Europe Trip, Part I: Castles, Stain Glass, and Macaques

As many of you know, Heather, the girls, and I recently took a long trip to visit our good friends Jeremy and Rochelle in Switzerland.  The government paid for our plane tickets (as they do for all the diplomats here in Taiwan), and we covered the rest.  We spend almost three weeks touring all over Switzerland as well as parts of southern Germany, a quick stop in France, and a few days in Prague.  The trip was amazing.

No way we'll be able to cover everything in one blog, so we're going to break it up into several posts, starting with this one.

LENZBERG
After traveling for almost 24 hours with two very tired and sleep-deprived kids, we decided to take the first day in Switzerland easy.  So we went to a to a nearby castle called Lenzberg.

 Lenzberg was a great castle with many floors and rooms that we could look through.  Each room was filled with items from different periods of the castle's existence.  There were also videos in many of the rooms showing how people would use the room.   Legend has it that the whole castle was built on top of a rock outcrop on top of a hill that was originally a dragon's lair.  They even had a recorded shadow puppet show showing the legend.  The girls loved it.  One unique thing about the castle was that many rooms had little holographic movie experiences.  For example, on the table below, food and hands would appear and recorded voices would reenact a little story of people having dinner during that time in history.

The top floor of the castle was an enormous play area where kids could do castle-related crafts, dress up in princess clothes and jewelry, play with toy castles, etc. They even had dress-up clothes for adults which Heather and I may or may not have taken advantage of!  The girls could have spent hours playing in there - they are our little princesses after all.

ZURICH
After the castle, we drove into Zurich, which seemed to be a surprisingly small city for one of Switzerland's major cities.  It is a beautiful city: clean, organized, lots of small alleys, a river dividing the city by two.   We loved that even in their biggest city, there were no high rises ruining the horizon.

Sienna and Rochelle's daughter Liza had a good time playing together during a half-day tour.

The main attractions in Zurich are two churches: Fraumunster and Grossmunster.  Fraumunster's claim to fame is its stain glass windows designed by Marc Chagall.  There are five windows altogether lining the walls of the abbey.  The windows are all vibrantly colored and very beautiful.  Pictures are not allowed inside, so here's the best picture I could find of the windows online.

Grossmunster also had some very unique stain glassed windows.  Here are some pics below.

EGUISHEIM 

The next day, we traveled to a small town in northeast France in Alsace called Eguisheim, which is a quaint little medieval town chalked full of old, well preserved buildings.   We were surprised at how much we loved this little town.  We walked around and poked our heads into various buildings, shops, and stores.  Heather was so happy to have a great lunch of warmed goat cheese, bruschetta, and a crisp salad; she was in heaven!

MONKEY MOUNTAIN

Near Eguisheim is an area that Rochelle and Jeremy call Monkey Monkey.  It's located on the top of a hill.  It's a large park full of macaque monkeys all in this fenced in area.  They give you popcorn at the park entrance to feed the monkeys with.  The girls weren't timid at all in getting right up close and personal with the monkeys.  Even Sienna was got right up close to them, enough to make us a bit nervous!