Christmas for Erika in Germany...

I could write pages and pages about our trip over Christmas to Germany, but no one wants to read all that, just like no one wants to watch a slideshow of someone's trip to Florida. So I'll try and keep this short and sweet and just hit the highlights of each day.

Day 1 - Friday, 19 Dec.

DH and I set off for Munich, Germany, on Dec 19th out of Manchester Airport. Our flight was late and it was rainy when we landed. We got sort of lost in the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) looking for the exit that would lead to our hotel (which was quite literally right next door) but nonetheless, had a great first night!

Highlights:
- DH eating his first Bratwurst!
- First visit of the Munich Christmas Market

Day 2 - Saturday, 20 Dec.

It was drizzling outside, and since we had booked the "I Love Chocolate" package through Sofitel, we enjoyed a really big, delicious breakfast before setting off for the Neue Pinakothek for our cultural immersion of the day. That night we had reservations at the hotel restaurant for our three-course chocolate dinner.

Highlights:
- Canova's Paris
- DH's first trip on a Strassenbahn (German street trolley)
- Chocolate dinner at the hotel
- Discovering super-yummy Nuernberger Brats at our new favorite Christmas Market (by the Sendlinger Gate)

Day 3 - Sunday, 21 Dec

We again slept in and enjoyed our huge yummy breakfast. Then we set off for the Deutsches Museum (German Museum) which is Germany's version of all the US Smithsonians combined into one single museum. Oy! We spent no less than 4 hours there! Afterwards we hit our favorite Christmas Market again for more Nuernbergers (although DH ate a normal Bratwurst) and some French Fries, and both our first Feuerzangebowle (traditional German hot drink at Christmas)

Highlights:
- Marine Navigation hall at the Deutsches Museum
- Watching a blind brass band perform Christmas songs at our favorite Christmas Market
- DH's first U-bahn (Germany subway) ride!

Day 4 - Monday, 22 Dec

Today we got ourselves out of bed a littler earlier than we had been, again enjoyed a nice breakfast, and then checked out of our Munich hotel and picked up our rental car. After a brief delay caused by a wicked accident on the Autobahn, we made our way to Noerdlingen, Germany. This is the town featured in the older version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory - at the end when they are flying around in the glass elevator. We also learned that the town was located in the crater of a giant meteor that hit over 15 million years ago, and that NASA astronauts had visited before their trips to the moon for quarrying experience. Pretty cool! They had a sweet little Christmas Market that we visited, eating a pretzel and - what else - another Bratwurst!

We left Noerdlingen to make our way to Rothenburg o.d. Tauber, where we were staying for the night. After some very tense moments getting lost and being unable to find our hotel, we finally checked in, parked the car, walked around the town a little bit, and then did the Nightwatchman Tour! We had a really lovely traditional German dinner at one of the town's hotel restaurants before turning in for the night.

Highlights:
- DH's first drive on the German Autobahn (his max speed - 150-155 km/h)
- Noerdlingen - I loved it!!!
- Nightwatchman's Tour of Rothenburg o.d. Tauber
- Yummy Schweinbraten mit Knoedel at Restaurant Roter Hahn

Day 5 - Tuesday, 23 Dec.

Since we had arrived so late in Rothenburg, we spent most of the day walking the town, visiting the Kriminalmuseum (full of old torture instruments!), and walking along the wall, gardens, and towers of Rothenburg. We left in the late afternoon, just making it to Wuerzburg where we dropped off the car and traveled by train to my friend Andrea's, with whose family we were spending the holidays.

Highlights:
- Seeing Andrea and meeting her loverly family!
- DH's first German train trip!
- DH's and my first Weisswurst (traditional Bavarian/Franconian wurst - not to everyone's taste, but definitely to ours! YUMMY!)

Day 6 - Wednesday, 24 Dec. *Christmas Eve*

What a lovely day. We didn't really do much. Slept late, ate breakfast, walked around Ebelsbach and saw two castles in 10 minutes, relaxed, ate "lunch" (baked chicken breasts wrapped in prosciutto and sage, potato cheese casserole (like an au gratin), and ratatouille), went to Koenigsberg i. B. to see another castle and a quaint little town, then returned to Ebelsbach, went to church for the childrens Mass and Nativity Play, ate yummy individual pizzas, and celebrated a traditional German Christmas.

Highlights
- The little kid playing the main shepherd looking for his little, white lamb at the Christmas children's Mass
- Home-cooked German food! Oh my!
- Walking around Ebelsbach
- Traditional German Christmas tree with real candles!

