February

A lot has happened since my last post.  Every time I post I say I need to do it more frequently.  What I think I'm going to do this time is space out my posts.  I have a lot to write and so I'm going to do a few posts over the next couple of days.  It has been so long I don't even remember what I have and haven't said.

February was a good month around here.  I started taking dance classes at Grace studio, which has been really nice.  I also now have 3 callings, Librarian, RS teacher, and Family History Center assistant director.  I've volunteered to help with the spouse's club bazaar as a historian, helping take pictures and record the event.  And we got a new computer, which I'm using right now!  We needed two computers for when Colin goes away for trainings and whatnot so we can keep in touch, and so I can use one while he's doing his schoolwork. His last semester for a while (because of said trainings) will be done next week, though, which means it won't be such a big problem.

February also means Valentines, and we had a nice, relaxing one over here.  Colin surprised me with a trip to the Canary Islands for later on in the month (which I discovered early due to bank statements :P) so we just had a nice dinner at home.  We made some salmon together and just enjoyed spending time together.

Over here in Germany instead of Mardi Gras, they have Fasching.  Fasching happenes the days before Ash Wednesday, and everyone dresses in crazy outfits.  They have a parade, throw candy, vote on a Fasching Queen, and shout "Ralau".  The men of the town wear funny jester's hats, and it's a huge event.  We went to the one in Ramstein village, and there were so many people there.  The train would pull up to the station and people dressed in costumes would rush out.  They played music, people danced and sang and got drunk.  The ladies next to us put face paint and steamers on a police officer.  We didn't dress up this year because we didn't know what we were getting into, but we will next year for sure!

people getting off the train

german cheerleaders

i think these were some kind of town officials

the 86th float

all the people at fasching

Baby it's cold outside

Hey all.  I haven't posted much in a while, mainly because its WAY too cold to go out and do fun things.  No one wants to sight-see when it's 8-12 degrees outside.  It snowed lightly a few days ago, and for the first time it stuck.  The wind started blowing from the east just this week, and apparently it's made it the coldest winter for Europe in a good long time.  So we've been sticking around the house a lot.  It hasn't been bad.  Colin is working on his schooling, and I've been keeping myself busy.  I've been asked to make the baby gifts for expecting mothers in our ward, and there are a LOT of them.  The RS president asked me to make hooded baby towels, which are quick, easy, and cute.  Here are the first two I made this past week.  Pardon my lamp/hat combo.  I didn't have any tiny heads to display them on.  Also I promise our lamp has a shade.  I simply removed it to take better pics :)  

I got the pattern here.  It was simple to follow and really cute with lots of pleats.  

I also have been called to teach in RS, so I've got some more things to occupy my time.  I'm also going today to look at a dance studio over here.  Their unlimited classes price is 52 dollars/month which is a great price.  In Logan, all of the places were 45 dollars/class.  Hopefully it pans out.  I'm also on the committee for the Ramstein Bazaar, which is fun.  I'm one of the historians, which means I get to help take pictures, make the photo book, slide show, and other fun things.  I've got my first meeting on Friday, and I'm excited about it :)

Prague! And everyday life. And my thoughts on Censorship.

Hey all.  I feel like I don't post on this thing enough.  Really only when we go on trips, which isn't often enough to make my blogs a normal length.  So sorry about that.  I don't think a lot has happened until I start to write.  Anyway, so here's what's going on in our neck of the woods. 

Epiphany here was really fun.  Children from our town dressed up as wise men and went door to door singing and collecting donations for charity.  After they sang, they wrote on our door a blessing.  It stands for may the blessings of Christ be with you in Latin, and the letters also symbolize the names of the wise men, apparently.  I also went to a fun gift exchange with some of the ladies in our ward.  It was a holiday tradition for the woman who hosted it, and a really fun time.

This is what they wrote on our door.  The outside is the new year, the inside the blessing.

 Colin fixed up my new bike (since the old one was stolen in Utah) to German spec.  It has a generator that turns the lights on when you ride it and holds a little charge if you've been going for a while, which is really sweet.  I haven't put my basket on yet(they didn't steal that oddly enough) but I will before I take it anywhere :)  Now I can ride myself to the thrift store on Sembach all the time! Colin is thrilled ha.

