While visions of gluwein danced in their heads

OK, so this is my THIRD attempt at this blog ... it started with an entirely too cheesy description of the weekend put to the lyrics of "the Twelve Days of Christmas", then got converted into a haiku collection of random words describing the trip that no one but us would surely ever understand ... and now all my creative energy is spent. Why is it that the truly exciting life moments are far more difficult to blog about than the mundane sillies?

I guess we'll just have to put it this way ... after more than three and a half years together and averaging, between the two of us, nearly 100 flights per year, we FINALLY checked-in, went through customs and immigration and boarded a plane TOGETHER for a birthday/Christmas weekend away in Hamburg, Germany. What a concept.

As proud new owners of two hilarious books - The Xenophobe's Guide to the Americans and The Xenophobe's Guide to the Swiss (HIGHLY recommended to anyone with a good sense of humour and a decent sense of potentially self-critical reality ... and/or anyone considering getting into a bi-national relationship ...), we cracked them open as soon as the aircraft doors were closed and did nothing but laugh at each other til landing ...

Checked into a super cool art deco hotel with different color rooms and wall mounted toilet plungers (as coat hangers) and rodent traps (magazine holders), we quickly scuttled out into the cold to attack the Christmas markets ... doing little other than be carried along by the crowds through stall after stall of good food and handicrafts. Four curry wursts, twenty plus gluwein with rum/amaretto, BBQ meat sticks, flamenkuchen and half a dozen delicious delicacies later, we oohed and ahhed over the truly amazing carved wood nativity scenes, pouted that we couldn't afford the one we wanted (600CHF!!) and settled on a really beautiful Christmas tree ornament instead before sneaking over for just one more gluwein (after all, we had to complete our set of Santa boot mugs!)

Finish the weekend out with an early Sunday morning rise to meander through the infamous 300 year-old Hamburg fish market with the other 70,000 morning marketeers, a mid-morning harbour tour, a night out to see the broadway musical of The Lion King from some killer seats (an AMAZING show if you ever get the chance to see it ...) and a last minute visit to the excellent Emigration City migration museum... and the return to "reality" couldn't be less appealing.