Thinking Happy Thoughts

Some days, living in Germany just really, really sucks. I'd like to think of a more eloquent way to put it, but there just isn't one.

Greg was assigned today to a month long duty in January that requires him to be within 3 hours of post at all times. It wouldn't be so bad if, you know, I hadn't already booked and paid for a 4 day snowboarding vacation in Garmisch for MLKJ weekend. I get it, the unexpected is part of "army life", but that doesn't make it any less irritating. Plus, from the second you step off the plane in Germany, everyone is telling you how you need to go travel. Then, the second you do attempt to travel, the Army makes other plans. We almost didn't get to go to Switzerland because of his school and now we probably won't be going snowboarding again this winter between his extra duties and my new job.


Instead of being frustrated, I'm going to attempt to be positive and think of all the good things we have going on right now. Today, we custom ordered a 2014 Jeep Rubicon X from ENCS. While Greg was still in Afghanistan, he expressed a desire to trade his car in for a Jeep again. Most of you know, when we met, Greg had recently bought a Rubicon and managed to win his first date with me by offering to take me for a ride in it. I know, it sounds incredibly cheesy looking back, but I'm sure girls have fallen for worse things than that. After moving to Colorado, Greg traded his Rubicon in for his GTI which he's loved, but also outgrew. We were planning on trading his GTI for another Jeep when he returned from deployment last year, but changed our minds when Greg received orders to Germany. Having a VW in Germany seemed like a much better idea than a huge Jeep. For that reason, we left my Jeep Sport with my Dad in Georgia and only shipped his GTI.
After spending a few months here, we started to rethink our decision. Sure, the GTI is great for small parking garages, but it's also quickly depreciating in value and our financial situation is not permanent. Right now, we both have good paying jobs with benefits, very few bills and disposable income. That very well may not be the case when we return to America, and we know it. We have always talked about eventually getting a larger sized Jeep as a "family" car and realized that we're better off taking on a car payment while we can still afford it. Will the Jeep possibly be a little inconvenient here in Germany? Probably, but we know our situation here is not permanent and we still have the "beater" BMW we bought when we got here. Ultimately, we decided to buy the Jeep because we want it for the future and would like to be able to pay it off before we leave Germany.
Because it was ordered from the factory, we won't get to pick it up for a few more months when it comes to port in northern Germany. Once we get it, I'll have plenty of pictures to post!

Today, I also got a letter in the mail from the 4 year old Nepalese girl I sponsor through a charitable organization. I've sent her a few letters and gotten some updates from her caregivers, but this was the first letter I received from her. It was just a very simple page allowing her to circle pictures that showed things she like to do and eat. Even so, it helped to put a smile on my face this afternoon.

She drew me a flower.

Greg completed his GoPro compilation from Zermatt which you can view here. I tried in vain to link it directly into the blog entry, but it wouldn't work properly. Fair warning, it gets really loud after the first song.


We may be taking a day trip close by this weekend to celebrate our anniversary and my birthday. Since Greg can't leave the 3 hour radius, we'll probably visit Trier, a city in western Germany known for his Roman history. Others around here have told us that it's a cute city to visit with a lot of interesting things to see, so we're hoping it will be worth the drive!

Christmas Markets

Let me start this post with some necessary disclosure: We don't celebrate Christmas.

Actually, we don't really celebrate holidays at all. Greg grew up primarily celebrating Jewish holidays and I hate holidays for personal reasons. I don't talk about religion, so we'll keep this short and sweet.


A lot of people we met here told us that their favorite part of living in Germany was the Christmas Markets. Basically, a Christmas Market is the exact same thing as the festivals they have from Spring until Fall except they serve gluhwein instead of beer. Gluhwein is essentially just mulled wine. It comes in red, white and apple, as well as some other regional types. (Greg swears they all taste like Tamiflu, which I don't understand because I thought Tamiflu was only available to adults in capsules...?) We both agree that apple is the best of the bunch, but is still basically just hard spiced apple cider. You could probably get the same experience from warming up some Strongbow.

Our first Christmas Market experience was last weekend in our town. We met some friends down there and it was a pretty good time. Christmas markets, unlike the festivals of summertime, are more similar to craft fairs. There are a lot of vendors selling overpriced trinkets. I'm okay with admitting that I am extremely cheap and would never partake in buying things other than food at a Christmas market. The food, however, is pretty similar to anything that you'll get at any festival all over Germany. We had, you guessed it, bratwurst with curry ketchup on a roll. They were serving lamb wurst the night we went, which was a nice change of pace. They were also selling potato pancakes with applesauce which we had to get since we didn't make latkes at all this year. Aside from that, we drank some gluhwein, hung out with some friends and walked home. Pretty average festival night.

This weekend, we went to nearby Frankfurt for their Christmas market which was massive. However, it was the exact same ordeal, just different scenery. Same booths and trinkets, same food, same giant crowd. It was a fun time but honestly, I'm totally unimpressed with the whole Christmas market thing. I'm actually shocked that people find Christmas markets to be the most enjoyable part of Germany. The weirdest part to me is that people around here actually go around visiting different town's Christmas markets all through December. I can understand going to the local ones within your area, but I wouldn't be willing to take a trip from where we live to say, Munich, just to go to a Christmas market. No thank you. I could get the same trinkets and bratwurst here within the three major cities in my area.

Basically, Christmas markets can be fun for the experience of drinking outdoors, but we weren't impressed by them at all. Festivals in the summer are much more enjoyable for us because they are less focused on purchasing things and more on enjoying yourselves. The festivals we went to during the warmer months typically had entertainment, rides for children and a greater variety of foods and drinks. However, it may be that others find so much enjoyment in Christmas markets because they have an over-all love of Christmastime in general, but that's obviously not us.


Next week, we plan to skip out on the Christmas market scene in order to spend money somewhere that I'd much rather: Ikea. Back in Colorado, Greg had a nice locker at work to store all of his Army nonsense. Since we've moved here, his Army stuff has slowly spilled from our tiny closet, to our bedroom, to our spare bedroom and is now taking up all of our storage space. My goal before going back to work full time is to organize our mess and hopefully get rid of some of the junk we've accumulated. I know I haven't officially announced it, but I will be finally going back to work full time very soon. Once I have the paperwork in hand and details about my start date, I'll give more information on my new position. I will go ahead and say that I am VERY excited to go back to work doing something that I love.

Greg did light the candles for Hanukkah one night this year, but sadly no latkes.

Zermatt, Switzerland and Snowboarding the Matterhorn

Before I start what is about to be a very long and in depth post, Greg and I had a really awesome time on our snowboarding trip to Zermatt, Switzerland. The weather was great most of the time and we got a lot of great pictures and GoPro videos. It was a wonderful break from Germany that left us really missing Colorado and my Jeep. By the time we got home, we were both exhausted and ready to sleep for a full day straight. After the jump is all of the details of our trip and some advice for anyone planning a trip to Zermatt or Switzerland in the future.

Nuremberg and Our First Train Experience

I have been a miserably bad blogger recently. I currently have at least 3 posts saved as drafts that I have yet to finish. I'd like to say that I have been busy lately, but that's not entirely true. Although I have been somewhat more busy over all, I also had enough free time to binge watch all of Dexter on Netflix last weekend and feel horrible about myself afterwords. One of these days, I may just pick up a hobby that doesn't involve my computer.

Anyway, Greg left several weeks ago to play Army at a school in Bavaria. He's nearly done and has been very proud of himself for everything he's accomplished, so we decided to have some fun this weekend while he was off. We decided to head to Nuremberg!

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.