We went to Prague!  They have an awesome history and it really shows in their architecture and infrastructure.  We stayed at an awesome hotel that ended up being right in the heart of New Town and nearby everything.  We also had a great view off our balcony, which we were lucky to get as only 4 room in the whole hotel had one facing the main street, Wenceslas Square(yes the Wenceslas of the Christmas carol.  He's Czech and totally not really a King.  Just a Duke.)  Anyway.  Wenceslas Square where we stayed was the main place where all of the protests happened.  In 1969 two people burned themselves to protest Communism, where Russian tanks came to remind them who was in charge, and where, in 1989, they announced that Communism was over.  So it was a pretty cool place.  

Nearby was the Old Town section, most of which dated back to at least the 14th century.  This is where the memorable astronomical clock is, along with all of the other architecture from that era including a lot of churches, which today are mainly just used as concert halls.  Old Town also has a huge Jewish Quarter.  It has a lot of synagogues and Jewish history.  Many of the people in this town were sent to a nearby concentration camp (Terezin) and it went from one of the largest(120,000 in the area) and oldest Jewish communities in Europe to under 10,000 when WWII was over.  The Jewish Quarter is where we bought our Czech Crystal.  It is apparently well known that the Czech have the best crystal, and with the exchange rate finally being in our favor, we bought a beautiful vase.  They also are essentially the only place where you can mine Garnets, so there was a ton of that around here as well. We also took a river cruise which was fun.  Nearly every major town we've been to has been on a river, and we've wanted to take one every time we go somewhere.  This time we got a tour of the city, and one was included :)

After Old Town we went across the Charles bridge to the castle and saw the changing of the guards.  It was a huge castle area and we didn't get to see it all.  It is still used today as government headquarters.  Another cool thing we did while there was take the underground to church.  Sadly we didn't get any of our own pictures of that.  It was an awesome subway system.  It was put in place by the Russians during Communism. The trains run really deep, so the escalators going down to them are really really steep, and once you get there, the whole station looks like it hasn't changed since it was put in.  It was interesting to think that most of the people around you had been under communist rule not that long ago, and that most adults remember what that was like.  

Our new vase.  It's really heavy.

 

The view from our balcony

The view from our balcony the opposite direction

St. Wenceslas' statue

The memorial for the university students who burned themselves in protest of communism.  The candles are there because their President had just died :(

The astronomical clock

Old Town square

Interestingly, there is no bottom to that church.  It was build right up to the walls of those houses so it has no lower half.

27 crosses in momory of 27 nobles/aristocrats/protestants who were killed when the Hasburgs took over

That statue is of Jon Hus, who rebelled against the Catholic church and formed his own.  The Tyn Church in the background was Hussite for a long time, until the Hasburgs took over.

The National Galerie.

The shorter yellow building in the New Old Synagogue and the start of the Jewish Quarter.  

Our boat for the river cruise

A cool building on an island in the middle of the river.

The Charles Bridge

This one was taken while we were on the Charles Bridge

The church in the Castle district.

from the castle square

View of Prague from the Castle

The other side of the Astronomical clock, also part of city hall.

The National Museum and Wenceslas' statue at night.

And that brings me to Censorship.  There is a lot of talk going on right now about a few bills that might bring censorship to America.  I understand that some artists whose pictures/songs get stolen to be put on YouTube videos and blogs might get upset, but for one, its great publicity for you most of the time.  And for another, we live in an area (Germany) that has a similar rule.  Because of that, nearly every YouTube video is blocked.  Pandora is not allowed.  Hulu is not allowed.  And much more.  You don't realize how nice it is to be able to use those kinds of things until they're gone. 

So anyway, other than that, things have been pretty calm around here.  Colin started school again online.  I've been crafting a bit.  I've made a few skirts, a sweater top, a beanie, and an ear-warmer.  I've only taken a picture of the ear-warmer, so that will have to suffice.  I go the pattern and basically learned how to knit from this website just so I could make this.  I've knitted before, but it was so long ago I couldn't remember how to start or finish or knit basically.  The website is great if you want to learn.  It's got videos that are slow enough to walk you through it, but quick enough that you don't get bored. 

Sorry about the weird picture.  The lighting was off and I couldn't use my flash because it blocked out the headband.  And it's been dark and rainy.  And it's a weird angle.  That's life.

