Our first German Christmas was nice. We shoved all the boxes against the walls and carved out a little cubby in the living room to do Christmas morning (which actually turned into Christmas-Morning week as C was content to open one gift at a time and play with it for a while before opening another. I don't think he opened his last gift until after our trip. Christmas dinner was a simple one, and although we missed our extended family, with whom we usually celebrate, the Mcs were all together -- and that's something to be thankful for considering how many of the last few Christmases D's spent in another time zone.
We ignored all the unpacking for Christmas day, spent Boxing day in Ikea, and ingnored the unpacking some more the day after as we loaded up the orange box and headed south to Nurnberg and Rothenburg.
Nurnberg was really good fun.
The things we did were by and large rather kid-friendly (the toy museum, the train museum, the zoo) and could have been in any city, but we got to see a good chunk of Nurnberg as we walked between attractions. Our second morning we toured the castle and climbed to the top of the Castle's Turret. *Mental Note* -- Climb no more twisty, narrow, steep stairways unless DADDY's the one wearing the baby.
Day three found us in Rothenburg, which according to Rick Steves is the best preserved example of a medieval walled city. The wall is completely in tact and you can't drive in the city. It was cold cold cold cold cold that day and there were still lots of tourists out, so I can't imagine the throng in the summer season. It's kind of tourist-trappy as there's store after store of clocks, nutcrackers, ornaments etc. Some, actually made in Germany, yet many others made in China to look like they were made in Germany. This one is by far the most famous.Seems like every city/event has some kind of food that it's associated with, and yep we try them all -- in Berlin it's the Currywurst, in Nurnberg it's finger bratwurst, in Bavaria in general it's apple strudel and vanilla sauce, at the Christmas markets its warm waffles and gluwein, and in Rothenburg it's the Schneeball (German for snowball). Trust me, if you ever go to Rothenburg...... Skip the Schneeball.
It's not near as good as it looks. It's really pie crust shaped into a ball and dusted with powdered sugar. Go for a strudel or a kuchen or a piece of cheesecake or a good beer, but skip the shneeball, even C was less than impressed and only ate a few bites, which is a shame because we spent the whole morning bribing him into compliance with the promise of the schneeball to come. [We thought it was fried dough, donut style]After Rothenburg it was off to the largest exchange in Europe so that D could buy a TV (yeah an all day affair, should have seen him trying to fit it in the box with the stroller, the pack-n-play, the suitcases and all the rest of the gear)
Then, we headed home. However, the roads had iced over and before the sakt trucks got to them, someone on our stretch off the autobahn had an accident. All traffic had to exit, except off course for the traffic that had already passed the last exit. (Exits on the Autobahn, btw, are pretty far apart, so we had to creep quite a ways before we could actually clear the traffic jam. So yes, the drive home which should have taken 2.5 hours took 7 and we welcomed 2009 en route.
The kids, however, hung in there gamely (except of course for C's potty emergency in the traffic jam when he refused to go on the side of the road like all the other menfolk) and handled the travel/touring far better than I had anticipated. Which is good, yes, as we hope to be doing alot more of it in the months to come.
I think we're settled enough that the blog is back, so keep checking back to see what we get into.
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