The flight home from Costa Rica was a bit rough for me. Something I had eaten, probably the breakfast on the last day in Costa Rica, had given me food poisoning. I’ll spare you the details, but the plane trip home was hell and I spent the next few days in bed recovering and hardly being able to eat anything. C’est la vie!
A week later it was already December. I was feeling much better and so we took the train over to Cottbus to celebrate Manjas grandfathers birthday and spend the weekend with the family. Manjas mum picked us up from the train station and we headed over for lunch. It was a great afternoon chatting and catching up with everyone, and had fantastic food – the first I really enjoyed in over a week! I even had a coffee at the end.
After lunch we decided to visit the Christmas markets, which were really nice. One of the good things about the market in the smaller town, and that we were there a bit early, is that it wasn’t totally crowded and we had the chance to browse a bit. One of the places I got stuck at sold Moonshine: Basically flavoured whiskey. It was so delicious that Manjas mum decided to buy a bottle… well a jar really, which was an awesome design.
We headed back to have dinner and then spend the evening solving the “escape room in a box” which Manja and I got for Kai last year. While Kai and I had an awesome time solving it, Manja and her mum had a nice time watching us and chatting 😂. The Moonshine probably did not help my problem solving skills, but we still managed to figure it out in time 🙂
Tomorrow we will go and bake Christmas cookies at Hagens place and we had to bring the dough. So we braved the cold and mozied over to the supermarket to get some ingredients. A walk back and some mixing later we realised that we’d need more…. So I returned to the supermarket once more and bought another batch of ingredients for a chocolate dough! After another round of mixing we were ready for the next day.
On Sunday I spend the morning chatting to the family back in Adelaide, before heading to Hagens place to bake cookies. We got a production line going, with Hagen, Henri (his son), Kai and I stencilling out cookies while Manja placed them on trays and Steffi (Manjas mum) glazed and decorated. A few hours later we had a couple of hundred Christmas cookies to split between us. We ordered some pizza for lunch and chatted for a while before heading back home by train.
Roll, roll roll the dough…
Cut them out in shapes…
The next week was full of end of year work events for me, I headed to a projects end of year event on Wednesday night where the biggest project had a Christmas Dinner. It was great catching up with everyone in a less formal setting. On Thursday we had planned our end of year event for the support team. We initially thought about doing an underground tour, but given the cold and that we were not perfectly organised, we changed to an escape room last minute. I can’t say too much, but I quite enjoyed the space mission at Smart Room!
Friday Manja and I had our traditional Friday-night-date-night where we explore local eateries. This time we went to Zia Maria, a little pizzeria nearby, which was recommended to us. It was really good! We chatted the night away and made our Christmas plans over dinner and while meandering back home through the Kiez.
Happy Simon looking forward to great pizza!
On Saturday we visited Falkensee – one of the suburbs we would consider moving to. We walked around for a couple of hours to see if we could imagine living there, wandering by a couple of places which are for sale. After we roamed around for a few hours we briefly met up with Gaby and Mathias who live just around the corner from there, before going to spend the evening at a friends parents house: They were having a birthday party with a whole bunch of musician friends, just getting together and jamming the night away. It was a spectacular evening – plenty of very skilled musicians there! I was definitely out of my league but still enjoyed the evening a lot.
On Sunday I finally had a chance to catch up with Glen and we chatted the morning away. It was so great catching up; it had pretty much been a year! In the afternoon we took it easy, using the time to clean the flat a bit.
The following week I went bouldering while Manja had a team Christmas event. As we were in the same area, and we had some food after bouldering, I picked her up on the way home and got to meet some of her colleagues – a motley group of nice people.
Motley group of nice people
We used the remainder of the week to finalise the Christmas gift shopping 😁
Friday night Manja caught up with some friends at a local Christmas market, and I joined them a bit later in the evening. The place was so crowded that you could barely move, so we adjourned and hit up a local wine bar instead. The temperature was much better, everyone felt frozen from the markets, and the acoustics were much better too, we could suddenly hear each other properly without yelling 😬
dinner at the christmas market
On Saturday morning I briefly chatted to the family for Opas Birthday, before we caught up with Stefan and Stefanie for brunch. They are planning a trip to Costa Rica in January. We shared our experiences and gave some advice about what worked for us. In the afternoon we walked around the Kiez near the restaurant, finding a few more small bits for Christmas gifts and noticing that the Moonshine we bought in Cottbus comes from a local place here!
Sunday morning I chatted to Johan and Stef for a bit. Making an effort to catch up with OZ friends! It was great to catch up and chat about the year 🙂
A bit later Butzi dropped by to join us on a trip to Lübben for a Christmas Market at the “Museum Schloss Lübben”. Butzi was kind enough to drive, so we chatted as we drove. The Markets were much smaller than we expected – we were through in under 10 minutes – so we decided to check out the Palace grounds for a bit. We found some beavers and followed a “heights trail” which was installed as a kids activity for the warmer months. It was cold so there were no kids and not every part of the path was sensible to do, so we skipped the part where we would have to climb over the icy river 😂.
On the way back we also noticed that the park had other kids activities, such as trampolines and a sensory playground with spinning optical illusions and various instruments. We spent some time playing with everything, including some slow-mo bouncing videos 😅
Finally we found ourselves in the labyrinth which we Aced – following the well-trodden path to the exit 😁. While it’s not ideal for winter, I have to say it is an awesome play area for kids in summer. This type of things is one of the things Germany really does well! By the time we drove home it was evening. I made us some dinner before we dropped into bed.
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