We wish we knew German

Today we said good-bye to Fulda, and drove to a town we had passed yesterday-Steinau. Luckily the places we wanted to go were both open because it was a German holiday. We had reservations to see The Bremen Town Musicians at the Marionette Theatre, so we pulled into the itty bitty town in the early afternoon and were very much charmed by what we saw. Small little streets, lined in timbered houses, punctuated with little cafes. Our first stop was the marionette theatre to pick up our tickets. The theatre was tiny, filled with lots of children and their parents. The performance began, and it has been awhile since I had heard the story, but I am not remembering any of what I am seeing, and it doesn't help that it is in German. Eva has never heard this Brothers Grimm story, so I am trying my best to translate some of the scenes, but know I am forgetting parts of the story. After the show is over, we purchase some postcards and finger puppets for our classrooms, and headed back to the streets to find the Brothers Grimm House.

It is a short block away, and we are super happy when we find it because it has 14 rooms FILLED with Brothers Grimm and fairy tale pictures, books, videos, artifacts, etc. Everything is labeled in German, so we are not 100 percent sure what everything is, but we do our best to figure it out. There was a lot of history about their family, many portraits that were sketched of their family, the kitchen was recreated with different tools, and several of the first and other editions of The Brothers Grimm fairy tales were on display in a case. There was a room for children to put on crowns that had headphones built into them, and they could listen to different fairy tales. There was a video montage of different versions of fairy tales, many of them Disney versions. They even had a display with Burger King toys that were fairy tale characters. We spent over an hour walking in and out of the rooms of the old house, where once the Brothers Grimm had lived, imagining them walking through the house themselves. When we were finished, we took some pictures outside (none were allowed inside unfortunately). They had a little garden with a couple fairy tale sculptures--the Princess and the Frog and the Seven Dwarfs. We really enjoyed learning about the Brothers Grimm, but wished we could have understood what was written so we could have learned even more. We walked back towards our car, but were stopped in our tracks by a cute ice cream parlor, where many people were lazily enjoying enormous sundaes and ice cream cones. When in Germany.... :)