The next day we woke up bright and early to have breakfast with Florian's mother. She works as a mid-wife at a nearby hospital so this was the only time I got to see her. We had a typical European breakfast (coffee, bread and jam...) and I had a chance to speak with his mother about her travels (and see some pictures), my travels, and life in general. I also had a chance to meet her boyfriend who works as a train conductor, she and Hans (I think is his name) love to ride motorcycles and once brought their bikes to Itlay and travelled around a bit!
After breakfast and meeting Florian's mother and boyfriend I had a chance to meet Florian's dad, his wife and Florian's two siblings hannah (six) and Franz (again I thiiinnnk this was his name, he was five). They also had a lovely home that was up on a mountian a bit and overlooked all of schmalkalden. The kids were so adorable and they were very excited to see florian. Hannah showed me her princess decorated room and she made sure to give Florian some handmade art before we departed.
After meeting the family we decided it was time to explore the town! Florian told me that in English Schmalkalden would probably mean cold and narrow and though it wasn't very cold there were some wonderfully narrow streets. I believe he also told me that it was founded around 800, but I could be wrong about that. The first place we saw was the church (I belive the only church...) which Florian was baptised in and his siblings are soon to be baptaised in! It was a lovely church and at one time Martin Luther used it as a hiding spot while he was translating the bible so that anyone could read it, even simple folk (this was the reason for his hiding becasue at the time it was illegal and only priests were allow
ed to read it).
We next walked around a bit and stopped at a gallery which is in a Gothic timbered house dating from the 15th Century. As Florian explained to me the timbered houses of Germany consist of a timber(wood) framing that is then stuffed with weaved together sticks and then a sort of clay which hardens and then they paint over it (it didn't sound like the most lasting structure to me but they have been holing up since medieval etimes!) The woman who owned the gallery was a friend of Florian's and gave us a full tour of the place (explaining to us about the art and the building) and even showing us some of her husbands artworks. There was a lot of great artwork there and I especially liked the art of her husband Harald Reiner Gratz because he uses a similar medium to mine and I found his artwork inspiring. By the end of our tour she asked me if I would like to have as a gift one of her husbands book, which of course I just could not say no to! She gave me the book (a very nice hardcover book with many wonderfull paintings for me to be inspired by!) and another smaller book as well. I tried my best to display my gratitude in both english and german (which consisted of me saying danka, um danka very much!?).
Next we went for a short hike up to the castle! The castle was built on top of medieval ruins but I'm not sure exactly when, it used to have renaissance gardens but unfortunately does not anymore. I got a chance to go inside of the basement of the castle and of course see the beautiful view from outside the castle itself. We only stayed a little while because we were getting wuite hungry by then, so we walked back down to town and had ourselves kebabs.
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