i've got this domestic thing down...

Tonight is the evening of our Christmas Dinner here with the International Office, and while they are providing the main course, they asked us students to bring something that might be a traditional dish from home, or just something we especially like. My very favorite part of both Thanksgiving and Christmas is pumpkin pie, and I was quite said to miss out on the Thanksgiving edition pumpkin pie, so I decided to not miss out on Christmas by making my own. However, I had no idea what this entailed....

Thankfully my friend Stacy from Ohio State who lives on the floor below me has a recipe from her mom who has made homemade pumpkin pie practically every year of her life. How awesome? (No comparison here, Mom, I swear, I love Mrs. Smiths. Heck, before Stacy told me, I wasn't even aware you COULD make pumpkin pie with an actual pumpkin.) But that is just what we did.

So we bought an actual pumpkin. (No idea that pumpkins had other uses after Halloween, however thankfully there's a store nearby that sells every vegetable under the sun...including pumpkins.) Well, we actually bought half of a pumpkin. While standing in line at the store, Stacy commented that the one and only large size of pumpkin they had would be enough that we'd be eating pumpkin for weeks. So the guy at the register offered to cut it in half for us and only sell us half the pumpkin for half the price. Sweet deal.

The pumpkin has to bake for an hour or more in the oven to soften it up enough to scrape out the insides. This was the boring sit and wait part. Then you scrape the meaty part of the pumpkin (as Stacy called it, I found nothing meaty about it) into a bowl and puree it with this fun pureeing stick thing. I kind of made a mess with that, splattering both me and Stacy with pumpkin bits. (It washes out I swear...) To the now liquid-y pudding like pumpkin we added evaporated milk, sugar, cinnamon and other spices, and eggs. Then we got to further beat it into submission until it was entirely a liquid.

The crust was more difficult that I had imagined. We were originally going to make that as well, but we had conflicting class schedules and some last minute engagements that came up, and we didn't have time. I thought surely one could buy a premade crust here...but not so much. The best we could find was sheets of crust-dough. So we molded them into our form and used water to make it glue itself all together (hopefully we don't find any leaks...). That done, we poured our pie mixture into it and set it in the oven to bake. It smelled delicious.

So now I am on my way in the next hour or so to my last class of the evening which we are getting out of early in time to make it to our Dinner at 7pm. I have to carry the pie with me to class, so I'm crossing my fingers it survives the trip okay. And sitting next to me smelling all pumpkin-y good for 2 hours...

a week and counting

In just about a week from today I will be flying home to Tampa for Christmas break, something I can say I am quite excited about. The last struggle between me and total relaxation over the holidays is finishing a paper and submitting the last of my materials for my graduate school applications. I am hoping to have all of the aforementioned completed by Monday. So we'll see how that goes.

Last week Wednesday we had a trip to Heidelberg that I have yet to talk about! It was actually a lot of fun and felt very Christmas-y. Heidelberg is about a 2 hour drive from Bonn, although with the double decker bus we take on trips with the International Office it took closer to 3 hours. And once again we left quite early, 7:45am. But it was all well worth it. When we arrived, we were split into three groups of 20 and were assigned tour guides who took us on a walking tour of the castle and the city, which is beautiful by the way. You'll have to see pictures for the testament to this. The river is very picturesque, and so is the old bridge over it. (It's actually called The Old Bridge btw.) The ruins of the castle are the largest along the Rhine and possibly in Germany if I understood the tour guide correctly. You'll have to consult wikipedia for the history lesson. But large parts of it are still intact. You can see where one whole side of a tower fell away into the ground below because of a massive explosion of the gunpowder stored there. There was even a garden around the castle dedicated to an Elizabeth! So that was fun. :) Although it wasn't the prettiest garden, but that simply could have been that we went in the one month that Heidelberg is visited least, December, and so that's when they do all their renovation work. So there were construction guys all over the place fixing things and making it all look pretty again. They were entirely re-cobbling (or however you say that) one walkway up to the castle, but they were doing it in exactly the same way they used to do it back when the walkway was originally made, so it was relatively interesting to watch. Heidelberg also has the largest cask in the world. They have a huge wine cellar and really huge wooden casks to hold the wine in for the population of the castle, and their biggest one is something like 45,000+ gallons. (I think...I might have done the math wrong on that one.) There's a picture of me standing in front of it so you can see just how ridiculously huge this thing is. You can actually climb up stairs built along the side of it and have a look from the top to see where they filled it up.

