Niesky

Saturday, June 30, 2012
Swimming! Wir gehen schwimmen!

At last! The long-awaited swimming. Bärbel & Dieter picked us up in Görlitz and kindly brought us to their home in Niesky (about 30 minutes north). Besides feeding us delicious food (there was some debate between me, Zach, & Molly about which meal was best, but it was agreed that all were delicious), they let the kids swim in the pool to their hearts content. Which ended up being many hours. My cousin Mattias and his family also came to visit and the kids spent the afternoon working things out with their limited shared language. We also met my cousin Thomas' finace, Claudia, and the kids enjoyed goofing around with them, too.

More Görlitz(!)

As I said, Görlitz was a visual feast for me. And so there are a lot of pictures. Of special note below is the whisper arch (aka Flüsterbogon) at 22 Untermarkt (where we stayed), the views of Poland across the river (one photo shows the painstaking reconstruction of buildings bombed in WWII and the other shows the gray that is more typical of the Polish side of town), and the lovely yellow roses my aunt gave us when we arrived.

Görlitz Colors

Görlitz is a visual feast. Since the 1990's, money has flowed into the city to restore and preserve the Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Historicist, Art Nouveau architecture that survived WWII. And the tourists flow in to look at the beautiful architecture. Molly and I had fun taking pictures of the different colors, doors, and textures on the walk home. She tried to evoke a different feeling for each wall using her body language.

She also exclaimed "That's a kinder-door!" (mixing German & English) when she saw one of the little doors.