Day 7 - Thursday, 25 Dec. *Christmas*

Another completely lovely day. After having Christmas dinner (which in Germany is at lunchtime, since the main meal of the day for many Europeans is at lunchtime) which was out of this world (Roulade, Knoedel (large potato dumpling ball), and Rotkohl/Blaukraut (red cabbage)) we went to Bamberg to walk the town's streets. We visited the cathedral, popped into a little restaurant to try a Bamberger Rauchbier (a smoky beer that smelled like smoked ham, and kind of tasted like it too), and generally wiled the day away. Dinner was a meat and cheese platter - where I discovered a new favorite cheese!

Highlights
- Bamberg Cathedral - so gorgeous!
- More German homecooking. Mmmmmmm!

Day 8 - Friday, 26 Dec. *Boxing Day*

Sadly, our last day in Germany. After a quick breakfast, it was off to the train station to catch a train to Frankfurt airport. We said goodbye to our lovely hosts, who are unparalleled in their hospitality, friendliness, and openness, and set off for Harrogate!

Highlights
- DH's first ride on the ICE - Germany's super-fast train (even though we didn't get to go super fast)
- Seeing the kitties again, who were clearly fat and happy and barely noticed our absence (thanks to the excellent care provided by our young hired help).

Pics of our trip can be seen here.

Finally... news...

Well, thanks to all of you who have offered tons of support, but I've just gotten word that I was not selected to interview for the Bosch Fellowship. At least I now know, and can refocus on getting a job here in the UK! No worries - I totally believe that when God closes a door, he opens a window. I'll think about reapplying again next year in any case.

Thanks again for all the well wishes!

Quick update - or rather non-update

For the one or two of you who might be watching for news about my fellowship application, I'm posting to let you know that I still have no update. I emailed the woman yesterday morning (8am England time, so 3am US EST time) and heard nothing all day. Everytime a message appeared in my inbox my heart would jump into my throat, only to be disappointed by the sender being "American Airlines" or "Whole Latte Love" or somesuch other junk mail.

With my friggin' luck, the woman is either a) out sick or b) out for holiday vacation and I still won't know for weeks on end. The mail situation for our APO box is total crap too, so I don't know when/how I'm going to hear.

Frankly, I don't have the best psychic vibe about it anymore. I mean, if I had been selected for interviews, which are being held Jan 13-15th in NYC, I imagine someone would have contacted me by now for travel arrangements, right? Argh, this is so frustrating. I just want to know definitively one way or the other. I feel paralyzed not knowing. It's brutal.

"Tell me honey, how come you're so cute?"

One of the leading actors from one of my all-time favorite movies died yesterday. Van Johnson, who was 92, starred in "Thirty Seconds over Tokyo," the Hollywood version of the true-life bombing of Tokyo during WWII.

The movie makes me laugh, makes me cry (of course), stars another one of my absolute favorites, Spencer Tracy, and has one of my all-time favorite pieces of dialogue that I use on DH all the time. If you're up one day and see it coming on TCM or something, sit down and watch it. What those boys (yes, they were just boys) did was nothing short of astonishing.

Here's the YouTube link for the trailer to "Thirty Seconds over Tokyo." My favorite piece of dialogue begins about 2:37.

">

Kinda just started to freak out...

Since arriving in England, I've put off a job search or anything resembling it because I've applied for a Bosch Fellowship. If I was awarded a spot, I would be spending Sept 2009 - June 2010 in Germany, working for a German government agency and a German non-profit/private sector firm for about 4 months each.

My application was submitted in October, with what I thought was a strong essay and what I knew were two very strong personal recommendations. I thought that I was supposed to hear via email by December 15th whether I was going to be invited just to interview for a spot. Re-reading the application acknowledgment email today, I realized that they are in fact mailing (by regular US mail) those results out, which I should receive by Dec 15th. I did give our APO address on my application, but we've been having tons of issues getting mail from the States at that address. So now I'm kinda freaking out, since they've requested that we not email them about the status of our application until after December 15th. Seriously, at this point I just want to know one way or the other, and not have this hanging over my head. I guess I'm just getting nervous now that it's nearly time to find out, since I haven't really been thinking of it until now.

Of course, with my luck, DH will pick up the letter today when he check our mail on base. It's like some kind of psychic link or something.

Weird, wild, wacky Christmas party (UK edition) - UPDATE

I have learned since attending the surreal Christmas party last night that many of the things I thought were peculiar were indeed British Christmas traditions. To wit:



These are the cylindrical "bang" packages which contained the tissue paper hats and little plastic toys that I was confused by. I learned tonight that they are known as "Christmas Crackers." From Wikipedia:

"Christmas crackers are an integral part of Christmas celebrations in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Republic of Ireland and in other Commonwealth countries. A cracker consists of a cardboard tube wrapped in a brightly decorated twist of paper, making it resemble an oversized sweet-wrapper. The cracker is pulled by two people, and, much in the manner of a wishbone, the cracker splits unevenly. The split is accompanied by a small bang produced by the effect of friction on a chemically impregnated card strip (similar to that used in a cap gun).

