Decorating for the holidays

My brother and his family are coming to stay from Switzerland, so mom has put me to work. Decorating the tree, the house, wrapping gifts. It was all so exhausting. And as any expat knows, when decorating for the holidays you sometimes need to be creative with what you have, as many of the common things found at home are unavailable, hence the pine tree branches that I tied to the windows and decorated with ornaments. I rather like the looks of it.

German menus

My German may be improving, but my ability to read menus is still very elementary. I can only comprehend every 4th word, which explains why I'm always surprised by whatever I order. Take today for instance, mom and I had a lovely lunch at a local gasthaus, I ordered sausage boiled in wine, with pickled onions.... Lots of pickled onions, in fact that was the unexpected surprise, I didn't understand that part of the menu so I just ordered to see what would happen. The same for dessert, I understood gingerbread, orange zest, and chocolate.... Totally missed the part that I was ordering gingerbread ice cream with oranges and chocolate sauce on the side. Oh well, it was all very tasty and a lively surprise. The rest of the day was spent shopping at a market in Ansbach and pricing lederhosen ( just out of curiosity.... Honestly it's too expensive to buy for a mere whim). Tomorrow my brother and his family are coming to join us, but I have a lot of decorating to do before that.

Just a boring day in Germany

Today I decided to catch up on rest and help mom around the house. We set up the Christmas tree and began to decorate the house. Later we hit the market for supplies for Xmas dinner. I loaded up on gluwien and gummies, just in case there is a blizzard I wanted to be sure the necessities were on hand.

Prague to Nuremberg

Headed back to Germany today, but not before checking out the art nouveau architecture of the main train station. It was stunning, but sadly that part of the building hasn't been well maintained over the years.

Ps. The funky glass building is the dancing building design by Frank Gehry, it is supposed to resemble the curve of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing together.