After the tour of the castle, we wandered into town. Their Christmas market had started the weekend before and it was really cute. It's similar to the one we have going on here in Bonn, but there were more artists in Heidelberg crafting things like jewelry and ornaments right there in their little log cabin hut things. We had a lot of fun drinking Gluehwein and eating roasted almonds covered in all sorts of delicious things and walking through the markets. It was really pretty lit up at night too. They have one Gluehwein stand that looks like the candelabra thing Mom and Dad have, where it has candle holders on the bottom and when you light the candles, somehow that makes the little propeller like things at the top start moving so that the scenes carved in wood in the middle of the thing spin around. What do you call this thing?? Anyway, they have a huge replica of one and it was cool looking. I bought lots of Christmas presents here so be excited! :)

Other than that trip to Heidelberg, I've pretty much been hanging around Bonn the last couple of weeks. I went to go see the Golden Compass movie, which sadly wasn't nearly as good as the book, particularly considering they cut out the ending completely. Oh well. This past Wednesday my friend Caitlin who is studying in Koblenz came to Bonn with a friend of hers who is actually a German girl currently studying at UCF. So I had fun wandering around our own Christmas market with them. I believe I am going Saturday (tomorrow) to Cologne with Caitlin as well. And if I can swing it, I'm looking into going to Koblenz the beginning of the week.

Also this Sunday there's a concert at the Beethovenhalle of the winner of the piano competition Bonn hosts every year. It has been going on for weeks, and they finally narrow it down to one winner who is supposedly the best pianist of them all, and that person puts on a concert. So I'm hoping it's going to be good.

Thursday of next week the International Office is hosting a Weihnachtsdinner (Christmas dinner). They are providing the main part of the meal, I think there's a goose and pork chops or something, and a couple of side dishes, and everyone else has to bring either a side dish or a dessert with them. Stacy and I are signed up to bring pumpkin pie, something no one here has particularly heard of. But we're going to have to make it from scratch. Sadly no Mrs. Smith's around here :) So that should be fun.

All right well I'm back to work on my paper. Go look at my pictures of Heidelberg, and I will be home in a week to celebrate Christmas with some of you, and will certainly be telephoning with others once I'm in the states. Much love to all.

PARIS!

Hi Everyone, well it seems I've had zero time to update, so I think I'll do two separate posts, one explaining Paris and the next recapping the last week or so. So Paris....

We got up ridiculously early last Friday morning so that we could catch the bus at 5:30 to catch the 5:45 train to Cologne so we could catch out 7am train from Cologne to Paris. We ended up sitting in a coffee shop for an hour at the train station in Cologne because we were just way to ahead of schedule, but we didn't want to take any chances with our trains being delayed between Bonn and Cologne (which happens frequently) and possibly miss our Paris train. Once we were aboard our Thalys train to Paris, we all fell immediately back asleep. However the train stopped 3-4 different times between Cologne and Paris, and every time someone would come over the announcements to say we were approaching a stop, and then to say we were pretty much there, and then to thanks passengers who were exiting the train for riding with Thalys, and then to greet new passengers who'd just boarded. And they do this announcement in 4 different languages, Flemmish, German, French, and English. So it takes about half an hour to get each one of these announcements made in all 4 languages, and it kept us from sleeping.

But we finally arrived in Paris! And we headed straight for our hotel to check in and drop off our luggage. I'm quite glad we ended up staying in a hotel in the Republique district instead of a hostel in Monmartre. Excellent decision. The people at our hotel were very nice, and it was little so they remembered who we were all the time, and even gave us some tips when it came to walking around or the order in which we should go see some things. Breakfast was made in their little kitchen and served by the same nice woman every morning. It was croissants and other pastries and breads with butter, some cheese spread stuff that was really good, jelly, and coffee. The coffee was the best part of the hotel. Seriously. This coffee was amazing.

Friday afternoon after we dumped out stuff at the hotel, we set out to see the Champs Elysees and the Arch de Triumph and then the Eiffel Tower. We took tons of pictures. Sadly, I must admit I forgot my camera. Yes, I know. It was sitting on my desk next to all the other things I couldn't forget like my cell phone and medications. However I somehow managed to not forget everything except my camera. I think Mom jinxed me for telling me a million times not to forget it. But that's another story. So Stacy and Sophie, the two friends I went with, made sure to take lots of extra pictures, and any photos I wanted to take I borrowed Stacy's second camera which she had with her. She has a nice film camera and a little digital one. So as soon as my two friends upload their pictures online, I will post the links here. And Stacy said she's making an extra set of her film photos for me, so I will be bringing those home with me over Christmas, and possibly seeing if I can get them put on a CD as well.

At 6pm Friday evenings the Louvre opens for free to students between the ages of 18 and 26, so we took advantage of that. It was awesome to stand in front of the Mona Lisa and all of Da Vinci's other works of art. It was really cool. The building itself was just gorgeous as well. But there was just sooo much to soak up, it was hard to take it all in in one night.

