Christbaum Day!

Monday, Dec. 17, 2012

This morning, Brad and I woke before the girls and walked to the grocery store around the corner.  I was extremely proud of myself because no one spoke English in there and I still managed to get what I needed!  I had to ask at the bakery about milk in the bread and Brezeln (pretzels) and order some salami at the deli.  My German was good enough to get us through!  Learned a good lesson, though.  Never buy more than you carry home a half mile.  Ha!  Brad warned me in the store but what did I care if I had him to do my carrying?  We bought a few things including these items:

Mustard and mayo in tubes, but the mustard is the blue one!  American  ketchup and Spezi, a soft drink which is a mix of cola and orange pop!

Brad was picked up by his coworker who took him to get a rental car. I made a delicious German lunch of Spaetzle with onions and some little German sausages. There are so many varieties of sausages over here and I have no idea what they were! But they were good.

Brad brought home our AMERICAN car (I was looking forward to a BMW, but it's ok!!) It's rather large for over here and an automatic which is nearly impossible to find. So even I might drive! But that is a scary thought.

We decided to go back to the Christmas market in Augsburg. We wanted to visit when there are less people there. We got some treats...a long licorice for Lea and one of those traditional gingerbread cookies for Lainie (no milk!!) and of course some more hot candied almonds.

We purchased a few more souvenirs including a glass candleholder with Augsburg pictured on it and a smoking man. A smoking man is a traditional Bavarian Christmas item. It is made of wood and looks similar to a nutcracker. He has a hole in his mouth and you put an incense cone inside him and light it. Then the smoke comes out of his mouth! We saw one last night at our friends' house and I knew I needed one. Lainie found one with a little piggie at his feet. I managed to break the piggie off so I figured we better buy that one. I also picked up another cute candleholder and went to look at the bottom for a price. Little did I know there was melted candle wax in it that I spilled all over the display. Brad was quite thrilled to be seen with me. Oh yeah, my purse also knocked over a little teapot at the smoking man booth.

See where the piggie used to be?  We will glue him back on!

On our way out we bought a little pretzel ornament. Because we had to.

We stopped at a flower shop around the corner from our house and got a Christbaum! (Krissed-bawm is how you say it.) Our first real tree since Lea was a baby! We picked a little one to fit in our little house. It fit in our trunk!

When we got home, I went next door to our landlords' house because they are letting us borrow a stand for the tree and some lights. She also had some ornaments we could use if we wanted. But since my lovely friend Anja bought us a little set at Ikea, we didn't need any. We just used her red beads. Turns out the stand does not hold much water. We found this out the hard way. Tree all lit up and decorated and 1.5 liters of water pouring out. Great. Got that cleaned up and now the tree looks great!! And smells great :)

We met our friends Soeren and Anja and their daughter Antonia at their house before going out for dinner. We have missed them so much! Antonia is 4 now and was so excited to show us her room and her toys. She has at least 7 million little horsies!! We walked around the corner to an Italian place. Soeren said the pizzas were personal sized, but I think we could have split one!! I had salami and onions as did Lea (with no cheese), Brad's had salami, peppers, mushrooms and Lainie ate spaghetti. It was really delicious!! It was another fun night catching up with dear friends. We are blessed to know so many people over here!

We are now trying to plan a trip. We had planned to visit Orange, France for Lainie because there is an ancient Roman theater there that she really wanted to see. But we found out that the drive through Switzerland is not good at this time of year and they often close parts of the road due to snow. We are nervous about taking that risk. The train there would cost us almost 1000 Euros :( Not sure where we will end up! But hopefully it will be a wonderful place.