A Day With Family in Gauting

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Our next stop was to visit our exchange student, Tobias, from so long ago, and his family.

Dieter told us that he would take us, this was a 3 hour or so, drive. But he did have someone to pick up in Munich and take back to Amberg, so it would be a round trip ferry for him. Dieter helps his neighbors out whenever possible. The neighbors come from Iraq and Afghanistan as refugees. He has taught some of them English and helps with their paperwork. He does this without charge and they are must appreciative and so picking up his neighbor was just part of how he helps.

On the way, Dieter wanted to show us the nativity scene at a cathedral in the town of Nabburg. He and Inge found this nativity scene some time ago. As with the scenes in other cathedrals, the scene changes weekly to reflect the continuing story.

We stopped and walked up to the cathedral when it started snowing. The cathedral was beginning to look like Christmas with decorations hanging from the ceiling. Dieter said that by Christmas the entire church has decorations hanging from the ceiling.

I shot photos and then we left the cathedral to go on to Tobias’. It was snowing hard and the flakes were huge. Some seemed the size of a quarter, they were so big.

We made it to Tobias’ house and he was already there, cooking. The day before, Tobias asked if I would like Bavarian food or if I was sick of it already. I had to tell him my tale of woe, no Bavarian food to date. He promised a meal of gluten free Bavarian food.

The 2 younger daughters were at home, we haven’t seen them for 6 years and the youngest was only maybe 2 years old, so they had grown up quite a bit. We said goodbye to Dieter and hello to Tobias and the 2 daughters.

The 2 girls speak some English so we had some conversations. The youngest girl brought a game of tic-tac-toe using buttons and a fabric board. We played over and over, first I played the youngest then the middle girl, then Dale played. We laughed with the girls when one or the other would lose. Then the girls brought out a card game in which whoever identified the matching symbols would get the cards.

We played these games on the kitchen bar while Tobias cooked so we were distracted many times and the girls would win. But it was great fun!

Tobias’ wife, Biggie and oldest daughter arrived later and we all had dinner together; Roasted pork with crispy fat that I could have eaten every day, knodels, gravy, wine and beer. The knodel is a shredded potato ball that is then boiled. As per Dieter many years ago; “a Sunday without knodels is not a Sunday”. We ate until we were stuffed!

We sat and talked with Tobias and Biggie until midnight when we finally all had to go to bed. They had to get up at 6:30am to get kids off to school and we had to get to the train station.

It was just so wonderful to see the family again, but they are hoping to make it our way this next summer so let’s hope we are home!

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