Goslar, Duderstadt, and Osnabrück

Hello and happy 3rd Advent! The past couple weeks have been really fun. Because we had rented a car to get home from Frankfurt after our Italy trip, we decided to take advantage of the fact that we had a car at our disposal for 24 hours. We took about an hour drive to a town called Goslar, which is in the woods and up the mountain aways. We had heard it had a great Weihnachtsmarkt, which is why we chose to go there (I will talk more about Weihnachtsmaerkten later). It was truly magical in this hidden away medieval town and the lights, music, and Kinderpunsch (non-alcoholic version of Gluehwein, which is like wassail) were all amazing. After a few Brats, mugs of Kinderpunsch, and candied hazelnuts, we headed back to Goettingen. We are planning on taking Tom there when he comes here (in 6 days!!!).

Last Friday (the 5th), Mom, Kara, and I went to cute little town called Duderstadt, which is an hour bus ride away from Goettingen. Rosmarie, a cute older lady in our branch, lives there with her husband and has wanted us to come visit her so she can show us her home (built by her husband) and around the town. We toured the extremely oldRathaus, including the jail cells and torture chamber below. Rosmarie's house itself was very cool and had an amazing yard and is a state-protected wild-life environment because of the unique and old trees and at least 51 different bird species. Her husband (Aloys) had built many birdhouses and we just sat at the picture window and watched the birds for like an hour. It was amazing- we saw a woodpecker and dozens of other colored and interesting birds. And there was a beautiful pond with fish in the yard as well .Rosmarie showed as pictures from her wedding 8 years ago to Aloys, and we thoroughly enjoyed hearing stories about her and her husband's life. She is originally from Canada. Rosmarie herself speaks like 7 different languages and is the unofficially appointed translator for anyone in the branch during church, including some French-speaking investigators we have attending the branch right now. The day concluded with a delicious meal she made for us and singing Christmas carols.

Last Sunday, I had 6 of my friends from my German class (which I am not continuing because the next term started 2 weeks ago and doesn't end until February) over for dinner. A group of them all rotate who cooks Sunday dinner, and I had volunteered this time. I had been blown away by the incredible pizza we had tried all over Italy and I wanted to recreate it. It turned out pretty well- I made one pizza with fresh tomatoes and mushrooms on top, another with ham, and the last with olives and peppers. The family was a big help too and overall, it was a really fun evening, especially because I got to see these friends again and I got to tell them about my Italy trip. It was also kind of exciting to find out that we had progressed so well as a class, that they had all skipped the next class and gone to B12 instead of B11.

This weekend, my family took a 25 hour trip to Osnabrueck, which is where Dad served the first 6 months of his mission (33 years ago). He wanted to visit the couple people he still knows there before we go home and we haven't been able to make it work until now. We took a 2-hour train ride and got there in the evening, just as they city was coming to life with the magic ofWeihnachtmarkt. Weihnachtsmarkt , for those of you who don't know, is like, better than going to Disneyland. It is in like every German town and varies between them all, but they all comprise of tons of little kiosks set up all around the main downtown of a given city, where you can buy a variety of different foods. I've mentioned some already, but you can also get crepes, chocolate-covered or candied fruits, hot cocoa, fried cauliflower, fried mushrooms, okay pretty much anything fried, any type of nut or candy, etc. Besides food stuffs, there are people selling a huge variety of handicrafts, from wood-carved ornaments, to blown-glass figurines, to intricately-cut paper lamps, to delicate candles, to all types of jewelry, the list goes on. Anyway, it's not onecertain thing about Wiehnachtsmarkt that makes it special, but just the general splendor of all the lights, decorations, holiday smells, and merry-makers out after dark.

We met Joe Kaiser (a missionary who served here the same time as Dad and then ended up moving back here and has lived here for the past 30 years) at theRathaus, as he had just finished giving an English city tour of historic Osnabrueck . Him and his wife showed us around the town a bit and we climbed a 32 meter tower in a church which looked over the city. They also took us to all the best stands of where to find the best brats,Knuedeln, and roasted chestnuts, etc. They also were so nice to let us sleep at their house that night.

The next morning, we visited Ingrid Reinke, a sister in the ward here who Dad knows through her (late) husband. She and her son were incredibly nice to feed us a delicious meal and we had a great time talking with her- she is such a sweet lady. We then went to their ward Christmas party where she played the angel in a re-enactment of the Christmas story. Dad played one of the 3wisemen, last minute, and the highlight for me was the 2 missionaries playing the camel accompanying the wisemen ... Also, Joe Kaiser played his flute, and then... our family sang Angels We Have Heard On High (in English) and didn't botch it up too bad, considering we didn't know we would be doing it or practice at all :) Afterwards, I got recruited to take some family photos of theReinke's, upon sister Reinke realizing her whole family was there and I had a camera.

Overall, it was a really fun Christmas program and day. We walked through the Weihnachtsmarkt on our way to the train station and then headed home. A short but fun trip.

Tonight we are just back home in our cute apartment and we are discussing the rest of our plans while being in Germany- hence why I have so much time to write this blog entry :)

Viele Grüβe

Emily

Italia!

