Fall, Frankfurt & Frankenstein

I haven't written recently because it seems every time we start planning something, it falls apart at the last minute, but that doesn't mean we haven't stayed busy. I was hoping for several weeks to take a trip down to the Black Forest to see the autumn leaves, but the weather here has been horrible the past few weeks. It's been cold, wet and miserable. Our front lawn is currently a sea of wet leaves that act almost like snow in how slippery and sticky they seem to stay. Fall appears to be just about over here in Germany and winter is quickly approaching. According to most of our friends, winter here tends to be cloud, cold and miserably but not particularly snowy. I personally hope we get some good snow!

Leaves in our neighborhood a few weeks ago.

Last weekend Greg had a four day. If you aren't familiar with the military, four day weekends are relatively common place and happen about once a month, usually around national holidays. Columbus Day warranted a 4 day here in Germany. To celebrate, we had a camp fire at our house, a party at a friend's house and went to Frankfurt with our friends and their children to check out the natural history museum. Germans have no issues with nudity or sexuality, so it was pretty interesting to see a whole area on how babies are made- explained to children- through the use of very "adult" pictures. We also got a good laugh at the American children's responses to said pictures. Needless to say, Germans aren't shy.

Aside from that, there were some pretty cool exhibits about dinosaurs, sea life and oddly enough, preserved human and animal parts for medical experiments (?). Most of the descriptions were in German, so we were a little lost.

Halloween is quickly approaching. Apparently, Halloween is viewed as an American holiday here in Europe and isn't celebrated, but the younger and more "Americanized" generation of Germans seem to be catching on. Our neighbors have warned us that trick-or-treating around our homes will be flooded with confused German teenagers who want to participate in the festivities, but don't really understand the concept of dressing up. In recent years, the very real Frankenstein's Castle, which is about thirty minutes from our house, has started to cash in on the young German's sudden interest in the holiday by having an adult Halloween party and haunted house in October and November. The castle itself is not very magnificent, as it is mostly in ruins now, but it was pretty entertaining to go see how German's try to celebrate the holiday. The party had shuttle buses that proclaimed "This way to Halloween!" and a lot of the Germans dressed up like movie characters. All of the food was apparently supposed to be in some way horror themed, but we didn't always understand the analogies. Maybe they were German horror movies?

Hanging out with Frankenstein's monster at his castle.

The "haunted house" itself was pretty hilarious. In Georgia, I remember friends going to Netherworld every year where you would wait in line for an hour or more to walk through a house where they told you made up spooky stories and tried to jump out at you to scare you. At Frankenstein's Castle, it was mostly just people dressed up in crazy (and sometimes very realistic) outfits trying to touch you. At one point, I got shoved inside a metal cage by two of the actors for trying to out-smart one of them. An older bald man apparently took my earwax and turned it into a piece of amber, which he let me keep. At certain times of the night, all of the "monsters" came together to dance to "Thriller" which was pretty good. Pretty much all of the actors tried to come after me at some point to scare me, probably because they thought I was a 14 year old girl. It was a lot of fun, but kind of pricey so I doubt we'll go back.

 

So, this picture was taken in the pitch black chapel of the castle (one of the only parts still remaining.) I couldn't see this guy standing there until the flash went off, so we all had a good laugh at his great photo bomb.

Also this week, Greg had a very interesting Army experience that I don't think he would have in America. To make a long story short, Heidelberg is also pretty close to where we live and once had a huge military presence. It's a beautiful city that is apparently extremely friendly to Americans and tourists, unlike where we are right now. Anyway, a guy that Greg works with chose to have his re-enlistment ceremony at the castle there prompting a mini work field trip for them, in their uniforms. Usually, it's highly discouraged for them to walk around anywhere in uniform, so the response from the crowd was pretty comical. Greg came home saying that Germans were asking to take pictures with them, stopping to watch and take pictures of their ceremony, and swarms of elderly American tourists migrated over to shake all of their hands. When he told me the story, I pretty much laughed all the way through because I could imagine being one of those prying spectators stopping to get a good pictures. What was more fun was the way he described people trying to "discreetly" snap a photo by pulling out their phones and pretending to be texting or something while pointing the camera at them. I really wish I had gotten to witness this ordeal.


