Hallo!
Last week was the first week of the Easter holidays (spring break) here, and I got to spent it on a rotary “Youth week” trip in Bavaria (southern Germany), which was hosted/organized by the Rotary Club of Ansbach. We were thirty exchange students from various districts in Germany, and together we had an incredible week.
Sadly, the cost of the trip didn’t include getting to Ansbach, so some of us who were going from this district got group tickets together (13 Euros each but many connections) and enjoyed a 15-hour train ride southwards through Germany. It was only supposed to be 11 hours, but there were problems around Hannover so we ended up missing two trains and then another later on in Erfurt. To be honest, it really wasn’t that bad, and we had two hours in the beautiful city of Erfurt (which I had never heard of before) to explore while we waited for our next connection. It also seemed that once we were south of Hannover, every other hill had some sort of castle or fort on it, which was a constant reminder that “we weren’t in Bremen anymore”.
The first two days we got to explore the beautiful cities of Wurzburg and Nuremberg, which were both heavily bombed during the war but rebuilt to be exactly as before. In Wurzburg we also visited the Marienburg Fortress as well as the Wurzburg Residence (palace). After visiting Nuremberg, we got a tour of the Doku-Zentrum – the giant area Hitler started to construct for his new government and army. It was never fully finished, but you could see the plans and what kind of scale Hitler was aiming for.
We also got an amazing tour through one of the Audi factories (no pictures allowed), which was making custom-ordered cars and therefore used real people to assemble them. For the final assembly line, they had about twenty stations of a few people each, and after exactly thirty minutes their task had to be finished and the car (each on it’s own moving platform) would move to the next station. The whole place and procession was pretty seamless, and our tour guide mentioned that one mistake could mean losing your job (in some cases it meant the entire car and parts had to be remade).
On Wednesday, we were the special guests at the Ansbach Rotary Club’s dinner night, which was held at a restaurant in a castle (Burg Colmberg) close to Ansbach. Apparently it’s a pretty common thing for their dinners to be held in castles. And not always the same one.
On our last day we visited a “Freilandmuseum” in Bad Windsheim, which collected old farming houses from all over Germany to re-create a few “farmer’s villages” from the medieval ages to the 19th century. After that we visited Rotenburg, an old walled city that seemed to be out of a fairytale. There we got a tour through the Criminal Museum, which was filled with various torture instruments and medieval paintings of how they were used. This put a bit of a damper on the mood, seeing how much thought and effort (and creativeness?) people put into torture back then (I mean, they had enough to fill an entire four-floored museum with exhibits…) We finished up the week by making presentations on our countries (in German to the rotarians) and discussing topics from today’s crazy world. “Trump” was sort of a forbidden word that night, for safety reasons.
Overall it was an amazing week, visiting incredible places and being with amazing people from all over the world. The train ride back went smoothly, although we were all pretty sad this time not knowing when we’d be able to see our new friends again. The next day I celebrated Easter with my host family, which included an egg hunt and many homemade cakes, as well as their traditional Easter “Wreath” pastry.
I hope everyone had a great Easter!
Bis spaeter!
Hannah
Varel - Deutschland 
Sounds like a fabulous week away. Southern Germany is almost a separate culture from Osterfriesland. Great pics. See you in a few weeks!
Wonderful letter, Hannah! Not quite enough food description, but mentioning castles is quite acceptable. 😉
Time is flying by, no? You will keep these experiences with you always — I’m happy for you. Hugs to you!!
Xox Auntie Mo