I can’t believe another week has flown past us. It’s been cold for a couple of weeks now, but this week it was COLD! It has snowed almost every night and some of the days, with some freezing rain mixed in, hence we stayed home almost every day. The exception being the kids going to school. They are pretty much German now as they continue to get themselves up and walk themselves to and from the bus every day. Matt has even offered to drive them a few times when the weather was especially bad, but that would probably be too embarrassing for them so they have declined all offers.
Friday, it was announced that all Christmas Markets in our state would be closed due to Covid starting Saturday. There was a break in the precipitation and I planned to drag my family to one more but when a friend invited me to go to it with her instead, I gratefully accepted.
We drove about an hour east to Ülm, a city on the border with Bavaria. It was pretty packed due to it being the premature last night of the market and we had to wait in a longgggg line to show alllllllll of the documents needed to enter: Vax certificate, negative test result and passport. Our state is now 2G+ meaning we have to be vaccinated or recovered PLUS have a negative test result to do anything. Luckily the long line for document check moved pretty quickly and we were in.
Ülm had one of prettiest markets I’ve been to so far. The market is set up in the square in front of Ulm’s beautiful church with its super tall steeple and there were lots of lights and trees, and even a nativity. There were plenty of food and drink options and lots of shopping. We got gluhwein as soon as we entered (of course) and grabbed some food for dinner. We noticed that the market had two different mugs so immediately determined we would need at least two gluhweins each in order to get both.
We did some shopping and had our drinks and as we were going through a final section of the market, we saw people walking around with drinks that were on fire. Since my friend was driving we decided to get one more drink, she would have a sip of mine, I’d finish it, and then we’d be on our way.
The drink is called Feuerzangenbowle, which means Fire Tongs Punch. It’s a mug of hot wine, and a special spoon is put across the top and a sugar cube placed on it. Then the sugar cube has rum poured over it and it is lit on fire. It tastes like super sweet wine with rum lol.
My favorite thing from the Christmas Market was our new Christmas Star. This is a traditional German decoration and many houses have these lit stars hanging in their windows so I was happy to finally get one for our house!
Saturday we considered driving to another market in Strasbourg but the weather was ridiculously bad; just pouring, freezing rain and snow all day so we took the day “off” to regroup and relax.
Me, being me, could only allow one day off though so on Sunday we headed out on another excursion. It has been a long time since Ryan chose an activity so I told him we could go to the sister technical museum of the one we went to in August. I had my own motives though because I knew there was a Christmas Market in the city.
We drove about an hour and a half north to the city of Speyer, where the Speyer Tecknik Museum is. It’s sister museum, The Sinsheim focuses mainly on aircraft and flight, but this location’s main focus is space.
They did have some smaller exhibits on cars, boats, and planes, but the highlights are the Boeing 747 and the Space Shuttle which you can go into, on site. We checked everything out-Ryan didn’t let us miss a thing- in about two and a half hours. In terms of museums, it’s not bad at all and Ryan was super excited to go there so I give it a 10/10.
After we finished at the museum, we drove into the city of Speyer, which has a beautiful cathedral. On the way in, I read online that Speyer’s market had closed the day before as well due to Covid. I was bummed but we still decided to quickly check out the city.
Next week is going to be another quiet week. We were supposed to go to London for a long weekend but had to cancel… due to covid, which I’m so tired of saying. I’ve been keeping myself busy booking lots of new trips for next year so it better go away soon!
Gilcrests Abroad 