Last year we went to the Friesach Medieval Festival and the Beach Volleyball tournament. We had so much fun we did it again this year. Here are the kids watching the Brazilian women team beat up on the Americans. We went to a castle earlier in the day – we will post those pics later.
Lots of free swag. Oliver loved the giant hands with the Volkbank logo on them. He was running around giving everyone 5. We brought home several of these.
Elora was also enthusastic with the high-fives.
Karen was just happy to win the sweet free Visa hat, which she is modeling here.
Meanwhile, Elora won a beach towel, which folds into a backpack. All the little vendors booths had games where you could win something for free. Elora spun the Visa “wheel of fortune” and it landed on the one that said “Visa Card”. This was the jackpot item, and I was thinking she actually won a gift card, but instead it was this sweet towel/bag combo. The gift card would have been more fun, but we’ll take the free towel thingy. The kids also won some gummy bears and tattoos.
We had to wait in a long line to find a seat in the grand stands for one of the matches on the main court. Elora was pretty excited, she was waving her huge hand and asking lots of questions.
Oliver was totally into it. He was clapping a lot and waving his flag with huge smiles. What was kind of sad about the flags, is they had a huge telecommunications company logo on the back side. I can’t possibly imagine a company in the US putting a huge logo on the flag. And to top it off, the two flags we brought back were ones we picked up off the ground in the mud. People were just tossing their own country’s flags in the ground when they left, there were dozens of them. I actually picked the first one up that I saw out of respect, thinking one person was just careless. Then I realized apparently Austrians don’t care about their country’s flag. You don’t have to be a crazy nationalist, but don’t just carelessly drop the symbol in the ground that so many of your countrymen have fought and died for. Kind of odd and sad at the same time.
We then walked over to the docks to see if we could rent a little boat, but they were closed. Elora was pretty sad. She cheered up a lot when we saw some fish in the lake and fed them some bread.
And finally, we went back to Friesach for the night. Friesach is a cute little town. While we were getting ready for bed a huge medieval parade marched by the hotel in preparation for the next day’s festival. Elora was excited.
