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!