Hello! I am so excited to tell you about our family trip to Italy! We left last Tuesday around noon (I left my last day of class a bit early and met the fam at the Bahnhof) and took the 2 hour train ride to Frankfurt. We then took a one hour shuttle bus to the Frankfurt-Hahn airport, and then the 2 hour flight to Rome, where we took a taxi to our hostel, arriving there around 11 PM. Surprisingly, we were not so dead tired by that point that we wanted to just go straight to bed... Temptingly, Rome's oldest gelato factory was right across the street from us. We grabbed some of that and than wandered over to the Colosseum. To see it lit up at night was fantastic, especially the juxtaposition of this ancient structure sitting amidst the blearing night traffic whizzing by all around it. We went back to our hostel, which was really nice.

The next day we had a marathon day in Rome, first visiting the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, then jumping on a Bus city tour where we hopped off at the Vatican. We tackled a sizable fraction of the vast Vatican museums and were struck speechless (and crick-necked) after taking in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We then had some lunch (pasta) and then headed for St. Peter's Basilica. I remember being stunned by the size and dark magnificence of the cathedral in Koeln a few years ago, but St. Peter's was.... ethereal. The bright white and colored marble and just the sheer space was overwhelming. We saw the beautiful Pieta by Michaelangelo, which is a statue of Mary cradling the crucified Christ in her arms. Next we went to the Trevi Fountain where supposedly, if you toss a coin in, it promises a return trip to Rome (I threw in about 10, just to make sure). We got some gelato and then walked over to the Pantheon. The ancient architecture was amazing- there was a big hole in the ceiling for light to come in and to show what time of day it is. The incredible part is that for the keystone of a domed ceiling to not be there, it is still to standing today. Of course the interior was completely transformed into what it looks like now when the Catholics destroyed all evidence that it used to be a temple devoted to worship of pagan gods. Kara, obsessed with Greek and Roman mythology as she is, was in denial of this fact and was re-titling and re-imagining all the Christian statues and paintings as possible mythology scenarios... in an only slightly sacrilegious way.... :) It was dark by this point and so we meandered through a couple piazzas and then got some dinner at an Italian restaurant (I guess Italian was an unneeded adjective) and I had this amazing lasagne.

The next day we caught an early train to Pompeii. It was gorgeous and green and relatively warm there and it was one of the highlights of the trip for me: it was hard to grasp how old and well-preserved the city was. We were able to see the remains of mosaic floors, frescoes, pillars, pottery, and countless homes and civic buildings up to the bottom of the second story. The higher stories had mostly been made of wood as opposed to the stone and brick of the bottom story, which is why nothing very tall survived the volcano or the nearly 2000 years since. We saw some bodies that had been found too; that is, holes that were filled in with plaster to reveal that a body had been there. One of them, though most likely crouching from the heat, to me looked like he was praying. We then spent a few hours in Naples and went to a museum that had more antiquities from Pompeii.

On the 3rd day, we were in Rome for most of the day. It was pretty rainy, but we braved it and took a tour of the inside of the Colosseum as well as the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill (essentially the ruins of the ancient Rome government buildings and temples). We left that evening for Florence.

Day 4: Florence (or Firenze in Italian) was beautiful, but cold and rainy. We took a bus tour of the city and got thoroughly chilled sitting on the open upper level of the bus. We ate some more great Italian food and then we went to the Pitti Palace, which housed the royal family of Florence, and an exceptional and colossal amount of paintings and sculpture. We saw many works of Michaelangelo, Raphael, and other famous painters. Walking around town, a poster for the Opera La Traviata caught my eye on a church. We found out it was showing that night and that we could just come half an hour early to get tickets. So we went and got some dinner (and then gelato of course) and did some window shopping on this cool bridge that has shops lining the bridge that are held up on stilts. And then we went to the opera, which was fabulous!

The next day we took a train to Venice (or Venetia). Once again, cold and rainy.... but of course still marvelous and beautiful. We shopped and just wandered through the almost claustrophbically narrow and building-lined streets. We ate some great pizza and looked at the beautiful Venetian glass and mask shops. Dad let us take a gondola ride where our gondolier pointed out the home of Marco Polo. We were all impressed at the way he masterfully steered the gondola through narrow canals and under low bridges. We saw an amazingly gaudy and dark cathedral there that Kara said reminded her of the Holy Sepulchre. And we got hopelessly lost in the maze of Venice. But we caught our train back to Florence ok after having another amazing Italian dinner involving a lot of seafood and pasta.

Monday morning we saw the Duomo cathedral and visited the catacombs below. We did some last minute shopping, after finding out that the Museum housing the Michaelangelo's David was randomly closed :( and then were on a train to the Pisa airport (no we didn't have time to actually stop in Pisa) and then a plane back to Frankfurt. Unfortunately, we missed the last train of the day to Goettingen, so Dad rented a car and him and I drove back to Goettingen. It was kind of stressful for me to drive on the autobahn, along with the fact that it was a manual (thank goodness Kristi let me practice on her car...), but also really fun- I hadn't driven a car in at least 3 months. Anyway, we got home around 1:30 AM, but had a marvelous time!

Italy is beautiful, but we are also glad to be back to our Goettingen where the food is not quite so rich :) if it's possible, we got a little sick of pizza and pasta, after eating it virtually every meal for a week. Don't worry though- I could never get sick of the gelato! Love you all and hope you had a fabulous Thanksgiving- we missed and thought of you dearly while we ate our pizza on Thanksgiving.