Last week I participated in my first church retreat since moving to Vienna. The retreat is for the women in the churches in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria and it takes place in an Austrian village each fall. Oh, and did I mention that it's in German? To be perfectly honest, I was part of an English-speaking discussion and prayer group and there were at least half a dozen ladies from the U.S. there, so there was plenty of English. But the daily times of worship and the lectures were all in German. And there were actually women there who didn't speak English. And I actually spoke to (some of) them in German. And I spoke in German to people that I knew spoke English. It was a crazy week. I even explained how to play Nerts (the card game) in German. When I explained that everyone should play their Ace in the middle, the other native English-speaker at the table chuckled because, well, the German word for Ace is an English word for something completely different.
If you visit my other blog, you've already seen photos of the beautiful location. But in case you missed it, here's a shot that didn't make it on the other site. The village is in a valley and the hotel where the retreat was held was a little ways up a mountain. This photo was taken early on a foggy morning.
But there was more to the week than just an amazing view. The lessons and worship were encouraging and I really enjoyed meeting new people. Plus, I probably spoke more German during those five days than I normally speak in several months. Ok, that may be stretching it a bit, but it was a lot of German. Kim and I even participated in one of the worship times by reading a Psalm. I was pretty proud of both of us.
And I guess I'll finish this off with some more photos that didn't make it onto Almost Daily Vienna. It would be a shame for them to waste away in Flickr without having ever seen the light of day on the blog.
This one seems very Pioneer Woman-ish. Except she doesn't have mountains behind the horses in her photos. And she would have taken the time to edit the photo to make it look prettier. Ok, so maybe it's not Pioneer Woman-ish at all.
The church has an interesting cemetery. Most of the headstones are orante ironwork rather than the traditional marble or stone. Plus, the area in front is really small -- as if the people buried there were exceptionally short. (Just to clarify, these were grown people -- many I looked at were priests. The cemetery was gravel, but each grave had a small area in front of it with room to plant something.)
For some reason, this one makes me think of Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey.
5 comments:
let me guess: that is a draft horse, right?
Hi, I found your blog post through a search for “Nerts”. It is cool to see others that know about the game. I hope you don’t mind but I wanted to let you know about playnertz.com, the site for the National Nertz Association. There is a bunch of interesting Nertz information there and you can also find out how to play Nertz online there. I hope you will check it out. Feel free to join and also let your friends and family know. Thanks
Hi Alisha:
It looks like the people may be buried vertically in that cemetary. Dad said that is the way people are buried here in the National Cemetary. You can get a lot more graves in that way.
Little light - I really have no idea what kind of horse. I just thought it was pretty. When I walked towards the fence to take the photo he came right up to me like he was posing for a photo -- I think he was expecting food.
Mom - Someone else suggested that the bodies were vertical. I bet you're right.
Those pictures are gorgeous! I'm glad you had a good time and way to go on your German! :-)
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