Tuesday, January 15, 2013

A peaceful Christmas in the Ore Mountains




Aren't we productive?

So our train to Dresden was pretty uncanny.  We didn’t leave Vienna until 10:30 pm, but that isn’t why the train was eerie.  It was our first night train and we were excited, don’t get me wrong. It was just that, our train was a Russian train at night. I think any train at night can be creepy. But you can imagine the amount of jokes we started to make. We didn’t get a sleeping cabin, bad idea, so we were stuck in a sitting position for the whole 10 ride. I had to joy of sitting next to a Czech couple so in love I thought they were going to make babies right there! They didn’t though, luckily. They just moved a lot to get comfy, something the rest of us couldn’t do. We really didn’t  get much sleep, because the ticket guy kept coming around. He would startle all of us and I felt bad for the others, Emily and Alex, since I was the one with the ticket and they could have continued sleeping.  I think after this ordeal  we have decided pay the extra cash, if it isn’t too bad, for a sleeping cabin.
Christmas market!
                Once we were in Dresden I had a feeling that none of us would be able to stay up, or even be functional. I know Emily wanted to go to the Christmas market there and I did too since it was the oldest, but there was no way I was going to be pleasant if I had to stay up.  When I suggested that we just headed straight for Freiberg to sleep everyone agreed with me.
The train to Freiberg wasn’t interesting, since it was still dark. What was interesting was that there was no public transportation, which we saw, by the train station. Emily asked the cashier in the little kiosk that is in the train station if there was and she said no.  Luckily one of the first things we saw once outside of the train station was a taxi, when I said public transport I meant a bus.  The taxi was nice enough to take us right to Benny’s building; we were using his apartment while he was gone. As soon as we stepped into the apartment we all just went to bed. Emily and I had the bed, so we had to climb a ladder to reach the loft. It was awesome to have a bird’s eye view of the place. I really want an apartment like that now! Alex got the couch, except for one night when Emily was skyping with her family.
                We were completely exhausted because we didn’t wake up until 1 pm. After that it was time to shower (we were all sorts of smelly and dirty), watch a movie, and message Benny on how to find the Freiberg Christmas market.  The Christmas market in Freiberg was super cool, and small. It was our first super tiny Christmas market. Well it wasn’t super tiny, but a bit smaller than the Oldenburg’s Christmas market.  They had this booth that sold nothing but chocolate, so you can guess who bought a lot of chocolate for some special people’s stockings. I also had some yummy Glühwein with blueberries in it. Sadly I didn’t get to try the strawberry one.
Our beautiful Christmas tree.
                Other than our adventure to the Christmas market and the grocery store, we didn’t do too much. We watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy twice in two days; we are still making LOTR references to each other. We also made a Christmas tree out of Benny’s little palm tree, I think we had too much time on our hands.  We also went through all of our movies we brought. That is over 12 hours of movies! One of the biggest reasons we watched so many movies is because our internet went down.  It was nice though to have no internet for a few days. I could access it on my phone, but I didn’t spend too much time on it. I did get to level 17 on my game. Wooo! Emily also beat her all time score on her Bejeweled game. We were very productive. I did make scalloped potatoes, cookies, and a cherry pie. Emily made yummy  and great chicken noodle soup that fed us for 2 days. Alex was a good sport with dealing with all of our mischief. I think it was the book Santa brought him that saved his sanity.
                On our last day in Germany, before we went to Prague, we got to see some of the countryside. It was simply breathtaking. The rolling hills, small streams here and there, small farms, small towns, the train on a bridge for a nice chunk of the trip, and so much more, seeing all this was amazing. It was what I thought Germany would look like, not like the flat north. Still love the north though! It was what I have read about in fairy tales, minus the train. I couldn’t have asked for more. It was one lovely train ride, plus there was no rain!

Ash

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