Trip to the Middle Ages

On the long Pentecost weekend the city of Hainburg, close to Vienna and on Markus' daily route to work, turned back time a few centuries and hosted a medieval festival. The old town of the historic city was turned into a medieval market place with traders, jugglers, musicians, hangmen, witches, knights and knaves. We have been looking out for a festival like that for a while and thus made our way Sunday morning towards the middle ages. The weather was perfect  -it was sunny and dry - and to our surprise it did not take very long once we entered the "time machine" for Jakob to warm up to the exciting event. The old market place was already at 1000 pretty busy with people dressed in historic outfit as well as "tourists" like ourselves.

No presents from the knights

Kids hat many different opportunities to experience the middle ages - be it by minting their own coins, constructing a bow, dancing to the sounds of lutes and flutes or by watching knights fight. The lattter part was not only for Jakob the most exciting thing, but the tournament area was the most packed area of the festival at times. Hundreds of people watched 7 knights fight each other with the longsword over several rounds and they did not make any presents to each other but fought really hard. No wonder - the price was a decent handmade longsword. Following the first rounds we of the knight tournament when we we made our way back to the marketplace we bought wooden swords and shields for our little own Don Quijote Jakob and his Sancho Panza Julia. Lunch we had  - very typical - without cutlery but we ate the chicken with our fingers and it was just delicious that way. Later on Jakob got his face painted as tiger before watching the final rounds of the tournament in the afternoon. Once the knights have crowned the winner in their tournament the kids took over the tournament court and "fought" with the newly bought swords.

Jakob watching very concentrated

It was not easy to convince our kids to leave the middle ages again and come back to the future, but once we were all sat in the car both Jakob and Julia were quite soon fast asleep. A sleep, that was badly needed as the day was exhausting. only one evidence was, that Julia did not wake up when we reached home but slept through until Monday morning.

Julia, Jakob, Kerstin & Markus