 It's finally gotten colder around here, but still no snow around us.  There was some on the drive to Prague though.  Mostly a ton of rain.  Anyway, that's life in Germany right now.  Hope you enjoy hearing about our travels and sorry for the long post!

Lots to Post

So... I'm officially the laziest blogger ever.  There has been so much and so little going on at the same time.  Christmas time over here was magical.  Christmas Markets are the best.  We went to one in Sankt Wendel before Christmas and it was HUGE! We saw lots of cool things, one of my favorites was the people playing the Alphorn.  It is so fun that they go all out for Christmas over here.  Tons of decorations, lights, and markets.

there were sooo many people there.

reindeer! Also, Germans use skinny people for Santa.

We also went to the Frankfurt temple for our Anniversary, since the ward temple day was the day before our anniversary, and our real anniversary fell on a Sunday.  After the Temple we had lunch at another great Kartoffel restaurant in Bad Homburg and then went to the Bad Homburg Christmas Market.  This one was really cool because it was on the grounds of an old castle/royal palace of sorts.  It was also nice because we went in the day when it was warmer and less crowded.  It had some fun things at it like a steam engine for kids to ride.

us at the Frankfurt Temple

Bad Homburg

Alpacas!  Ha they were selling hats/scarves made with Alpaca hair

Christmas Eve was pretty fun, too because I went skiing for the first time!  We chose this day because we figured everyone else would be spending the day with family, and since we couldn't, we figured we'd make the best of it.  It was great.  We went to this indoor slope in Amneville, France.  I started off on the bunny-hill but totally made it down the big hill a few times before our 2 hours were up.  I only fell a few times and didn't break anything!

The big hill

the bunny-hill

Also, we've apparently been having a pretty warm winter around here.  It has only snowed about 3 times, and it has never stayed around more than a few hours.  Which to me is perfect.  Just enough snow for it to be fun, but not so much that you hate it.

New Years Eve, or Sylvester as they call it around here (I've heard it is because it is the same day as St. Sylvester's Day, a Catholic holiday for a Saint from Germany, but haven't really looked into it), was a lot more fun than we both expected.  We looked up holiday traditions here for New years, and one of them is to watch this short clip, Dinner for One.  It is pretty funny, and apparently they show it on every tv station here on New Years, and it is a drinking game in the bars.  We've heard that everyone knows the lines, and if you walk into a bar and say "Same procedure as last year?"  Everyone, even those who don't speak English will respond "Same procedure as every year!" because of the movie.  Interestingly, it is a BBC sketch that never aired on BBC but has turned into one of the most watched clips in Europe.  We were just going to have a quiet night at home, and were starting to regret not going anywhere.  Then we heard the fireworks.  In our reading we heard that Germans light off fireworks on New Years, but we figured it would be in the main cities put on like fireworks displays in America, where they have a show put on by the town.  Not even close.  Every person in out little town bought dozens of aerial fireworks and shot them off.  It lasted for 45 minutes.  And I'm not exaggerating.  It was incredible.  The church bells rang and the fireworks went off and it was amazing.  We took a video, I'll see if I can get it to work.

New Years Day, after church, we took a side trip to Brussels, Belgium.  We didn't really know what to expect, and it knocked our socks off.  It was an amazing city.  Clean, Orderly, beautiful architecture, great food, chocolates, art, a nice hotel close to the city center.  It was the perfect trip.  We saw some really cool things and learned a lot.  Brussels is NATO headquarters and EU headquarters.  The city is the perfect match of old and modern.  I loved it.

church right behind our hotel

chocolate store

the candy store we bought our candies from.

Colin and his Belgian waffle

it was raining, so this ice rink was half under water, but people were still skating! We saw this one girl fall, she ended up soaked :(

In Brussels they had a ferris wheel at their Christmas Market! We rode it.

Cool architecture.

The atomium.  It was made for the world's fair.  

Out hotel was the one in the middle that says hotel centrale.  our room was the windows right about the word hotel!

The next day we spent some more time in Brussels before heading out to Bastogne to see the WWII sites.  We drove through the town, went to a museum, drove through the forest.  Colin could tell you a lot more about this part.

Colin in front of a tank that was taken out in December of 1944

The house where the German officers lived during their occupation.  It is now the 101 airborne museum. 

Anyway, that has been our holiday season.  Hope you all had a great holiday as well!