Saalburg Fort (Feb. 7)

Last Wednesday was my birthday!  It was SO fun to be able to celebrate it in Germany!  Four years ago, I celebrated it with the C's in Hawaii--I wonder where they will be in 4 more years?!

It was still cold, but it was sunny, so we decided to venture out to a reconstructed Roman fort originally built in the early AD 100's called Saalburg.  The guy at the front desk was very kind and gave us the family rate, even though that usually means for 2 adults and 2 children, so we obviously were way over that, lol.

Here we are at the entrance.  It was so neat, set up on a big hill (which totally makes sense, given that it was, in fact, a fort)!

It had 2 moats or trenches.

I'm guessing this is Emperor Hadrian, since he was emperor when the fort was constructed?

Group shot inside!  Then we went in the big building right behind us, which had many artifacts, some of which were found at this site, and some that were just from that time period.

The boys were particularly interested in the weaponry.  These are some reconstructed spears of various types.  You can see the pile of spear heads at the bottom there.  We bought a souvenir magnet for our fridge like that shield in the top left.

These were leather shoes.  The ones that look new were obviously made recently to look like ones from back then, but the dark ones are fragments that were found.  They looked just like you would think Roman sandals would look like, straps and all!

Then we walked around to other parts of the fort.  Again, we were able to watch the movie in English, and it was very interesting, detailing the history of the fort from so long ago.  All this talk of the Germanic tribes made me want to break out my Henle Latin books again!

This was a room for soliders, probably high-ranking ones, since it was so beautifully decorated, even on the ceiling.  (In this part of the fort, nothing was translated into English, so we were just sort of guessing, lol.)

The crenellations on the walls were really nice, especially against the backdrop of snow.

This was a side gate.

We spent a good deal of time in a big room that had lots of hands-on activities. They had a huge game board for "muhle" (pretend there's an umlaut over the u), which is called in English, "Nine Men's Morris".  Caleb is taking a computer game design class this semester, and so he had actually studied several Roman games, including this one and also "tabula rasa", so he had an idea of how to set up the pieces and play the game.

They had a bunch of other old games set up for kids to play as well, including checkers.

Verity industriously colored away on a picture of Roman ladies all dressed up in their stollas and pallas.

This was a model of the fort, with the outbuildings shown as it was in its heyday.

There were all these dress-up Roman clothes.  Some people were more enthusiastic about dressing up than others, lol.  We had a hard time figuring out exactly how to make all the outer shawl-type things work.  I remember having this problem during all the TNT ancient history units where I attempted to dress up.  At least I wasn't using a sheet this time!

Caleb took this formal portrait of a family from Roman times.  So authentic, lol.

We ended up in the "taberna", where we bought one cup of hot chocolate (Anna says that in German really well) to split among us all.  But the guy was so nice, and he ended up bringing out that mug, plus styrofoam cups half-filled for all the kids AND, as we were preparing to leave, he offered us all fresh, home-made butter cookies that were so yummy!  Everyone has just been so nice here!  It has been so wonderful!

Then we headed out to the gift shop where we bought our souvenirs.  There were so many fun and pretty things, but we restrained ourselves.  We did buy this beautiful little glass "flakon" (flask or bottle) that looks like it could have perfume or something in it.  As we were buying it, along with our magnet, tiny model of the fort, pewter Roman soldier, and a book, the lady rattled off something about it in German, but it was way past Anna's level of understanding.  We should have had her write it down!

Then we headed home again to another delicious dinner from Siri, as well as a delicious chocolate cake for my birthday!  What a wonderful way to celebrate!