Enlightenment!

"Did you know that Donatello came almost 100 years before Michelangelo? I always thought that Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donetallo, and Raphael were all around at the same time and fought crime together."
- Der Junge, Florence, 07 May 2013, 6:42pm

New posts....

Guten Tag! I'm on a much needed blogging update frenzy as we are about to enter the much anticipated Spring and a whirlwind of traveling adventures to come!

Just added:

Cologne (added 16 March 2013)
A big little reason to give Thanks! (added 16 March 2013)
Christmas market time! (added 16 March 2013)
Stuttgart Christmas Market! (added 16 March 2013)

And expected soon:

Ulm and Aalen with a visiting friend!
Munich with a visiting friend!
Return to US for Christmas
Baden Baden -das Mädchen's birthday -February 24

Future trips on the books:

Dresden -Easter

Prague - Easter

Florence - May 

Our wedding in Jekyll! - June

Munich Oktoberfest -Sept 22

Croatia - October

Stuttgart Christmas market!

aaaahhhh!
technology failure alert!

Alas we have no photographic evidence of our wonderful trip to the Stuttgart Christmas market.

My camera as they say in Germany went "kaputt" before we even arrived (i.e. the battery died)...so we took pictures with der Junge's phone... and then in January his phone went kaputt, and we lost all of the pictures! Schade!  (this will teach us not to wait so long to update our postings!)

Result: all we have to show for our Stuttgart Christmas market experience are our Glühwein mugs

this is what it looked like... and it was really an incredibly fun experience...

Stuttgart Christmas Market

So then there is always next year (perhaps we can get to the Nuremberg market next year)!

Christmas market time!

Germany is famous for its Christmas markets (Weihnachtsmarkt). The history of Christmas markets in this region goes back to the late middle ages.  Just about every town in Germany has some sort of Christmas market and they are a BIG deal, very fun and basically a great excuse to drink Glühwein (hot mulled wine) and eat giant spicy hot dogs in a festive outdoor market.  The best markets are in the bigger cities, like Ulm.  They basically run daily for the whole month of December until Christmas.  There are tons of open-air stalls with Christmas decorations, handmade crafts, and seasonal food.  Our first Christmas market was in the nearby town of Ulm.  Many of der Junge's colleagues live in this town as it is a bigger town than ours but within an hour commuting distance.

So much fun!

So we initially had great plans to visit the famous Nuremberg and Munich markets, but alas, due to the Kiwi Fiasco in Cologne, we scrapped the plans. New plan is to get to the Stuttgart market!

Look for the post to follow!

A big little reason to give Thanks!

We have exciting news to share that we have a brand new little nephew!

Happy Birthday and welcome to the world little guy!

Cologne (aka, Kiwi is not invited on any more trips)

So this is not a happy post unfortunately.

Our trip to Cologne was a big expensive disappointment. Not by the fault of Cologne, in truth it seemed a pretty cool city, but for Kiwi....

(turns out her separation anxiety is a bigger issue than we realized)

Suffice to say,

we got to see the train station.

the hotel.

the Dom Cathedral (across from our hotel).

and the Europcar Rental office. (to end our trip early...)

the beautiful, historic Dom hotel

our room

bathroom

if we only knew!

Dom Cathedral

Losses: 

Portable dog crate

the Dom Hotel's television remote control 

Tickets to the Kölner Haie 

Nonrefundable room (for check out a day early)

Nonrefundable train tickets 

Lessons learned... no more Kiwi trips and lots more training

Oh well!!!

Roman Holiday!

Finally! Our long-anticipated trip to Italy... an entire week in the "Eternal City" 

Buongiorno Roma!  

Zurich

Kiwi and I travelled by ourselves (my first time navigating the confusing train system without der Junge! aah!) from our town via train and 2 transfers and 5 hours later we finally arrived in Zurich. Where we met up with these two strapping young Alpine men...

visit to the Friseurin

aka, my first haircut since I arrived in February...

so for me, getting a haircut can be a little scary... I have had some real disasters in my past with some pretty awful haircuts...

and that is when I could speak the language of the hairstylist!

Well, unfortunately I missed my opportunity while in the US.  So despite warnings that I would end up with a mullet (there are a shocking number of Europeans sporting mullet hairstyles, it does nothing to alleviate hairstylist fears!), I decided that I had to do it, and so I did, I got a haircut in Germany!

and it turned out pretty cute, if I do say...  I brought in a picture of Heidi Klum (pictures = 1,000 words right? and she has a beautiful hairstyle and she's German so I thought maybe I would get some bonus points? :) So the picture did help and it wasn't so bad... I could basically communicate with the picture and hand gestures in place of poor language ability. I guess now I don't need to wait so long!

haircut! hallelujah!

Atlanta trip ~ my brother's wedding!

