’t clearly a village, because that’s going to be a separate topic. There are many cities that we’ve visited to choose from:

Paris, Strasbourg, Colmar, and Dijon in France.
Bruggs in Belgium.
Luxembourg in Luxembourg.
Amsterdam, The Hague, and Gouda in Holland.
Stuttgart, Ludwigsberg, Frankfurt, Munich, Füssen and Nuremburg in Germany.
Salzburg in Austria.
Zürich, Schaffhausen, Basel and Bern in Switzerland.
Florence, Rome, Venice and Naples in Italy.

We’ve spent at least a day in all of these cities, some we spent more than one day and others we have visited more than once.

Of course, just to be difficult, I’m going to pick a city that’s not on the list: Berlin.

I didn’t include Berlin because I visited it by myself after Sandi and the kids went home last July. But I had to make it my first choice because of the immediate sense of history I encountered there.

Many of the cities we visited have a lot of history, but Berlin has been the focus of a a lot of world events in the last 100 years: The rise and fall of the Third Reich, The rise and fall of the Iron Curtain and all of the trauma associated with each, such as the political turmoil, the bombings, the Cold War games between east and west, the Wall and the Reunification.

Berlin still bears the scars of these events, and they are easy to find if you want to see them. But at the same time, Berlin is probably the most lively, modern metropolis I have seen in Europe. It helps, of course, that World War II created a major “urban renewal” and that the communists held a lot of the prime real estate in escrow until the late 1980s.

Because of this, Berlin was my favorite city that I visited, and the one I would most like to return to. I barely scratched the surface.

As a runner up, I would like to give honorable mention to Rome for many of the same reasons as Berlin, although the era of its prominence is much further in the past. It is amazing to see Roman ruins surrounded by apartment buildings filled with people oblivious to the sight because of familiarity. And the Vatican, while not technically part of Rome, is a sight everyone should see regardless of religion.

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Ken says that I have to take time out of my busy day to write about our favorite things. So here it goes…

Ken and I have joked, but with some truth to the fact, that I do not like big cities. It seemed I complained about many of them or did not care to go in the first place, such as with Berlin. To me I wanted the quaint cobblestone roads and beautiful old houses. That was the reason I came to Europe. The big cities seemed to offer so much more modern aspects and a little loss of that charm I like so much. However, looking at the list Ken has put together, I realize I like more than I disliked. It is hard to choose just one. So many of them had great things to see and experience (that are why we chose to go in the first place).

Since I have to choose just one, I am going to do it this way. I am going to pick one that I would love to go back to. My first thought was to say Bruggs, Belgium but, I realized that as much as I loved the city I believe there was more to it. We added Belgium onto the end of our spring vacation which only allowed us to stay for a couple of days. The city was filled with fantastic things to see and too many corners to turn for new discoveries. I feel that I did not have near the amount of time I wanted in order to see it all. And what I want more than anything is to be able to tour the entire country (hey, it’s small and can be done). So if Ken post a topic of “COUNTRY we would most like to go back to” then Belgium wins hands down for me. But since that is not the topic right now….

Bruggs seemed to have alot of the same charm that I loved so much from the city that I am going to choose. Venice, Italy. Although I can’t say I was thrilled with most of Italy, Venice stole my heart. In all honesty, it was the one city I feared the most on out first big vacation. It scared me to park our car, take a boat to an island with only boats or walking as means of transportation, and do it with 2 kids in tow. All fear vanished the minute we checked into our hotel. The streets were unbelievably narrow and one could spend days wandering them to catch sight of the little touches of life. Because of the absence of cars the city had almost an amusement park feel to it. Then you look around and realize that people LIVE there. That those lucky people get to wander those streets and learn every nook and corner. Every dead-end and bridge crossing. The entire stay felt laid back and relaxing (hard to do with kids). We sat and fed pigeons in the large square, we walked until our feet hurt, explored churches and shops. The locals stopped us as much as possible to tell us how beautiful our children were especially with Celia’s blonde tight curls. We even had other tourists taking pictures of our kids.

I wish I could have seen more of the city and really explored everything but, with 3 days and kids, well… just not possible. I have though, made Ken promise to take me back again. Just the two of us!

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Today’s topic is the other side of the coin from Yesterday’s: what was our favorite small town. As Sandi explained, she was much more interested in the small towns because in a lot of ways they seem to embody much more of the European character that Americans think of.

Let’s list a few that we’ve seen:

In France – Riquewihr, Ribeauville, Eguisheim, Betschdorf and a host of small towns in Champagne that look like they grew out of the rocky white soil where they lay.

In Germany – Villingen, Rottweil, Rothenberg ob der Tauber, St. Peter Im Schwarzwald, Freudenstadt, Triberg, Meersberg, Ueberlingen, and too many others to list.

In Austria – Halstatt, St. Wolfgang, and St. Gilgen.

In Switzerland – Stein Am Rhein.

There were many, many other small towns we passed through at one time or another. If you are not in a hurry and can get off the Autobahn, there are interesting places to see around almost every turn. We’ve made several accidental trips this way.

My choice for favorite village is pretty easy: Halstatt. It’s an amazing town, cut off from the rest of the world for most of its existence except for a pipeline of saline water running down from the salt mine in the mountain. Halstatt (which literally means Salt City in an old Austrian dialect) sits precariously between a lake and a mountain and even though tourists have discovered it, the town still feels undisturbed. From the slow traffic on the lake to the ossuary at the Catholic church (where the bones of former residents lie because burial plots had to be reused), Halstatt is a beautiful, relaxing place, full of its own little history, shielded from the rest of the world.

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I am gonna agree with Ken that Halstatt is a very interesting and beautiful town, but I think my favorite will have to be Meersberg, Germany. It is a place we took everyone who came to visit and recommended to anyone who would listen. One of the first sights you see as you come into the small town is an ivy colored guest house. Having been there in every season, we watched the colors of the ivy change from a bright green to a gorgeous array of fall colors and all over again.

The town sits on the Bodensee, which is a fairly large lake between Germany and Switzerland. As if that was not enough beauty, they added grape fields growing up the hillsides. There is one rather large hill in this town and it can take your breath away walking it. However, if you calculate your visit right, you will only go down and up the hill once. Just enough for you to work off the dinner you ate while sitting in the outdoor cafe, on the boardwalk, overlooking the lake.

A small town in Germany would not be complete without it’s own castle from medieval times and Meersberg does not disappoint you on that. Although there is nothing fantastic within this castle, it does have an amazing view over the land.

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As most of you know already, we are leaving Germany. Today, even. So I wanted to update you on what’s going to to happen to this group.

As far as the Survivor Germany group itself is concerned, I think we are planning to continue it. Unfortunately, we can’t rename this group, so it has to stay “Survivor Germany”. We could start over with a new board, but everyone would have to sign up again, and that just seems like more trouble than it’s worth.

So I have created a new message board called “Survivor France.” This will be the place where we do most of our posting from now on as we prepare to begin expat life in Rennes.

[Editor's note: This post makes more sense if you realize it was transferred from MSN Groups, which allows you to create but not rename message boards.]

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