Monday, December 14, 2009

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!

Sunday, December 13, 2009

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.