Urlaub 3 - Church weekend away, Jena, Eisenach and Wittenberg

Very briefly, some of the weekend trips we've made:

1) Church Weekend Away

This was in June, but it was still quite cold at that stage. The topic of the weekend was "In Christ", and we learnt from Philippians 3 and 4. It was good to be reminded that in Christ, we shouldn't put our confidence in the "flesh", ie in what good things we can do. Rather we should put our confidence in Jesus - who gives us his own goodness (righteousness) through his death and resurrection.

The weekend had an Australian flavour, because there were 9 aussies there - in previous years there have been none. As a result, we were teaching the children how to play touch footy (we called it touch rugby to avoid confusion) and handball.

And on of the evenings we had an aussie bush dance. We had a bit of an injury toll, though. Nathan sprained his ankle playing touch, and one of the Germans sprained her ankle during the bush dance. Just reinforced for the Germans that Australia is a really dangerous place!

2) Jena and Eisenach

In July we made another trip to Thuringer - the same state as Weimar and Erfurt (Urlaub 1).

Jena is quite famous for optical instruments, and we went to the optical museum there. Here's a photo of some old glasses.

We also happened to be there while they had some lifesized dinosaur replicas in one of the shopping centres. Owen wasn't scared at all...

Eisenach has a famous castle - Wartburg. Luther stayed in this castle when he was excommunicated from the Catholic Church, and it was there that he made his first translation of the Bible into German. It sounds ordinary now, but at the time it was quite revolutionary, because many believed that only the priests should read the Bible and that others could only learn from it through the priests. We saw some museums with some really old bibles, which was pretty cool.

Bach was also at Eisenach, and we went to a Bach museum that had lots of old instruments of his time. Here is a photo of someone filling the bellows of a really old pipe organ.

3) Wittenberg

We made a day trip to Wittenberg when Jon visited us. It's only 1 hour away by train or car, and is famous for being the place where Luther posted his "95 thesis" against indulgences which sparked the reformation. The original church door is gone - the church was destroyed by something (fire or war, can't remember now), and was replaced with this one. It's got the 95 thesis engraved in it.