In one version of the tradition the person with the larger portion of cracker empties the contents from the tube and keeps them. In another each person will have their own cracker and will keep its contents regardless of whose end they were in. Typically these contents are a coloured paper hat or crown; a small toy or other trinket and a motto, a joke or piece of trivia on a small strip of paper. Crackers are often pulled after Christmas dinner or at parties."

I don't yet understand the tissue paper crowns (which come in the crackers) or the ABBA connection, but I will solve these mysteries and report back to my faithful readers!

Weird, wild, wacky Christmas party (UK edition)

Wow. I don't even know where to start this post.

Last night was DH's team's Christmas Party. It all sounded normal enough (normal to my American sensibilities, anyway). We were going to a local hotel for a meal, and meeting up for a little pre-party at a nearby couple's house for a little wine and cheese.

Indeed it started pretty much how these things go... we went to the couple's house, which was very nice, and enjoyed some pre-party drinks, were introduced to spouses and made some small talk, and it was all very expected.

I guess the first sign that things were going to be a little different should have been DH telling me that the dress code was either "smart casual" or "70s disco" style. These two things don't make much sense, but I just kind of let it go. When we arrived at the hotel for our pre-dinner drinks at the hotel bar, I looked around at the assembled crowd. Our group was only about 20 people; there were perhaps a hundred or so in the lobby area. People were wearing the widest variety of clothes I had ever seen assembled in one place in my life. There was a very large group of people dressed in black tie formal attire (with more women than I have ever seen in my life squeezing into dresses that had they bothered to check a mirror, they would have known their dress was four sizes too small) Oh - there was a complete lack of appropriate foundation garments as well - there were flat droopy boobs, poochy tummys, and spare tires in abundance. There were the "smart casual" folks, with the boys in nice pants and nice shirts and the occasional tie and blazer and women in nice sweaters or shirts and skirts or casual dresses..

And then there were the folks in the 70s garb. Just. wow. Bell bottoms and paisley galore (including some sequined bell bottom paisley, which was nothing short of insane). These people were dead serious about their 70s style costumes. Standing there in the lobby I bitterly cursed DH for not having a) told me to bring our camera and b) forgetting his iPhone in the car, which takes much better pictures than my crappy cell phone camera.

After a short while in the bar we were led by someone from the hotel staff up to the restaurant and to our reserved tables. The tables were decorated in a way I expected much more for a New Year's Celebration than a Christmas party - with little champagne poppers, noisemakers, strange popping package-type things that went "bang" when you pulled them apart, and really annoying balloon-type things that you blew up and let go, at which point they sailed around the room making that horrible deflating balloon squeal. They looked like giant flying penises and there were dozens of them flying around the room. Inside the little "bang" packages there were tissue paper crowns, which people all around the room were wearing on their heads.

I kind of stood there in shock for a few minutes, trying to understand exactly what this scene in front of me was. Eventually we settled down, had a fairly standard quality hotel-catered meal, and I just kind of was looking around at this surreal scene of grown adults at their companies' Christmas parties, wearing tissue paper hats and shooting champagne poppers at one another and setting off balloons around the room. It was like a strange LSD trip.

And it was only the beginning of the strangeness.

After dinner, once everyone had had their cake and coffee, the entertainment for the evening started. Now DH had told me that the hotel had a 70s theme club or something, he wasn't quite sure what. We joked that it would be something like an ABBA-fest (me) or a BeeGees-fest (him). This of course explained why some of the people in attendance were dressed in 70s garb.

At the front of the room there was a small dance floor with some lights and whatnot set up. The room's lights were dimmed quite low and some peppy instrumental music I didn't recognize at first started playing. I was in no way prepared for what appeared next. Indeed, I'm not quite sure I believe it actually happened yet.

At one point I recognized the musical refrain, at about the same time as DH did. I turned to him and said "Is that... Waterloo?" At that exact moment, the dance floor's lights came on, and there was a group of four - two men and two women - that were clearly an ABBA tribute band. And they started singing "Waterloo."

The room went crazy, "Woo-Hoo"ing and screaming, as if it was a room full of teenage girls and the latest boy band had just taken the stage. A woman, dressed in a 1920's style flapper dress (she was with one of the black-tie groups, I think), almost immediately jumped up on the buffet and started dancing (it was the first song! how much had she had to drink already that she was ready to dance on tables?). The ABBA tribute band was singing its heart out, and I was simply looking at my DH in utter and complete shock.

