Winter Wonderland

Before you even know it, it's Christmas. Well, not really, the chocolate santas have been in the stores for months and at the end auf November the light pollution increases tremendously, but anyway, the last few weeks before Christmas pass like a flash.

Over Christmas I went to visit Barbara and her family. Barbara had just arrived from the US a few days before and is now Master of Science... (actually she could go and earn the money now and I would become the houseman). Anyway, since Barbara hasn't been home for about 16 months we decided to spend Christmas Eve at her family. A colleague of mine at Hocoma is Dutch and drove with his car home over Christmas and since my girlfriend lives close to the border to the Netherlands it was perfect for me.

I arrived in Bedburg-Hau some days before Christmas and tried to get used to my "jet-lagged" girlfriend. We did a lot preparation for the different Christmas dinners and I was able to help some in the kitchen with the cooking and so on, which is more an honor than anything else to me.

One day we had really nice weather and made an awesome walk in the winter wonderland. I uploaded some of the pictures and see for yourselves - even without snow this is incredibly beautiful. The day before Christmas eve, the whole family came together and we went to Bochum to see the musical Starlight Express. It was a surprise of Bärbel and Udo (Barbara's parents) and it was really really nice, even though they sang in German.

Christmas Eve was one thing and that is long. We had Raclette for dinner around six and went to church around nine. Usually the service at church is earlier than nine, but due to some church changes in the area, there was only one service and that was at nine. This is not really a bad thing, however, the service ended around midnight... After that we went home and had a Feuerzangenbowle and started to unpack the presents. There were quite a few people and thus there were a whole lot of presents which were unpacked one after another. We finished with all the presents around 3:30 am and went to bed. The next day some friends of the family came over and we had a brunch and ate and talked some more.

The next day Barbara and I went to my parents' place and after that to my grandparents before we drove with my brother and my sister in law to Stuttgart. From there we took the train to Zurich, where we stayed one night and the next day we rode the train to a friend of Barbara's -- but more about that in my next post.