Now that the shut down is over, Greg gets to go back to school again. As much as I'll miss him, I'm glad he's going because we were getting concerned that the longer his classes got pushed back, the more likely they were to cut into Thanksgiving and our trip to Switzerland. As of right now, snowboarding in Switzerland is still the plan for next month. Hopefully, everything will work out. We also have a hotel booked for a four day in January to spend in Garmisch, which should be fun. I was hoping we could go over our anniversary weekend, but pretty much all of December is booked everywhere I looked into going. Next year, I guess I'll have to plan further in advance.

Speaking of planning, I'm crossing my fingers and hoping we can settle on a Mediterranean cruise sometime this upcoming spring or summer. I really want to see Greece and cruises over here are crazy inexpensive, but it always seems that cruise lines try to throw in extra destinations that you really would rather not see along with the best ones. For example, I don't have any desire to stop twice in Turkey on an 11 day cruise of the Greek islands and Greg would prefer to stay far away from the Middle East. The only cruise I've found that met our parameters was through Norwegian, which is more expensive than the European lines. I told Greg when we came to Germany that the only thing I really cared to do here was go on a cruise to Greece. Considering that a week long Mediterranean cruise is about the same price as 3 days snowboarding, I don't think that's an unobtainable request.

LEGOLAND Deutschland

On Saturday, Greg and I went with some friends of ours and their three children to Legoland. Our original plan for this weekend was to go hiking in the Black Forest to enjoy the peak time for viewing the leaves. Unfortunately, the weather called for heavy rain in the Black Forest area all weekend, so we scrapped that plan and decided last minute to go to Legoland. The USO here sells discounted tickets, so both of us got into the park for about the price of one ticket to Six Flags.

It still rained for most of the day, but the rain was usually just a light drizzle. We don't get many heavy thunderstorms in Germany.

The park itself was a bit different than American amusement parks. In America, amusement park rides seem to typically be geared towards older children and teenagers with tons of roller coasters and thrill rides. Legoland, and apparently many of the other amusement parks in Germany, cater more to families with young children. The rides were mostly some variation of a car going around a set track. There were three roller coasters that were all very small and child-friendly. Ironically, safety features in America aren't so present in Germany. Some friends explained to us that at other parks, the rides were often not manned and designed for a parent to simply put their child in the ride, hit a button, and take off. Legoland rides were manned by employees, but some of them were as simple as an individual just waving you to jump off the platform into the moving vehicle. It was much different than all of the safety features we were use to in America.

At one point, Greg was on the most "thrilling" roller coaster with his friend, his friend's daughter, and a friend of the daughter (confusing enough?) when his friend's daughter began slipping out of the seat of the coaster from beneath the bar. When Greg reached around the back of his seat to attempt to help grab her, he hit his hand against a nearby tree. Her dad ultimately held her in the seat until the ride ended and everyone was safe, but very shaken. On a more positive note, the picture taken from the roller coaster camera was probably one of the most hilarious pictures imaginable. Since everyone made it out alive and our friend's daughter was only slightly traumatized, they bought the picture in the form of a magnet for their refrigerator.

I don't really like rides, so I mostly stuck to the kiddie stuff. Greg and I wrote a little car around a Lego safari complete with animals built entirely out of Legos.

It was pretty impressive how everywhere in the park, all of the decorations were made of Legos.

There was also a pretty huge area called Lego City that was nothing but sculptures and replica towns made out of Legos. They had everything from scenes out of the Star Wars movies to a full model airport, multiple castles, a stadium complete with lights and sound and multiple European cities. Greg was really excited about Star Wars, but I really liked the replica cities. I have hundreds of pictures and Blogger takes about 5 minutes to upload just one, so my Facebook album is the best way to see all of the Lego town goodness.

