Anyone up for some Curling?

Last night was Martin's lab's Christmas party. They started off with a potluck dinner and secret santa gift opening, then we all boarded a bus ... and a train ... and then another bus to get to the sport center in Wallisellen where all the curling magic happens.

Here are Nikko and Martin with their road sodas:



In case you had any doubts, yes, it was still snowing. Here are the 3 guys Martin shares an office/lab space with, from right Mattias, Julian, and Oliver (not the guy in the background texting). Oliver's girlfriend is next to him but she was the only girlfriend that was brought along, then there was me and one other wife and that was it for significant others.



They're all either Swiss or German.

There were about 35-40 of us going curling so we rented out the whole place, though it only has 4 lanes. First we had to do some exercises to learn how to curl and then we got to play for real. It was really fun but boy that ice is slippery. A lot of people fell but nobody got injured. I think we all have bruises on our knees today from kneeling when pushing off with the stone.

Here's Martin lining up his shot:



And the action shot (see his right knee on the ice, that's where the bruises are):



And the follow through:



Here's our team doing some sweeping while I helped out by taking a picture of it:



We ended up tied 7-7 at the end of our game. We had a pretty high scoring game compared to the other 3 groups.

After curling, it was time to hit the bar that was there. It had a glass wall overlooking the curling rink so it was neat.





I would highly recommend curling to any of you! It was a very good time.

Some Christmas Lights

Today I took some pictures of some of the Christmas lights in Zürich. Some of them are only a little blurry!

Here is one street (the street that my German school is on actually):



And here are a few shots of Bahnhofstrasse, the main high-end shopping street:





And the lights on Bahnhofstrasse twinkle! Like stars. I think it would be neater if they were red, orange, and yellow instead of white, light blue, and dark blue, but that's just me.

A Tour of Göttingen

On Saturday morning we went on a guided tour of Göttingen with our hosts, Fritz and Antje and their little boy David. I got very little out of it since it was all in German and there were ~25 people in the group and we were on noisy streets most of the time so I couldn't hear the tour guide. But Antje and Martin translated some of it for me so I can talk about some of it here.

Here's a shot of a street in Göttingen. It's quite a cute town and it has lots and lots of stores:



Here are Martin, David, and Antje on the tour (David really liked Martin):



Göttingen has a population of 130,000 and 30,000 of those people are students at the University there. So a large part of the tour was of the University. The Brothers Grimm were professors there. And the tour also included the student jail! The jail is just a bunch of little rooms with uncomfortable wooden beds in them where bad students were locked up anywhere from a few days to a few months. There were lots of drawings on the walls:





And here is a cute building that the guide talked about but I have no idea what she said:



Later that night Fritz and Antje had some friends over for dinner (meat fondue, yum). Actually most of the guests were their children! Fritz has two older children, Johanne and Ruben, and Antje has a teenage son as well, Jakob. The other guests were an older man named Martin and his son, Loren (probably not spelling that correctly). Martin (the older one) and Fritz toured the US together several times during the 80's and Fritz lived with Larry and Frankie for about a year in MA in 1986. Towards the end of the evening the slides came out and we got to look at pictures of everybody from 25 years ago. Crazy. Anyway, here are Fritz and David watching Loren play a video game:



Here is the wood stove that Martin and I plan to purchase for our future home:



And here are the two Martins:



The older Martin looks exactly the same as he did 20+ years ago except his hair is gray now.

Christmas Markets!

A very popular thing to do during the month of December in Germany and Switzerland (probably Austria too but I'm not 100% sure) is to hang out at Weihnachtsmarkts (Christmas markets). They are made up of little booths that sell handmade goods or German food specialties, carousels and ferris wheels, and one even had an ice skating rink. It's just a good time for all. And don't forget the Glühwein! Glühwein is a hot beverage made from wine (red or white). You can get it with rum-soaked cherries in it too which is what Martin and I decided was our favorite derivative of Glühwein.

We went to two Christmas markets in Cologne (there are four there total but it was too cold for us to venture to all four in the few hours we had in Cologne) and one in Göttingen. Each market has its own feel and personality, so to speak. The booths are all coordinated and the lighting is themed differently at each market. And the goods and the foods are different as well, though obviously every market has some Glühwein, crepes, waffles, and let's not forget the bratwurst. The market in Göttingen had half-meter long bratwurst!

