Ammerland - Visiting Relatives

Rastede


We stayed the week with old family friends - Herbert and Rosie in Rastede. This area is called Ammerland and includes the town of Oldenburg where Liane's parents grew up. Herbert speaks good Aussie/English because he had lived in Australia for 10years previously and enjoys having a joke. They have a beautiful home and garden. It is the only flat roofed house we have seen in Germany.

The neighbours even had a welcoming Australian flag flying for us!
Every morning we had a lovely breakfast on the terrace. Was it the north/south or east terrace? It was a topic of discussion each morning. We nicknamed it Hotel Rosie as she certainly looked after us very well. Rex and Rosie managed to communicate even though both didn't speak each other's language - everything was schon (lovely).
We visited an amazing farmer's museum where an old farmer had collected thousands of old farming and household items.
Then we had a lovely walk in the evening through a rhododendron garden and almost lost our way. Check out the height of these bushes!We also visited a newly built Beach Club which had a fantastic water skiing machine. It looked so cool we wanted to have a go! Reckon it would be a great thing for the Gold Coast or even Geelong for any entrepreneur out there.


Cloppenburg

One day we looked through an old village museum which had examples of many old farmhouses and mansions. It is amazing to think how they built these houses with massive wooden beams. The animals were also kept in the same house with the hay stored in the attic. Many did not have chimneys and the smoke filled house preserved any meat hanging from the rafters. They would also sleep 3 or 4 people together in small sleeping cupboards. Very cosy indeed, but neccessary in winter.

Rosie swinging the pot of stew around for serving

Oldenburg

The next day Herbert took us to visit one of Liane's aunties who lives in her dad's old house. Her cousin also arrived and so the family photos began.
One day Liane's Uncle Ernst picked us up and did a fantastic job of taking us all around the Stalling side of the family (Liane's mother's side). First we visited Oma Rosskamp’s old house (which has been renovated), then the oldest church in the area (950yrs), then the graves of Uncle Alwin, Oma and Opa Stalling. We had a quick look inside the church too. We then visited Auntie Marianne for Fruhstuck (2nd breakfast of bread rolls and cake).

We visited a farm that sells produce straight from the farm. The owner was a good friend of Uncle Ernst. They make a lovely non alcoholic sekt from some flowers so of course we had to try a glass. It is asparagus season so everywhere there are huge amounts of asparagus for sale and it’s featured on all the restaurant menus. Wiefelstede
We stopped off to admire the lake with three hills (Bad Swichenahn??) and then drove out to Auntie Annie’s where we were expected at precisely 3pm. All the cousins were waiting and of course the table was beautifully set. We had strawberry cake and rhubarb cake. There were cousins Helga, Heiner and Helmut as well as their wives and two of their children.

Heiner gave us a tour of his dairy farm. He has all new sheds. One for new calves and one for milking - all with a massive amount of solar panels on the roof of which he sells the electricity back to the system. He has two state of the art robot machines which milk the cows – as each cow steps on the platform it is scanned and those who don’t need to be milked are sent off. Those that are milked have the teats all washed and cups put on by laser. Some of the cows can now be milked 3 or 4 times a day!



Helmut then gave us a tour of his Wholesale Nursery. He now has 10 hectares of plants after buying some land further down the street. It is a very busy time for him as they were just taking all the plants out of the hot houses and replanting them into bigger pots. It is an enormous set up and he now employs about twenty people. He says he has so many orders he can’t grow enough plants to keep up!

We then drove to the hospital to see Uncle Georg. He looked very well and was coming home the next day. While we were there we came across a lovely lady who had volunteered to look after a small Angolan boy who was recovering from an operation.

We then went to a restaurant at Bad Swichenahn, which was on the other side of the lake, with Auntie Annie to have tea.

View from the Restaurant

“So…Finally” said Uncle Ernst, “We get something decent to eat!!” We had schnitzel and beer!

Back to Oldenburg
We took Auntie Annie home and then visited Auntie Hanna (by this time it was after 9pm) where cousins Helmut and Walter were waiting with beer for us!

We eventually got home at about 11pm. Liane was totally kaput that at the end she was beginning to translate into German for Rex when someone spoke English!!

A very big day indeed!

The next day we had a more relaxing day out with another of Liane's cousins from her dad's side. Sebastion, their son, had stayed with us last year for a few days.