Not all of my time was spent in Basel over the 3 months. A perk of Alex’s job is that when he has to travel he can stay through the weekend if he wants. So for his trips to Rome and Paris I bought some cheap airfare and joined him. Those two trips probably require their own entries so I’ll save them for later.
Merry Christmas from Tiefenort, Germany!
We also took a nice little trip to Germany over the holidays. For Christmas we went to Tiefenort, the village where Alex grew up to visit with his parents and his sister. I was nervous because I knew that his parents both spoke about as much English as I did German. And at this point that was close to none. His mom had started the Rosetta Stone course for English when I started mine in German so at least we would be able to say “the boy is drinking water” or “the flower is red” to each other. Of course all my fears were for nothing. It’s amazing how much you can say without words and the giant hugs I got as soon as I arrived were enough to tell me that we would have a great time on our visit. And of course, we did. We ate so much amazing home-cooked food and I got to try some of their traditional German cuisine including kloesse, which is so famous it has the most amazing music video EVER made in its honor. We also made some Feuerzangenbowle which a rum-soaked sugar pyramid on suspended over a bowl of mulled wine. You set the sugar on fire and it melts down into the wine. So fun! On Christmas Eve we went to a church service. Although it was all in German it was very similar to services I’ve been to growing up. The children did the nativity pageant which was adorable as always. There were some different customs such as opening presents and celebrating on the 24th. We also hiked up a hill where a bonfire was taking place at the top, Christmas music was playing and hundreds of people were gathered.