Saturday we got up early and went to the Eiffel Tower again so that we could go up it. The lines were pretty long, but it had been too windy the previous afternoon and they'd shut down the upper deck. But it was gloriously sunny that day, and we didn't want to pass up the opportunity to see the awesome view from the tower without clouds blocking it. So we waited for maybe an hour, but we got to go to the very top deck! It was kinda scary and windy haha, but it was gorgeous. (See pictures for reference)

After the Eiffel Tower we went to the Musee D'Orsay which was also an awesome museum. The building was really cool. It's an old train station I believe, and there's this huge clock on the wall made out of what looks like gold. My favorite artists in this museum were Monet and Van Gogh. It was so cool to see Van Gogh's Starry Night in person. I have a poster of that painting in my room here because I really like it, but it's nothing compared to the real thing. And to see Monet's work in person was equally breathtaking. It's so cool to stand in front of this stuff and think about the artists who did them and know that at one point in time they stood in front of these works of art just this way too.

The sun was setting by then, but we wanted to fit in Notre Dame, and so while we only got to see this church at night, it was beautifully lit up, and I'm glad that if we had to choose between seeing it at night or day, we saw the night version. There was also a huge Christmas tree lit up out front of the church. And as we got there, there was a service just starting and two girls were singing, and their voices were just amazing. I think they were singing in Latin, so I had no idea what they were saying, but the music was a great background to wander around Notre Dame in. Sadly, they started shaking incense around shortly thereafter and I was forced to retreat or succumb to loud frequent coughing. I hate that I'm allergic to that stuff. It sets that whole church-y mood sometimes I think. Anyway. We spent a good deal of time taking pictures from the outside of Notre Dame from just about every angle possible. I don't have many of these from the digital camera, but Stacy has a bunch on her film camera so I will try to get those scanned, or you'll just have to come see me to see the pics!! :)

That night we went to a restaurant near our hotel on the Place de Republique, and the waiters there thought we were cute girls from Germany. We spoke German actually almost the whole time we were in Paris, unless we had to communicate with other people and couldn't manage in French, then we switched to English because everyone speaks that and no one speaks German. But otherwise we didn't like looking like American tourists. You don't get looked at funny when you speak German on the subway. You get weird looks if you speak English like an American.

Sunday it was rainy again, but the first Sunday of every month Versailles has free entry, so we definitely wanted to check that out. We were hoping that maybe since it was raining, five million other people wouldn't have the same idea, but sadly no such luck. However, most of them did not go inside. There was a silver collection exhibition thing going on in the King and Queen's Apartments, which was pretty much the whole display of rooms inside Versailles that you get to see, and so we still had to pay for that. Stacy and Sophie opted out, and instead explored the gardens despite the rain. I on the other hand was content to enjoy the view of the pouring down rain and the gardens from the windows in the Hall of Mirrors (gorgeous by the way, sadly no pictures allowed in the building). I've never seen rooms so decorated in my life before. And I thought the silver pieces incorporated into the rooms were beautiful. Apparently the American funded group Friends of Versailles is working on tracking down all the original furniture that was in the palace and putting it back in the rooms it was supposedly known to have been in. After I was done with my tour, we headed back to the hotel to take hot showers and naps because it was just so terribly cold and rainy. Thankfully the rain let up later because we wanted to go back down to the Champs Elysees and take pictures at night of all the Christmas lights they have set up on the trees lining the street. Then we decided, since the weather was still good we really wanted to see the Eiffel Tower at night too. However, as we were getting out of the metro at the Eiffel Tower, it started raining again. We figured we'd brave it, but as we're dashing across the street to the bridge, the skies literally opened up and dumped rain like you've never seen before. And with the wind, I thought for sure I was back in Florida in a hurricane, only colder. Thankfully, the pictures were beautiful. I did get sick though :( so that was no fun. But I'm feeling better now and it was totally worth it.

Monday we got up and it was thankfully sunny again. So it was perfect to go see Sacre Coeur, which in my opinion might have been better than Notre Dame. The inside was beautiful, the dome in the center was painted with this brilliant blue color I loved. And the church is up on this huge hill, and so the view of the city from there is just amazing. You can see pretty much everything. From there we went on an awesome walking tour (involving the eating of crepes which were delicious. Granted, they tasted a lot like the ones you can buy from street vendors here in Bonn, but the point was we were in France and ate French crepes, so they tasted better). Then we wandered through Monmartre, past the Moulin Rouge, which wasn't quite as exciting looking as I thought it would be. Then we went down towards the Opera and the big department stores Printemp and Lafayette. The inside of Lafayette has this big dome that's decorated for Christmas. This big Christmas tree starts on the ground floor and goes up to the top of it. It was really cool looking. We walked around the opera which was really cool looking, then went in search of this bakery at the Place de la Vendome. However, all we found was the richie rich part of town. I did find a jewelry store named after my father, but there were security guards maintaining some kind of perimeter around it and they scowled at us for taking pictures. We finally made our way to the Toulleries gardens and the Louvre again where we stopped for an afternoon snack/lunch. After that we had to head back to our hotel to get our bags and catch our train. So all in all, it was a lovely weekend.