The Real Thanksgiving (and 16 pictures)

This post is about Thanksgiving and our trip to Germany.

And it has sixteen pictures.

Germany is amazing.

It all just looks so...

German.

This is for real. This isn't Disneyland.

I think visiting Germany any time would be fun. But I think coming from Russia was especially enjoyable. For one thing, people smile. And everyone I spoke to spoke English (I did try German first!). Oh, and the roads! The driving! So orderly, so neat, and uncrowded. I love driving, and in Russia, if I drive, the roads are dirty, bumpy, and crowded. You can't go more than 10 feet without having to use your breaks. It felt so good to get into the car at the airport in Germany (a manual transmission too!), and just go! (What does this mean? Am I am a control freak?).

To be fair, I do have to say that we were outside the big city almost the entire time, and we were only there for a couple of days, but it was a great couple of days.

And to be funny, I have to say that in the airport before we left Germany, we were waiting for an elevator, and when it opened a couple came off, and the lady looked and Barb and then kind of gave a dirty look. After being around people who were so happy and friendly all weekend, I was a little confused. I thought something might be wrong. But then, the lady turned to the man and started speaking Russian. And it all made sense.

Now on with the pictures...

Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, we decided to take a trip to the temple, and were lucky enough to visit some good friends who we haven't seen for several years.

They were fantastic hosts and tour guides! And the food! Oh, the food!

How lucky are we to have such good friends!

(they even had another friend visiting from out of town, and they still made room for us!)

They have a boy Evelynn's age and a boy Owen's age. The kids had so much fun together. Playing with toys, hide and seek and sardines in their awesome old house, sharing what we were thankful for, watching German cartoons and Christmas movies. Definitely a Thanksgiving to remember.

One day, we drove out to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, the oldest complete wall around a walled city, or most complete oldest wall around a city, or oldest walled city, or something like that. Anyway, it's a little town famous for it's wall and it's German-ness. It's very German.

As for me, before this, city walls only existed in fairy tales, so I thought it was especially cool to see. It was like I was in a fairy tale.

Okay, sorry, now on with the pictures...

Here we all are.

And we may not be all smiling, because:

1. We walked all the way up here to take a picture of the castle gate, and we couldn't even get a picture of it, because there were too many cars driving by.

2. One of the kids just hit another one in the face with a snowball (I don't remember which was which)

and 3. We were in kind of a hurry, due to commitments later in the day, which caused the adults to be a little short on patience.

See?

So much for Christmas card photos. :)

We visited the world famous huge Kathe Wohlfahrt Christmas store.

"Just the girls" went out to a Christmas market the night before where they had a small Kathe Wohlfahrt shop set up, but I waited until the mother store to purchase our souvenirs.

The kids rode on this little carousel. Vintage or German? or both?

They were the only ones on it, and I thought it was cute that they sat together in these little fish. They loved it.

Dave impressed me with his high school/college German to buy...

...wait for it...

That's right ladies and gentlemen, a 1/2 meter long sausage.

And these little guys for me and the kids.

I'm usually not a fan of sausage, spicy mustard, or crusty bread.

So, why was this so good?!

(oh, and Dave actually impressed me with his German during the whole trip. His high school German is way better than my high school French. He must have studied harder.)

We also got some hot chocolate in souvenir mugs (that you can return and get your deposit back, but we kept them). This picture shows the people in the background drinking hot chocolate (or more likely the alcoholic "spiced cider" that draws crowds to the markets) and Owen making his Bowser face. Because I think it's been a while since I posted a picture of Owen making his Bowser face.

The drive to Rothenburg (and anywhere else, really) was beautiful and dotted with these cute little German towns. I'm telling you this stuff is straight out of fairy tales. Do people still really live like this?

And of course the reason we made the trip.

We had planned on taking turns waiting with the kids and going in the temple, but our friends graciously offered to watch our kids outside while we went together. We really appreciated it, and I'm sure the kids did, too (if you guys are reading this, the money for lunch is coming in the mail!).

We had such a great trip!

And now we want to live in Germany.