We flew back to the US, to Atlanta, for my little brother's wedding! It was the most beautiful wedding.  I'm thrilled for my brother and so happy to have a new sister, especially one as great as she is! She was a beautiful bride and my little brother looked all grown up and so handsome!  They got married on the back lawn of a lovely house near the beautiful historic Marietta square. The reception dinner catered at the house had the most amazing Southern food. Below are pics taken by their wedding photographer. It was a lovely wedding and they are a beautiful couple!  Congratulations to A & K! (it's so hard to write this without saying their names!)

Heidelberg, Part Zwei

So yes, we have already been to Heidelberg, but that was in February and it was so nice... and for three Saturdays over the summer, the town "lights up" the Heidelberg castle and sets off fireworks. Well we missed the Fourth of July so it seemed a perfect reason to go...

Wir grillen!

So we brought our American grill to Germany and then we learned that German gas canisters do not attach to American grills... :(
But we are neither the first nor the only ones to bring a grill here from the US and we found a German company who makes parts that connect the German canister to the American grill!  Woohoo!
Except, due to unfortunate translation error, we ordered the wrong one and subsequently missed half the summer grilling season trying to get the right one!

Johannisbeeren

Only in Germany... hand-picked Johannisbeeren from a German friend's back yard!  There were so many berries that she invited me and several others to help ourselves.  It was such a nice way to spend a beautiful sunny day.  I have never had a garden but this experience makes me see the appeal of having your own garden.  It feels so "living off the land" healthy and you know that the food is good and organic.

Führerschein

The rule is that a US driver's license is valid in Germany for 6 months with no paper work. So tourists need to do nothing. Then, if you are are here longer than that, you can file an extension for another 6 months, giving you 1 full year that a US driver's license is valid.

Getting a driver's license here is a fantastic display of bureaucracy and showcase of German rule making. Not to mention it can cost well over 3000€ and take somewhere around 6+ months. That"s not to mention the mandatory driving classes, the safety instructional classes, or the first aid seminars offered only in German.

Since I would be here for over a year, I was saavy and motivated to avoid the standard process for getting a drivers license.

It"s easy! And you can to!

1000+ page views

Modest though it is, we passed a milestone for page views. As of this week, our 1001 Swabian Nights has been clicked on over 1001 times!

Good work.... mom.

Berlin

We were inspired to book an ICE ("fast") train to Berlin for a weekend visit.  Der Junge's parents who visited us a few weeks ago took an ICE train from Dusseldorf and gave the train great reviews.  So we decided to go while we have the nice weather in summer (Berlin is much farther north and colder in the winter!).  We found a great saver fare that would get us there in 8 hours with only one train change.

How To: Drive through the Iberian Peninsula

You may have heard that I had a few troubles getting a license here. In March, when we booked the trip to Portugal, Das Madchen was more confident that I would have my license in time for the June trip. Apparently she did not know how easy it was to get a license here!

So, when June rolled around and I still didn't have a license, das Madchen became die Chauffeurin for 20 driving hours, 600 mile journey through the poorly labeled, in accurately GPSed, windy, narrow, and- generally- scenic trip from Lagos to Salamanca to Porto.

Salamanca

With das Madchen's fingerprints firmly imprinted on the rental car steering wheel steering, we arrived in Salamanca. In fact, the reason we chose to do this road trip was because mein Bruder and meine Schwägerin were spending a few weeks in Salamanca as chaparones for their high school, Spanish summer trip. We arrived later than expected because someone wasn't driving at an optimized speed.

"Salamanca" in Spanish means "The Land of Overexposed Church Pictures"

Cáceres, Spain

Shortly after crossing the Portuguese/Spanish border, we stopped in Cáceres, Spain... for lunch and also to take the advantage of exploring this amazing UNESCO world heritage city.

Cáceres, like Evora, is not a major tourist spot and has next to nothing written about it in tourist information websites.   We picked these cities to visit because we needed to drive to Salamanca from the Algarve, Portugal and they happened to be en route.   Our happy discovery was that they both turned out to be quite remarkable cities because they are authentic and off the tourist path!

Évora, Portugal

The drive from Lagos to our next stop, Évora, took us into the heart of Portugal, the Alentejo region. This is a sprawling, rough and rugged countryside with almost every type of terrain... mountains, hills and plains. Despite that the Alentejo region contains about one-third of Portugal land, it is the least populated at 7.1% of the population. The popular phrase here is, "Alentejo, where even time takes its time."

...and we did spend some time here!!!

Alentejo 3 by Cevron Guy

We were on the most barren stretches of country road that I have ever seen. Not a soul in sight... It was a little disconcerting and der Junge can testify that I was more than a little nervous about the state of our rental car (tire conditions, brake conditions, amount of gas...). Der Junge had his work cut out for him to distract me from all the "worst-case-scenarios" running through my head...