Visitors

Well, I haven't mentioned all the fun visitors we've had the last couple of months.

The day after we arrived home from Florence, we picked my dear friend Marcy up at the airport. I was so much happier than I even realized I would be to see one of my girls. Marcy was here for Sylvester, or as we like to call it, New Year's Eve. We were invited to spend Sylvester with a couple in our neighborhood that we've become friends with - he is Belgian and she, Turkish. They had several of their German friends over as well, so with us Texans, it was quite the multicultural celebration.

The fun thing about New Year's here is that it is the one time of year (or one of a few) that fireworks are totally legal - within the city limits even. So at midnight, the sky went nuts with all the fireworks. We walked out into the street and had such an amazing show just from all the neighbors.

Here we are with the city of Heidelberg behind us...
















A couple of weeks later we had my cousins Carolyn and Ryan in town for a quick weekend trip.
Ryan just turned 12 and it was time for her to catch the European travel bug.

We visited the Cologne cathedral, one of the largest in Germany. We climbed the 509 steps to the top of the bell tower and saw 24 ton St. Petersglocke, the largest free-swinging bell in the world, along with some really amazing views of the city.

Then, Mark came to visit for a quick weekend. We had a fun time in Miltenberg and the Kloster Engelberg.
Last Saturday, Steve's cousin Jessalyn who is studying in Oxford was in Heidelberg visiting some friends for the weekend. We picked her up, stuffed her full of schnitzel and strudel and sent her back to England. :)

Today, we are headed to Austria for a little skiing...hopefully. The weather forecast is not so great right now, but I'm hoping for miraculous blue skies and powdery snow when we arrive. Happy Leap Day.

Helau!

We also attended the local Fasching parade Sunday afternoon with our neighbors and some of their friends. Fasching is essentially the same as Carnival or Mardi Gras. Mainz and Cologne have much bigger Fasching celebrations but we were content to enjoy the smaller, more intimate, Heppenheim version. The parade was not so different than any typical small town parade, complete with marching bands and drill team-esque dancing girls, floats that advertise local businesses and political issues. One float actually had palm trees all over it and someone translated the German verbage for us to say something like, "If we don't save the planet from global warming soon, there will be palm trees in Germany". At that point, I could no longer feel my toes in my sadly un-insulated tennis shoes and palm trees in Germany didn't sound half bad.

Langnese has a distribution center on the outskirts of town and they seemed to be using the parade as an opportunity to unload excess inventory. Along with the little candies that are typically tossed by the passing parade floats were whole icecream bars and, in some cases, whole boxes full of icecream bars. While I was busy pondering whether the people around me were completely insane (because they were opening said icecream bars and eating them in 30 degree weather), one of them pelted me right in the eye from a passing float. I thought I might have a black eye to show for it but it turns out I was just being dramatic.

We enjoyed ourselves, even if we were the only ignorant Texans, horribly inadequately dressed, surrounded by Germans wearing four layers of ski gear (literally).

Oh, I almost forgot - Helau - it is apparently a standard Fasching / Carnival greeting used in Germany that doesn't sound so unlike Hallo - the standard everyday German greeting. Everyone in the parade that wasn't playing an instrument would wave and yell "Helau!" as they passed us by. I couldn't help but think of this Seinfeld and laugh.

There was lots of American music (as always) but none took me back to a high school football game as much as this (yes, they are dressed as nuns and monks)...

Here are a few more of the fun and interesting Fasching sights.

You know you're an expat if...

...the first football game you see all season is the Super Bowl. Even more so, you're watching kick-off at 12:30am, can barely survive the 1st quarter and go to bed oblivious to who won.

We did enjoy our first dose of American TV in quite some time. We don't have the AFN (Armed Forces Network, which would afford us loads of standard American programming) at home because we figured we didn't come all the way to Europe to sit in front of the tube watching Desperate Housewives. One of Steve's co-workers hosted a Super Bowl party and I think that some people actually stayed to the bitter (or not-so-bitter if you're a Giants fan) end somewhere around 3:30am. We enjoyed watching Paula Abdul's big comeback along with all the usual pre-game stuff. We stayed for the first quarter, tried to tough it out to half-time, but the bags under my eyes finally started to embarrass Steve enough to leave.

We had fun but needless to say, I will be glad to see my bed tonight before the am hours.

No, we have not fallen off the face of the earth...

If you think you are the only one that has been wondering what in the world happened to our blog, you're not. We have received many questions, complaints and even a couple of threats. I had no idea we were so popular!

Honestly, I think we did so much over the Christmas holiday that I was completely overwhelmed by the thought of trying to re-count it all. But, it's February 1st and I can hold out on you no longer.

First off, Christmas in Italy was - well - perfect. It was unconventional and a little strange at times - but pretty much perfect.

Below is the Coliseum on Christmas Eve.

We also visited Vatican City on Christmas Eve. In the midst of making travel plans, I was so concerned about getting to the Vatican on a day when everything was open that it somehow escaped me that Christmas Eve is one of their top 3 busiest days of the year.....woops.

We showed up about 10am to a 3 hour line, literally wrapped around the city. A nice (and by nice I mean scary) Irish man offered to let us skip in line with his "tour guide" who had been in line all morning and would save us about 2 hours of waiting.....for a fee of course. We negotiated a few bucks off his "fee" and hopped in line fully expecting it to be a total scam and planning to bail on the tour once we got inside. We figured it would be worth it just to not have to wait. Turns out the guy is a student in theology and art history. It was honestly one of the best tours we've had in all our European travels thus far. I would love to recommend the company to you if you happen to visit someday. Unfortunately, I think they are totally under the radar and you will just have to look for the scary/nice Irish man.

I knew nothing about the Vatican museum before we showed up and was happy to have a thorough explanation of how the museum came to exist, all of the precious artifacts it contains and, most importantly how the Sistine Chapel came to be. Here is a bath tub that belonged to Nero made of rare (now extinct?) Egyptian marble that is estimated to be worth half a billion (yes, Billion) dollars....

Feed a small country? Perhaps.

We toured the museum and saw Michelangelo's famous ceiling, got disconnected from our tour group, barely got to breeze through St. Peter's before they shut it down to get ready for Christmas Eve Mass.

We stopped for a late lunch just off the square where I had quite possibly the most delicious lasagne ever and snapped this photo...

We finished the day wandering Rome one last time before hopping a train to Florence the following day. Perhaps you're thinking we should have stayed for mass. We were told that over 60,000 people show up at about 10pm to angle for the "cheap seats" and wait for midnight mass. Well, we're not Catholic, and waiting two hours with thousands of people, in the cold for something that wasn't going to hold a whole lot of meaning for us just didn't sound like fun. We opted instead for a dinner of baguette, cheese and wine in our room, playing Texas Hold'em and watching Star Wars in Italian. How's that for starting new traditions?

More to come soon on what we've been up to lately - I promise.

In the meantime, a few photos of beautiful Rome -