It's Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas

I believe the Christmas season, at least for Todd and me, has arrived!  The Dutch are in full on Sinterklaas celebrations (my next post will be devoted to him), but I'm looking toward Christmas.  To get in the Christmas spirit, I am once again listening to my NSYNC and Glee Christmas albums.  Seriously, how can you not get warm fuzzies listening to "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays"?  I have also begun to decorate our home. We brought our stockings along, so those are hanging over the fireplace.  We had our first snow in the Netherlands yesterday.  It was very fun to look out the window and see snow. Dare I say I missed it?  However, my love of the snow was zapped when I needed to take my bike out in it.

As a work-from-homer and only part-timer, I can typically arrange my schedule to avoid needing to ride my bike in terrible weather.  But yesterday I happened to have a meeting with the internship coordinator at Philips.  This meant hopping on my bike to get to his office about 4km away. Not far normally, but a tad sucky when traveling through a blizzard.  Thankfully, I arrived early to my meeting and could dry myself off in the bathroom and look somewhat presentable.  It continued to snow a soggy, wet, drippy variety of snow both ways on my bike.  I snapped this pic when I got home:

I was drenched, and promptly put on a nice warm sweater.  So life wasn't so bad after all.

This past weekend was another excellent "get in the spirit of the season" opportunity.  We went to Cologne to check out the Christmas markets.  Cologne is about an hour and a half from us, so we went for the evening.  Cologne has 5 different markets set up throughout the city with a different theme at each one.  We made it to 4 of the 5 before Todd was on Christmas market overload and we went home.  We began at the market that is situated under the amazing Gothic cathedral, the largest in Germany.

This particular market was the busiest by far.  So busy we could hardly even get to the booths to buy our gluhwein!  Gluhwein is what the hot mulled wine is called that everyone drinks in the market.  It is especially fun because each market sells their gluhwein in a different mug. We have a nice little collection of Christmas mugs now.  After the Cathedral market we went to the market in Old Town, the market at the harbor on the Rhine river and then the Market of Angels.  Along the way, we put together our dinner from the various food stands.  Sausages, potato pancakes, toasted almonds...we tried a lot.  

Market #2

See my cute mug?

Ferris wheel in the middle of the market.

Amazing that these are all temporary structures!

Take your pick of sausage.

Ice rink.

Market #3, Harbor.

Market #4, Angels.

The atmosphere was lively and fun, we had a great time!