Holidays, Traveling, and some other stuff

So I'm officially on vacation. No more lessons, no more kids, no more droopy, sleepy eyelids. It's nice to not have to worry about being places at certain times, having all of my work done, papers printed out and copied, taking attendance, dealing with noisy kids, and keeping track of everything every class has done. I will say I was pleasantly surprised at how good some of my classes were, given the stories I'd heard from teachers and other assistants. I remember well the days leading up to vacation (in high school, since college was final exams) and how hard it was to get work done. So props to some of my classes for that. Enough about school.

It snowed! This is not a common thing in Normandy, so of course all the kids were excited and throwing snowballs and getting soaking wet. It'll most likely be gone by the end of the weekend, since it rains and it's not really very cold here. But it was nice to have some white on the ground to make me feel like it's winter. I don't know how I'll be able to deal with a green Christmas.

But on the more fun side, we went to Germany last weekend! Left on Saturday from Rouen, dark and early in the morning, to go to Paris and catch the high speed train to Frankfurt. A 4 hour train ride isn't bad for that distance, and the tickets were cheap. Plus, look who we found!



Austin! What are you doing in Germany, silly man? Oh, work? Oh, we'd planned to meet up with you? Well, OK. So after we dropped our stuff off in the hotel room, Austin brought us to the Christmas market. It is amazing. It's festive, it's pretty, there are tons of people, and lots of hot delicious food and drink. As Austin had been several times already, he knew the best places to get wursts and glühwein. So I got a currywurst, Lisa got bratwurst, and Austin had a bratwurst too. They're hot and fresh and they come in a little roll. So yummy. We wandered through the booths looking at all the crafts and food and clothing that you can buy. Lisa bought some gifts to send home, whereas us men just ate food. We bought some candied nuts, which were also amazing. There's a trend with the foods you can buy at the market, in case you hadn't noticed. There is nothing bad to be had. Nothing. After some shopping, we got some glühwein in little Frankfurt Christmas market 2009 mugs. You have to pay for the mugs but you can reuse them anytime after. We saved them for souvenirs. It's totally worth a couple euros to have 25cL of hot wine, especially when it's cold. After getting our fill of market and wursts and wine, we headed back to the hotel to watch curling.

Later that evening we headed out to an Irish pub to watch the football game and have some drinks. No pictures, but we definitely had a good time and found that we could speak English and no one cared. They actually have bartenders from Ireland come down to work at the pub, which is nice. They also had a great selection of English and Irish drinks, so we enjoyed those. A good day, all things considered.

On Sunday, we had breakfast at a little cafe, and I bought some chocolates. We then wandered though some of the other parts of Frankfurt. It's full of skyscrapers, nice cars, and open squares and parks. Somehow, we managed to find ourselves back in the Christmas market, eating wursts and sweets and drinking wine. Funny how that happens. Early in the afternoon, Austin had to head to the airport to catch his flight, so we saw him off at the Hauptbahnhof. We did a little bit of window shopping, and some real shopping, then took naps at the hotel. And again to the Christmas market for dinner, some more pictures, and even a ride on the carousel. We saw some ridiculously German people, heard a few people from other places, and generally enjoyed ourselves.

On Monday, for a change in our routine, we went to the Christmas market! Just kidding, that's all we did in Frankfurt. It being our last day there, we had to go spend our few remaining euros, so we did. Well worth it in our opinion. We took the train back to Paris, and had an amazing run through Paris to catch an earlier train back to Rouen. 22 minutes from Gare Est to Gare St. Lazare. We rocked it!

My weekend in Frankfurt set a good precedent for the amount of awesomeness I plan to have on all of my future travel weekends. Let's just hope I can live up to it.

Here are some pictures from the weekend:

The Christmas market in the evening. So pretty.



Lisa riding on the carousel. That crazy girl!



There are some gorgeous half-timbered houses that surround one of the market squares.



Just a pretty picture of the tree that overlooks the main market area.