Burg Means Castle in German

I'm unsure how to start talking about our two week vacation in Europe. Do I brag about our experience by using all the synonyms for 'amazing' and 'beautiful' as I list all the sites and countries we visited? Do I tell you all the things that went wrong? Do I describe everything all at once or break up into small pieces? And if I do break it up into small pieces, how many do I realistically have the energy to do? How many segments do my readers have interest in?

Who knows. I'll probably do a combination of all the above. Come to think of it, knowing me, there's a good chance that this is the only post you'll get.

Yesterday, as I contemplated how to organize our photos and thought about whether I wanted to blog about our trip, I discovered that the newest Picasa has a moviemaker feature. I spent some time (won't tell you how much) figuring it out and made the below movie. I chose to start with this Europe experience because: 1.) It was one of the first things we did on our trip 2.) It was a pretty incredible place to visit and 3.) One of the funniest things of the whole trip happened there.

Soo...Burg Eltz was a castle we visited in Germany the day we drove from Frankfurt to Paris. That day was certainly the introduction to many things, namely the craziness of driving in Europe (i.e. it is impossible to get anywhere without getting lost) and how unbelievably cool/beautiful/interesting the sites are.

Here is the movie (the resolution gets kind of crummy if you enlarge it):



Here is the funny thing:

To see the interior of Burg Eltz, you go on a tour with a bunch of other people. Luckily it was an English speaking tour. Anyways, in the kitchen, our guide pointed out the oven, the stove, and some of the cooking equipment. Keep in mind that this was a medieval castle--as in 700 years ago. After the tour guided pointed out everything he felt was significant about the kitchen, he let people ask questions. As people are looking around, soaking everything in, this older lady points to these pans and says,

(actually, this particular pic was taken at another castle, but same general idea).

"What were those used for? Jello?"

Hahahaha!! Jello!? So classic. Brandon and I look at each other and quickly have to look away for fear of completely loosing it. The tour group was awkwardly silent; I don't even know if our German tour guide knows what Jello is but he eventually said, "Those were used for bread."

"Oh, I see" says the woman.

Then we saw the woman's daughter, who was probably 5-10 years older than us, turn away to meet eyes with her husband (who was standing by us) to share a secret laugh.

Writing this out makes me feel mean, but honestly, Brandon and I laughed about it the whole trip. It was sooooo funny picturing the castle servants preparing Jello as they shivered by the fire while the prince jousted in the court yard and the princesses painted porcelain.

Well, maybe I'm mean and maybe that video was a little too amateur, but that was Burg Eltz. Definitely a place worth visiting!