marksburg and a wine tasting.

this is the castle that we went to in marksburg, a medieval village. it was pretty cool and it high up in the mountains.

these are the steps leading up to the main part of the castle. if you look to the right, you can see a little bit of our tour guide's arm. the tour was completely in german but there were a lot of us who didn't understand a lot of what he said because of his accent and the fact that he was talking about medieval things that we didn't know the words for. oh well. it was neat anyway.

this is the smallest cannon the castle had. it was a pretty neat view.

this is the view out of one of the windows. i'm pretty sure that's the rhein river.

they made wine in this castle and these are the wine barrels. there were drawings on the wall next to them that showed different steps in the wine making process. some of us were joking that they were the directions.

medieval torture devices. because no medieval castle should be without them.

can you guess what this is? i'll give you a minute....

no? a chastity belt. when the men went off to war, they would put these on their women until they got back. this was the one thing in the tour EVERYONE understood. pretty funny.

after the castle, they took us to a winery and gave us a tour and we had a tasting. this is a bad picture of the vineyard. they went almost all the way up the hillsides. it was really interesting to see an almost vertical vineyard.

this is the group of people i sat with at the wine tasting. from left to right: me, bill, nick, sharee (australia), lindsey, andy, patricia (spain), and paulina (poland). most of us were from michigan. that's why i didn't tell you where they were from.

well, that was a really long post. sorry. i'll start updating more regularly. it's not like i can go outside and do anything. it's too cold.