Monday, December 3, 2012

Let it Schnee!

This is what my life looks like right now. 
Beautiful? Absolutely.
From inside of a nice, warm house.

I've decided that the snow and I are going to have a love/hate sort of relationship. There are going to be days where I arrive at the bus stop only to realize that the bus isn't due for another twenty minutes, and as I sit shivering in the FREEZING cold I'm going to curse myself for not Au Pairing someplace warmer, like Greece.
When I'm walking the boys to school and I can barely keep my eyes open because massive snowflakes are attacking my face I'm going to think of hot, summer days, and palm trees.
However,
I'm hoping the snowmen and sledding and snowball fights and ice-skating help remind me every so often that I've been wanting to experience a white Christmas for as long as I can remember.
I'm sure the Gluhwein and Christmas Markets won't hurt either :)

Herman the Snow Man gets all the ladies with his super cool mustache.

So I was lucky enough to have a SECOND mini-sort of vacation while my host parents were in Istanbul for a week at the beginning of November. The boys went to stay with their grandparents and I had the house to myself. I was hoping to go to Salzburg, Austria during the week, but didn't quite make it there. But I did make it to Schloss Neuschwanstein! 

Walt Disney's inspiration for the Sleeping Beauty Castle. No big deal.

I played princess for a few hours, staring up at the castle every little girl dreams about, and then headed home to hand out candy to the ONE group of trick-or-treaters who came to my door on Halloween. I had a big bowl of candy set out for three kids. I was probably their favorite house on the street though because I gave them each massive handfuls of chocolate and basically poured the entire contents of the bowl into their bags. Lamest Halloween ever.
But.

 What Halloween was lacking we more then made up for it with our friends Thanksgiving!

 This is our fabulous Turkey made by two people who have never cooked a Thanksgiving meal before in their entire lives. And it was one of the best Turkeys I've ever had.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not the most enthusiastic cook and that you can usually find me anywhere BUT the kitchen, but for the first time in my life I helped to cook Thanksgiving dinner :)
 To my mom and step-mom: it only took me flying across the world for me to finally stumble into the kitchen. And you would have been so proud! I made homemade cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and a pineapple casserole, with the invaluable help of my friend Siobhan. Then I got really crazy and bought a SINGLE box of Betty Crocker cake mix and a SINGLE carton of icing for TEN EUROS, and made heart-shaped chocolate cakes. I tried not to think about how much that would have cost me back in the United States as the lady was ringing up my purchases. It was worth it though; it tasted a little bit like home. 

What would an American Holiday be without Macaroni and Cheese??

Not too shabby for a bunch of Au Pairs :)

 It was Thanksgiving a little bit modified. There was no parade or football and we drank Gluhwein instead of Apple Cider. Our Thanksgiving wasn't really even on the right day, but before we began to eat we went around the table and all said what we were thankful for, and by the time we were finished we were all in impressive Turkey comas.

The cure? A bonfire with (extremely hard to find) marshmallows, a walk around the block, and multiple rounds of charades.
To my friends and Tiffany's host family: I'm thankful for having met such wonderful people to fill my holidays away from home. I couldn't have asked for a better German Thanksgiving.
And I've decided that spending eight hours in the kitchen cooking a massive dinner can actually be pretty fun and satisfying. Who would have thought :)

 Happy Thanksgiving!

This last week my friend Tiffany and I took two of the little boys I Au Pair to the zoo on a school holiday. It was freezing cold outside: the only animals out of their little houses were the cold-weather friendly ones, the elephants and the goats. It would have been a little disappointing except that one of the elephants had just had a baby, and nobody can feel let-down while watching a baby elephant wave its cute, little trunk around in the air.

This is the first time I'd ever seen a baby elephant in person. Trust me when I tell you that its every move was well documented.

The zoo had set up a petting enclosure with the aforementioned goats just inside the entrance of the park and I though it would be really cute to take pictures of the boys feeding and petting them. This plan was immediately thwarted by Franz who fell asleep in his stroller on the train ride to the park. One minute he was babbling away and the next minute I look down and he looks like this:
Keep in mind that this is about eleven o'clock in the morning. You have to be careful on those trains. You close your eyes for one second and then the next thing you know you wake up seven stops past your intended destination. Lucky for him he was in a stroller :)

So Karl and I braved the goats on our own, which ended up being quite a terrifying experience. You would think, given the fact that it's a children's petting zoo, the goats would be the cute, innocent ones with tiny little beards. These goats were on steroids, or at least a handful of them were, and the big brutes chased away the friendly ones. Karl had a bunch of goat food in his hand and we ended up simply throwing it in their faces because I didn't want them to get too close. They then tried to eat our map of the zoo once the food was all gone, and were starting to eye Franz's little fingers before I decided that it was time to leave . Needless to say we spent about a minute and a half in the goat enclosure. True, fearless champions.

 
If you look really closely at the bottom, right-hand side you can see our souvenir of our goat encounter.

There was also this really cool, love-lock bridge on the way into the zoo.
I'm fairly certain Prague has something similar: couples engrave a message or their names onto a lock and then fasten it to the bridge. Karl and I tried to count how many locks there were before we eventually gave up and went with ganz viele. Too many to count.

I was going to try and write about Christmas time in Germany in this blog update but I've decided that I have much more Christmas to experience before I record it for all posterity, and that it deserves a post of its own. That's how awesome it is.

Things I have to look forward too:
Christmas with my host family.
New Year's in Berlin with Shandi and Alexa.
Packages from home.
Cookies!
Ice-skating.
Christmas Markets.
Gluhwein.

And in 54 days...LONDON! I can't even begin to explain how excited I am for this trip.

Also of note: last Wednesday I went to see Jason Mraz with my friend Shandi and it was incredible. Not only was he an amazing performer, but we were in the front row and were shown on the big screens behind the band numerous times because the camera man was standing right in front of us. I could almost touch Jason as he sang "I Won't Give Up", which pretty much just made my life complete.

“Another year is fast approaching. Go be that starving artist you’re afraid to be. Open up that journal and get poetic finally. Volunteer. Suck it up and travel. You were not born here to work and pay taxes. You were put here to be part of a vast organism to explore and create. Stop putting it off. Take pictures. Scare people. Shake up the scene. Be the change you want to see in the world.” - Jason Mraz