Anyway, here's the first one, which was next to the Cologne Cathedral. This is only the entrance to it, it extends in a star shape all around a big stage where there were musicians playing Christmas music:



Here is my first taste of Glühwein (and yes it is on a star-shaped table):



We ended up stealing mugs like these from the Göttingen Christmas market though it's not actually stealing them because you pay a deposit for them when you order the wine.



Here's the nut booth:



And a pic from the inside of the market:



The booths contain things like wool scarves and sweaters and mittens, chocolates or nuts, christmas ornaments (wooden or shiny/sparkly), candles, ceramics, wooden toys, jewelry, and glassware. All of it is unique and in most cases the artists are working on new pieces right in the booths - blowing glass or carving wood or etching drawings into things.

The second market we went to in Cologne was much prettier and more atmospheric than the first one. It did not have as many booths with goods in them but it had many more booths with food in them. Here we got some meat on a stick for dinner, followed by spätzli with fresh creme and herbs as a side dish. I didn't take many pictures here but the lighting was much prettier. There were lanterns that looked like candles in some of the trees (big trees too, it was beautiful) and many trees were lit with spotlights of different colors.

Here are some brass musicians that were playing Christmas music ... some of them had no gloves on!! I couldn't feel my fingers and I had gloves on. I also can't imagine that you can keep an instrument in tune in such bitter cold but they managed okay. Behind them is a statue of something or other, and behind that you can see a church that was very pretty in the moonlight (or maybe it had a spotlight on it?). When I return to Cologne next year to attend the other two markets that I missed this year, I will venture into that church to see the inside. You can also, in the picture below, see a bit of a tree that was filled with dangling hearts. Fun.



Here's a blurry pic of some of the lights:



I didn't take any pictures of the market in Göttingen, sorry. It was raining and I was drunk off Glühwein with rum-soaked cherries in it. It wasn't as pretty as the Cologne markets but the town of Göttingen had many decorations and lights in the streets so that was nice. I'll show a pic or two from Göttingen in my next post.

The Cologne Cathedral

Know what it was like in Cologne? Freezing cold, that's what. It was somewhere below freezing with a strong wind and therefore a significant windchill. Anyway we arrived around 3pm and immediately got ourselves to the famous Dom to get a pic of it before the sun set:





It's black for several reasons. #1 because the train tracks used to be right next to the cathedral and all of the black smoke from the engines discolored the building and #2 because people used to heat their homes with coal and that smoke also discolored the building. I think it makes it look neat but since people no longer heat with coal and the trains no longer run right next to the cathedral the stonework will slowly be replaced with new clean stones and the blackness will be gone.

The inside of the Dom is enormous (obviously not as big area-wise as Saint Peter's but definitely close and it might be taller on the inside but it probably just looked that way due to the architecture or something like that that I don't understand):



Inside the Dom, you could see your breath. It was the coldest church I've ever been in and I have no idea how anybody could sit through a mass in it.

There are beautiful windows of stained glass, more than I've seen in any other church I think:



I really liked the bigger scenes, this one's a little blurry but you get the idea:



Then they let a modern stained glass artist do one of the big windows and this is what he did (I think it's great because it's fun and it's totally different from all the religious scenes you always see in stained glass):





The floors were made up of intricate mosaics:



And look at all the prayers being sent to the Virgin Mary! I've never seen such a large area filled with candles in a church before.



And of course all the dead archbishops of Cologne are buried in the Dom so you can see their tombs as well.

Grittibänz

Grittibänz are sweet little men made of bread. They are made here around Christmastime and they're awesome. They are Switzerland's version of gingerbread men except they're much doughier and not made of gingerbread but instead of sweet buttery bread.

The one below is smoking a pipe (which is not edible) but they also come holding bunches of twigs or a block of chocolate. And when you eat the chocolate with the sweet bread it's the most delicious thing on earth. Sometimes they have bits of sugar sprinkled on them, like the one below, and sometimes they don't. It's not really sugar, it's like the frosting on a cinnamon bun ... so it's sugar mixed with something that's really bad for you but tastes really good.

Here's the one I brought home today, and I would like to note that this is the first time I've gotten one home intact! I almost always eat at least the head off on my walk home from the store while it's still fresh.