I am in Rothenburg right now (took a train from Hannover, definitely the best part of the trip so far...not the train, being in Hannover...anyway, train from Hannover to Steinach, transferred to another train to here this morning). Personally, I am not impressed. The town is very fake (think Disney World meets old German town, pinnochio-esque). I decided to rest a bit while my grandparents took a tour of the church here, catch up on some email, blogs, and other stuff. Last night, I patched up the English and Galego translations for gbrainy, wrote a small math puzzle for gbrainy, and emailed them to Jordi Mas. The puzzle took a good bit of last night and the train ride today (it gives you two numbers and a total, the user decides which operator makes the two numbers equal the total...not too difficult, but a good warmup) and the translations only took about 15-20 minutes. One problem with the puzzle is the inaccuracy when it comes to floating-point numbers. Division is the only one that has this problem, but the int -> float -> int conversions wreaked havoc on the total variable and if statements determining the correct answer, so floating-points were taken out for now (anything and everything with a decimal gets rounded to the closest whole). Who knew math was fun! Anyway, back to the trip...
Hannover and Bierbergen were absolutely amazing. They are probably the most peaceful towns I have ever been in. The inn-keeper in Hannover was so friendly and nice, he didn't know very much English (most of the places we have stayed were very limited in language), but between me and my grandpa, we figure things out pretty well. We took a train -> bus -> bus to Bierbergen to see where grandma's great great great grandpa came from. She left her folder with all the her family info on one of the buses, so we got there with nothing to go on. When we got off the second bus in Bierbergen, the town looked deserted, but a lady came around the corner pushing her baby stroller about a minute after the bus took off. Grandma stopped her and luckily she spoke some English (actually, better than what we were expecting). Grandma explained who we were and what we were doing when the lady said "Oh yes! Please, come with me!". She started pointing out houses saying "Lege there...und there...Lege...Lege..." and it turns out she is also a Lege (my grandma's surname). It is pronounced Leeguh in German, not Leggy, like we say it. The town is full of Leges and there are many in the cemetery (the town is tiny, you can walk the whole thing in a couple hours max and everyone seems to know each other). The lady (Jana) invited us to her house and showed us the phone book with half a page of Leges. Jana called the pastor of the local church (the church was built in 1770-ish) and he came over and talked with us, gave us his address so we can mail him the information and he can look the info up in the church records. Then, we were going to go back to Hannover, but we missed our bus, so we had to wait for the next one which took a different route than the previous one. Overall, we got to see parts of Germany most people (even the natives) don't get to see (most didn't even know what/where Bierbergen was).
No comments:
Post a Comment