Christmas Fun!

Ice Skating at the Landesmuseum with Brooke and Bridget. I am so happy to have started working at ICS to meet these two ladies! I got a little too confident ice skating this time and bit it hard. It hurts a lot more to fall than when you are little. We had a great girls to celebrate Bridget getting out after having beautiful baby Oliva two weeks ago. She looks fantastic by the way for just having a baby. We enjoyed the night with ice skating, gluhwein of course, and a yummy pizza dinner at Santa Lucia.
First snow of the year. This is the back of my school after about an hour of snow. After two days of snowing we had about 4 or 5 inches. Too bad they don't cancel school here, Fairfax County would have been canceled for the week.

Zurich singing Christmas Tree. We enjoyed the festive children singing German Christmas songs after the Zurich Christmas parade last weekend. This singing tree is modeled after a singing tree that use to be in Mall of America....wierd that the Swiss would copy that!

The beautiful streets of Zurich all light up. I love Christmas time!

First night of ice skating at the Landesmuseum. This was Thanksgiving night (pictures are not in order). Mandy, Miran and I showed our stuff on the ice while Zann watched our purses. Then we went out for my kind of Thanksgiving feast at http://www.zeughauskeller.ch/ for some wiener schnitzel.

Mandy, Miriam, Me, Barbara

Pretty cool ice skating rink! Well this is the picture from the Internet because you couldn't see the lights as well from my camera but it was a sight to be seen. There are restaurants, bars, and fire pits set up around the ice skating rink. I think most people were there just to drink and watch people like me eat it!

Christmas Market in Colmar

Welcome to France!! Last Saturday we took a day trip to Colmar France with Mandy and Nathan. We woke up early and took the 9:00 train and were in France by 11:00. How cool to just get on the train and be in another country two hours later!Here we are crossing into France. After walking through those doors you were not in clean Switzerland anymore. The bathrooms definitely did not meet the high Swiss cleanliness standards.

Colmar is famous for their outdoor Christmas market. There were five different markets around the town. It was a great way to spend a Saturday. Unfortunately the stuff looked like it was straight from the dollar store. But we found plenty of chocolate and gluhwein to buy!!

We took the train with Many and Nathan and Nathan's boss Hakan and his wife Jasmin meet us.

My heaven!! The best chocolate in town so we just had to get a bunch to try!

Bread anyone?

Since the trinkets were lame we decided to eat and drink our way through the market. More gluhwein of course and flammekueche (Tarte Blambee in French). It is very thin dough covered in creme fraiche, onions, and bacon. It is a speciality of the region and sooo very
yummy!

Freshly made crepes

Colmar was such a cute town. It was so much fun just to walk around and look at all the shops.

Zann's new friend

Centerpieces for the Sullivan Family Christmas Party?!?

This is the restaurant we ate at. We were taking the 7:30 train back to Zurich so we needed to eat an early dinner. Well all the restaurants in Colmar are closed until 6:30. This was the only one we found open and good thing we did because the food was amazing!

It was so beautiful when it got dark and the lights came on. All the streets were decorated with lights like this.

Random Pics

Uetliburg again. It was foggy in the city, but we could see the mountains great.

The signs on the tram warning people to not saw the seat, play the guitar, or to be broke on the tram.

In the background are the wine boats. Their are 7 boats tied together with wine vendors all over the place. After a small cover charge, you could try as many wines as you wanted and be on a boat.

Some friends at Uetliburg at night

Mom and Dad come to Switzerland

I was sooo happy to have Mom and Dad come visit last weekend! We had the best weekend and it felt like we had not moved half way across the world. They landed Friday morning while I was at work so Zann was nice enough to take the day off to show the in-laws around.

First stop, Uetliberg to see the Alps. I was not very happy to be at work instead of going to my favorite place in Zurich.

Hiking down the steep hills can be harder than going up

Saturday we headed out to walk to the lake and explore the city.

Beautiful, Beautiful Fall day in Zurich

Mom loved the fountains

Shopping for chocolate

Pizza Bretzel Pit Stop

Happy hour in the old part of the city

Beautiful view of the river, city, lake, and Alps

Swiss style dinner at Zeughauskeller! We all got Wienerschnitzel and Rosti and good German Beer.

Never far from the laptop :)

Sunday football and snuggies after a long hike to Kusnacht

The trail to Kusnacht trying to find our way to the lake.

Piano Man

Virginia one day and Elton John in Zurich the next! Elton put on a great show! We had been looking forward to going to this concert since June when Zann bought tickets for our early birthday presents. We started the night off making our own cocktail party on the tram with a bottle of wine and continued to enjoy ourselves singing along all night!!

And a beer was only 7.50 CHF. That's cheaper than a Miller light sold by Dan Snyder at a Skins game.