A busy time, missing teeth ... witches and tanks!

Firstly, Amelie has lost a tooth!

On Saturday 28th of May, we visited a place called the Hexentanzplatz, which is a place in the woods in the Harz mountains, where the witches used to dance.  It is not far from a town called Thale.  At this place there was a really cool toboggan slide which we had lots of turns on, Mummy and Ollie recorded the top speed of 38.9km/hr.

Here is a picture of Amelie and Ollie looking at the toy witches.

We even found a keyring with Amelie's name on it .... so of course we bought it!

We went on the Gondola down the mountain ...

The kids were a little nervous when we told them it was a rollercoaster :)

At the bottom of the mountain was a play park with some really cool rides ... here are some pictures!

After we got home to Magdeburg, we went to the "Night of Science" ....

Every year this starts with a reenactment of a really famous experiment performed by a man called Otto von Guericke.  This is the same guy that the University is named after.  The experiment shows the properties and existance of vacuum.  It consists of putting two steel hemispherical shells together and sucking all the air out of the inside using a vacuum pump.  When this is done there is nothing holding the hemispheres together other than the air pressure outside.  Then they tried to pull the two halves appart using two teams of 8 horses.

After the 16 horses tried and failed, a little girl from the audience opened a valve to let the air back in and the two halves fell appart by themselves.  The original version of the experiment used 20 horses.

The kids also learned what water molecules looked like and saw a casting demonstration.

The next day, we went with Andre and Matias to a place where the "men" drove the tanks, while the kids and I went along as passengers.  They were the BMP1 Russian troop carrier tanks!  Very cool fun!

The instructors only spoke German, so Andre had to translate everything into English for Chris.  We're not sure Andre was telling us everything because the english translation was always much much shorter than the German version.  But we figured there couldn't be any danger of getting hurt - after all, we were in a tank!

The tank weighed 13 tonnes and was driven by a 16 litre v6 engine.  The tank uses about 2 - 4 litres per 1 km .... not very economical ... and it made a lot of noise!  If you look carefully at the 6th tank photo ... you can catch a glimpse of the very determined Andre and his "war face"  :)

Until our next adventure .... Cheers!