All of the seats were filled with little Lego people wearing their team's  colors.

The drive there and back was three hours, so it made for a pretty long day. We didn't get back home until almost midnight. On Sunday, we both woke up feeling like we had been binge drinking all day. I'm sad to say that I'm not quite 24 and I'm already too old to stay out past midnight.

Next weekend, we're hoping it will be nice enough to go hiking, although I'm guessing most of the trees will have lost their leaves by then. Also, we just started planning our first out-of-country/overnight trip to Switzerland to go snowboarding over Thanksgiving weekend. Greg's three-week long class he was supposed to attend last month was postponed, so he will most likely be leaving again soon. As sad as I am to see him go, I'm going to enjoy some solo travel while he's gone. I'm tired of hanging out around our house all the time.

DIY Cork Board Map

When we moved into our apartment, we had more furniture than could fit in most of our rooms. The only exception was our dinning room, which seems to be designed for a family of eight living in our two bedroom apartment. Seriously, it's bigger than both of our bedroom and has nothing but one tiny little eat-in kitchen table sitting in it. The dinning room in our last apartment was probably a fourth the size of our current one and was off-set by a large bay window area. Basically, it was a giant window with a table next to it. Not only do we have a big empty room, but we had a huge space of chalk-white walls with no decoration. It made me sad.

So, I got on Amazon and ordered a $10 "vintage-style" map to Modge-Podge onto a cork board to take up some of the space in our unnecessarily large dining room.

I could have done without the National Geographic logo.

I picked up a framed cork board on-post. Living overseas, you have to work with what you can get. There were cheaper boards on Amazon, but none of them would ship here on Prime and it wasn't worth it to pay the shipping. There was a grand total of one type and size of cork board at the store. If I was in the States, I probably would have just gone to Home Depot or a craft store and had the exact size cut and the map would have probably turned out better. Also, I could not get regular modge-podge, so I had to make it myself.

I also cannot write properly on chalkboard

Since my cork board was just slightly too small, I had to trim the map down. This didn't turn out too great at first, but after modge-podge-ing it onto the board, you couldn't notice my lines were slightly uneven. I may go back and paint the edges of the board and make it even less noticeable.

After gluing the map on, I ended up with a few creases. Most of them are over ocean area, so they aren't very obvious. I wasn't thrilled with how it turned out, but for less than $25 for the whole project, I can't complain too much. Since this will most likely end up ruined in our move back to the States anyway, I'll probably end up redoing it a little more accurately in the future.

Yes, I did add Greg's deployments

The map is 2 ft by 3 ft and is still dwarfed on this giant, empty wall, but it's getting somewhere. Eventually, I plan to surround it with pictures to help fill up a little more of the void. Now, all we need to do is actually travel some places so I can use up some of these extra pins!

Off Topic: I love my husband

Ever since we've been in Germany, it seems like we're constantly meeting people who have such difficulty in their marriages. Never have I encountered so many couples who bicker and argue at each other over absolutely nothing. Words can't describe how entirely out of place I feel when I'm surrounded by women complaining about how they don't get along with their husbands. Greg has commented how strange it is to him that men will look forward to going to training or to the field so they can "get a break" from their families. It seems like a foreign concept to actually enjoy spending time together with your spouse. Some days, we feel very out of place.

I'm not saying we don't have our moments of getting on each other's nerves, but I'm extremely thankful to still have such a great relationship after three years together.

Frankfurt Auto Show

After a bit of a break, I've finally gotten around to blogging again. It's been a pretty crazy two weeks around here and we've been spending a lot of time at home, but things are starting to settle down and we're getting back into our usual routine. On Sunday, we took a trip to Frankfurt to the big international auto show at the Messe Frankfurt.