Bad Blogger

It's true, I've been pretty horrible at updating recently. Within the next week, I hope to finish 3 posts that I'm drafting about our recent adventures. I swear I didn't completely give up blogging, but we've just been extremely busy!

As a sneak peak of what is to come, here is a picture of a giant pig made out of flowers.

Does it creep you out? If not, it probably should. That thing is terrifying.

Day Trip: Idstein Spring Festival

For the past two weeks, it's been unusually sunny, warm and beautiful here. This weekend, on the other hand, was the exact opposite. On Saturday, we got caught in the middle of a hail storm, something I have never witnessed outside of Colorado. When I say "hail storm", I don't mean the typical strong thunderstorm with accompanying hail that was more common in the southeast, I mean that it went from being sunny and calm to 30 mph wind gusts with pea sized hail stones (no rain) within 5 minutes. We just so happened to be leaving the store with a car load of groceries when it started. I always assumed the reasoning for the hail storms in Colorado was due to the high altitude and inability for the hail to melt into rain before hitting the ground, but that wouldn't explain why it suddenly hailed here. Welcome to springtime in Germany, I guess. It was obviously the best weekend possible to take a trip to a Spring festival a few towns away.

Local: Fasching (or Fasnacht Day) 2014

I remember when I was very young living in Pennsylvania and "celebrating" Fasnacht Day. For my non-German-American readers, Fasnacht Day is better known as Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Carnival or, more simply put, the day before Lent begins. A fasnacht is like the German equivalent of a King's Cake, for lack of better comparison. It's a huge, fatty doughnut possibly made out of potatos. As a kid, I don't remember doing anything for Fasnacht Day other than acknowledging it. I'm not sure if I've ever actually had a fasnacht, but I would probably take a whoppie pie from an Amish bakery before a fasnacht anyway.

A few months ago, we were over at our friend's house flipping through a catalog about happenings in our area when I saw an advertisement for a Fasching cruise. I immediately asked if Fasching was the same as Fasnacht Day, and no one seemed to know what I was even talking about. Turns out, Fasching is basically the German Carnival and Faschnut Day is, of course, still the Tuesday before Lent right in the middle of the Fasching celebration.

Fasching is basically a giant, week long party here in Germany. Most of it involves dressing up in costumes (like Halloween), parades, heavy drinking and breaking glass all over the streets. Occasionally, you'll also see young men trying to persuade women to kiss them, but mostly it's just drunken craziness in costumes. Yet somehow, it's also relatively family friendly.

London Trip for Valentine's Day 2014

This past weekend, Greg and I visited London! No, it wasn't technically "for" Valentine's Day, per say, but this year Valentine's Day fell on the Friday before President's Day, meaning that it happened to be the first day of a 4 day weekend. Since we won't get much time to travel very far in the next few months, we decided to jump on this opportunity to take a trip we've been discussing since we landed in Germany: a trip to the UK!

I could probably write a post for each day we spent there, because we crammed so much stuff into 3 days. Instead, I'll try to limited it to the basics.

Good Things Come

I apologize for my lack of blogging recently! We have been rather busy,  but not with anything particularly interesting. However, we have a lot of fun and exciting changes coming our way soon, which we are thrilled to share with everyone!