Snow Day!

First thing in the morning we tried to find out where Nate's Great Grandma was from in the Czech Republic.  We think we found the correct name of the town; however, there are two towns in the Czech Republic with that same name, one near Český Krumlov which is over 4 hours away and one near Pardubice which is only about an hour and a half away.  Karolina tried to look up some genealogy websites to try and see if we could figure out which one she was from.  If she was from the closer one, we were going to plan our day for that direction.  Unfortunately, we weren't able to find any substantial information, so we gave up on the idea of going to that town. Plan B was to walk around Žamberk then go to the nearby Craft Museum.  The museum includes more than 50 comprehensive expositions of crafts and trades from the period 1840 - 1930.

The boys look at some of the exhibits

The book binder's section included a catalogue turned to
the page displaying the chalices they had for sale at that time

In the embroidery section we saw beautiful embroidered vestments

In the baker's section they displayed the forms used to make hosts.

Seb & Tobi in the ropemaker's section.
They have ropemaking in their history.  The house that Petr grew up in was a ropemaker's house.  I think it was his great-grandfather who was a rope maker.  We don't know how far back the trade went in Petr's family, 

WEATHER REPORT BY ANNI...

Today it snowed!  We couldn't believe it.  Everyone was very excited.

Especially me!

Here is the backyard as it began to snow.

This is the roof of their house as seen from the window
where we usually look out of

This is the balcony

Another view from the balcony

This is the hill we play on but its full of snow so we don't
play on it any more or we will slip and fall

This is Zach having a lot and lot of fun

Here is a  picture of  Zach chasing snow

And now back to you, Mom...

In the afternoon we were going to drive to Klášter Králíky, a cloister on top of a big hill with views, a nice stations of the cross path, lots of beautiful artwork, but it was just too snowy.  I was worried about the drive, so we didn't go.  Here are some pictures for you Nate, since we didn't make it there...http://kraliky-klaster.cz/kkcz/102/exterier-arealu.  We were also going to try and make it to Neratov (http://www.neratov.cz/fotogalerie2/kostel-nanebevzeti-panny-marie/soucasny-stav/), but we decided to just stay home and visit and help Karolina make the decorations for the party on Saturday night.

Libor watching the action

That evening the parish priest came over for dinner with 2 "scouts".  We had our favorite for dinner.  Do you know it's name by now?

We found out a few interesting facts from the priest that evening.  He is only 1/3 of the way done with the restoration work on the interior of the church.  There are about 10-20 active parish families.  The Czech Republic is divided into 8 diocese with 15 seminarians from this diocese and overall about 50-60 seminarians for the whole country.