Froehe Weihnachten

24 December 2008- We have returned from the fatherland, Germany or Deutschland. We journeyed by TGV (love the fast train) and were sitting in Burger King in less than 3 hours. I know we shouldn't eat fast food but as Chad rationalized "We don't have Burger King in France and the French certainly wouldn't want you to have it anyways but theirs." The picture above is actually our second stop in Germany, Munich. Blogger seems to mix up my pictures after uploading. Anyways the view from the hotel was great.

Of course we enjoyed beers. This was our only MaB or liter enjoyed. You see I got and shared an earlier gift with Chad: A wicked head cold with a runny nose. What a loving wife I am? Awesome gift, at least we had planned ahead and had some cough drops, extra tissue packs and english-speaking pharmacists available. But no Nyquil was packed. We took in the dunkel beers at Hofbrau Haus with some pretzels and Kartoffelzuppe (potato soup). A Bavarian band complete with accordion and tuba played throughout our lunch. Just prep work for our next year's trip during Oktoberfest.

Check out the size of this groBe Bretzen. It was tasty and mustard free. Plenty of rote bratwurst was also consumed. Even for breakfast. I had to have Berliners in honor of my puppy dog, Berlin, back home. When he was incredibly silly, I would call him Berliner or jelly donut. And the best smell of the markets was the hot sugared nuts. I would have my house smell like that all the time if I could. Yummy!

Of course with all that bread in my tummy and a runny nose, I needed a hot beverage. Gluhwein (hot spiced wine) is the speciality and served in lovely mugs of lots of varieties. I only ended up bringing one mug home, got the deposit back on the others....

We were supposed to try skiing but with the headcolds, we decided to take in extra marketing and hotel sleep time. The Mercedes museum was awesome and of course ends up in the store. Of course, their store is also the show room. We will have visit Stuttgart again after the 31st of January when the Porsche museum reopens after remodelling. The BMW museum was closed on the day we visited but we still enjoyed the showroom-store. Chad pre-visited the place where you can take delivery of your new BMW. He swears he will return...We shall see about that.

A very successful trip especially for getting in the Christmas spirit. We shopped a bit but mostly consumed our purchases. I used a bit of the rusty German and caught myself several times "oui"ing instead of "ja"ing. Lots of smiles. We even found a woman who knew how hot it can be in Arizona. No one in France evens knows where Arizona is...

I will say this, the Germans are joyous, love love love Christmas and are a bit goofy. I never saw so many adults and teenagers in the light up Santa hats in all my life. And this is from a girl who has a friend who's dad is Santa Claus.

We got home to Junior today. The stinker did shred some envelopes and started on a few of the presents. We have to wait for La Poste to open on Friday to retrieve our packages that came in our absence. I cooked a truly french dinner for us. We popped our Christmas crackers to wear our crowns and now have cheesy toys to taunt the cat.

We are looking forward to sleeping in late in our own bed after hearing the bells ring out at midnight. Froehe Weihnachten, Joyeux Noel and a Merry Christmas to you all.