April 5 - Last day in Austria - HutteritesHutterites

April 5 – Last day in Austria

Written by: The Bridge on Saturday, April 8th, 2006

On Tuesday morning, we went to Astrid’s parents for a short visit. We wanted to see her father’s blacksmith shop, and also visit a bit longer. He makes antique looking metal work. Some of it is actually art. He used a furnace or a torch to heat the metal, and a hammer and anvil to form it. Just by watching him, you could see he was an expert in his trade. He demonstrated for us by making a horseshoe from a flat iron bar. A few years back, for his wife’s 60th birthday, he made her 60 roses out of metal and overlaid them with gold. Each rose is formed out of a single piece of steel bar, with nothing welded on it. It took him close to a year to complete the project. Needless to say, she’s very proud of them, who wouldn’t be?! He also has some very impressive artwork throughout his house and yard. For example in the picture of the door, you can see the handles and hinges that he formed. Eventually, we went into his house for some ‘Apfel Saft’ and he played the Ziehharmonica (somewhat like an accordion, but with a lesser range) for us.

After that we went over to Klagenfurt to have a quick visit with Helga und Micki. Micki sagte das ich hallo sagen sollte zu Josh, Wayne, Timothy, and alle andere. Er sprach noch immer von die Zeit da der tractor umgerollt ist, das vergist er nicht so bald. It was hardly worth the visit, we had to hurry on so that we could make it to Linz on time; we wanted to look at a concentration camp but we didn’t make it anyway, that was too bad. Also, we left Lynde Lederer at Helga?s, she was going to take the Zug back to Kramsach. She really went out of her way to show us around, and that is something we really appreciated and will always remember.

The next day, we got up at 4 in the morning to catch our plane from Linz back to Frankfurt, and then after a 3 hour wait we were on our way to Africa!