I kind of figured that they would play one or two songs and then a normal dance floor would follow. How wrong I was. I didn't even think ABBA had that many songs, but they played for a solid hour, with their "encore" number being, of course, "Dancing Queen." It was absolutely surreal. There is simply no other word for it.

Once the band finished playing, our group started to disperse - it was 1100pm on a Friday night, after all. I'm still not sure that I've processed everything that happened last night. After all, my Christmas party experience has mostly been a subdued meal with some folks you work with, perhaps a little bit of Christmas music on to get you in the mood, maybe a Secret Santa or White Elephant/Yankee Swap-type game for some wholesome laughs, and then everyone goes on their merry way.

I was not prepared for an New Year's Eve party-type craziness with an ABBA soundtrack. It was, to say the least, bizarre.

And here are just a couple of crappy cell-phone pics:



Hard to see... but up there are the blond and brunette "ABBA"-like chicks singing


Flapper-like chick dancing on the buffet - TO THE FIRST SONG!

I have a pic of DH wearing his paper crown, but to my chagrin he won't let me make it public.

Weird, wild, wacky weather (UK edition) - Part Deux!

Well, something in the air made it snow yesterday - and the whole town fell apart. It was a whopping 2 inches! You'd have thought that we lived in Alanta, GA, or something, the way that they handled things. Traffic was snarled, streets were impassable. No one shovels their walks around here (of course, we don't even have our snow shovels - I guess that's one purchase we should make this weekend, that and some rock salt). DH drove my beloved Bug to work today and I am just praying he makes it okay.

Here are a couple of pics I took of the snow:









Yes... that is a car with a snowman on its roof. You can see more pics I took around town here.

In more gastronomic news, I got my second veg box delivery this morning (good job River Swale!) Take a look at these yummies! Carrots, onions, potatoes, red cabbage, fennel, leeks, and eggplants!

Weird, wild, wacky weather (UK edition)

View from our bedroom window one morning

So over the past 7-10 days we've woken up several times to see a dusting or a coating of snow outside our north-facing windows. On many of those same mornings, DH has driven to work only to discover an inch or more of snow has fallen just 5 miles outside of town.

It seems that more than anything that altitude is playing a role in these differing experiences. From tonight's bulletin from the UK Met Office (their National Weather Service equivalent) applicable to our region (North Yorkshire):

There is a high risk of a severe weather event affecting parts of Scotland and the northern half of England. Snow spreading from the west on Wednesday evening will become persistent and heavy at times by the early hours of Thursday morning, eventually clearing away eastwards from England by Thursday afternoon and from most of Scotland by the evening. On low lying ground there is the potential for 2 to 5 cm of snow to accumulate, while on ground above about 150 metres accumulations of 10 to 20 cm are expected, with blizzard conditions and considerable drifting in strong winds. This is likely to cause disruption to travel networks, particularly across higher level routes.

According to Google Earth, the location where we live is about 470-490 feet above sea level - just at or under the 150 meter mark. Where DH works, however, he is at 750-770 feet above sea level.

Luckily, DH just got the snow emergency number to call to know whether to report on time or at all for work in the event of a major snow. I don't think that they get major snows (like 8+ inches) very often though.

D'oh

I'm not having a lot of clothes-related luck.

Point #1 - DH and I went shopping for a nice new winter coat for him. We went all over Harrogate to the major stores hoping to find a nice wool coat. Our first stop was the Gap, where we had bought his current coat several years ago. They had one possible option, and it wasn't bad. 3/4 length and 70% wool 30% manmade. The problem was it was a quite a bit thinner/lighterweight than his current coat, quite a bit more expensive, and it just might not have been warm enough. We went to some other "English" shops, figuring that there are so damn many sheep around, there must be plenty of wool coats. Boy, were we wrong. At one of the more recognizable Brit stores - Marks & Spencer - we looked at coats labeled "Wool Rich Blend". What a total joke - "wool rich" meant only 5% wool! Total and utter crap.

Point #2 - Continuing with the whole "wool" theme, I bought a nice lambswool cream-colored hoodie from LLBean before leaving for the UK. Today, I thoughtlessly threw it in the wash, and lo and behold, shrank it such that it would only fit a barbie. Dammit. My own fault for not paying attention.

Point #3 - Continuing with the whole "wash" theme, I went ahead and washed all my bras today. Hanging them up to dry, I realized that I had washed ALL my bras, and there was no way one would be dry to wear to Quiz Night at our local pub tonight. Just great!

At least that's three things... so now I should be safe.