Our Bavarian (white) Easter

Unfortunately for our mental health, it is still winter here in Bavaria.  Though my sources were right in that we had the snowy Easter holiday I was dreading in my previous blog.  However, that didn’t stop us from having a great time with family nor slow us down on our snow covered Easter egg hunt.  After one less hour of sleep thanks to daylight savings, we set out to the town of Benediktbeuern on the edge of the lower Alps with Aunt Ellen and Uncle Rüdiger.  Benediktbeuern is a picturesque little town where Rüdiger’s brother lives, with an apartment with a view of the Alps (or at least Ellen says – the clouds blocked everything out). 

Once we arrived, the brothers headed out into the snow to hide 32 eggs.  When an hour passed and they still weren’t back, I knew we were in for a difficult egg hunt.  Finally it was time to venture out into the woods for my first ever Easter egg hunt. 

And because they use real hard boiled eggs here (not the plastic ones full of money or chocolate that Julie grew up with), the egg hunt felt more like a survival search for food as we roughed it through the snowy wilderness terrain digging for eggs.  Luckily (and unluckily) there were slopes too steep for snow, so this helped (and hindered) finding some of the eggs.

Rüdiger is apparently so good at hiding the eggs that it is pretty much expected 15% of them will be lost forever.  Let’s just say the snowy conditions got the best of me because in the end I only found 3 out of the 30 eggs that were found.  Of course Julie was the winner finding 10 eggs or 33% (and yes, there were 5 of us searching).  Later she told me that she had collected only 6 eggs and was ready to give up searching when the announcement was made that we could not leave until the rest of the missing eggs were found.  We were both afraid we would be out in the woods forever!  As she was rather hungry (always good motivation), she kicked into survival mode and quickly found 4 more eggs while the rest of us just poked around senselessly.   In the end only 2 eggs went missing, a loss of 6%, which was thought to be one of the best recoveries they have witnessed (thanks to Julie's participation!). 

 

At last we were allowed to return home and have our Easter feast of green soup, salad, quiche, and my favorite part- American cupcakes (one of the many sweets options)!

I am Dreaming of a White Easter…

As any of our avid blog followers probably have noticed (hi Mom(s) and Grandma!), we have not been very active this winter.  Partly this is because we burned ourselves out visiting 9 countries last year and we are saving up our vacation days to do it all over again in 2013.  However, another large factor of why we have not done much lately is that this winter has been very, very long and dark.  Julie and I had discussed that there just didn’t seem to be as much sun this winter as last year, and the German Weather Service confirmed our suspicions.  This winter was officially the darkest winter for at least the last 60 years (they have only been tracking sunshine records for 60 years). 

The temperatures have been relatively constant around the freezing point, which brought a lot of snow this year.  It seems the snow started in October (see previous blog) and has not let up since: except for Christmas of course when we had a freak period of warm, sunny weather.  We’ve had a few freeze/thaw cycles in March, but even this week, the first official week of spring, we had a little bit of snow.  So since our ventures began in Munich back in December 2011, there have been 0 white Christmases and 1 white Easter (last year, 2012).  And with just one week to go, the forecast has us dreaming of another white Easter.

So naturally we have spent a lot of time avoiding the darkness by staying inside where it is warm. But seriously, what have we been doing!?  We conquered a 5,000 piece puzzle, bought a Nintendo Wii, had Indian food delivered about every Friday, watched 3 seasons of Downton Abbey, and learned to play/became addicted to the strategy/conquer board game Die Siedler Von Catan (The Settlers of Catan, also available in the States).  Oh and I can’t forget the thrilling episodes of “Der Bachelor”, “Deutschland Sucht den Superstar”, and “Germany’s Next Top Model” featuring Heidi Klum.  Only a small price to pay so I can watch soccer once a week, and it’s good German practice…..don’t judge!  I went to the FC Bayern vs. Arsenal Champions League game...pretty much a soccer fan’s dream come true.  Meanwhile Julie was busy winning trophies beating her co-workers in Go-Kart races…..I’m just glad I wasn’t there to also be defeated.

I also spent a lot of hours this winter studying German and preparing for my B1 language exam in February.  Today I received my scores and found out I passed with 93% and received the Goethe Institute “sehr gut” (basically an A) stamp of approval!  Yay!  Now the Mt. Everest that is German grammar looks a little bit smaller.

But don’t worry; our blog is about to get new life because after Easter weekend we are booked for every weekend until July.  We are jet setting to Denmark and Iceland in early April, then we prepare for 12 visitors over the following 6 weeks while also making long weekend trips to Vienna, Dresden, and Hamburg.  And that doesn’t include the trip to Croatia in August we just booked.

It is bound to be an awesome spring and summer - we just have to get through the last days of winter/ our potentially “white” Easter.  Happy Spring everybody!

The dogs and their doppelgängers

Today we headed out on a normal Sunday walk over to the park.  What made today different than any other?  We stumbled upon Rita and Sadie’s doppelgängers – in cat form.  And this makes sense – because cats are the evil pets, and dogs are the good ones, so these had to be the evil versions of Rita and Sadie!  I am only kidding, all you cat lovers reading this. 

Here is photo proof of the show down.  Ok, so we couldn’t get them in the same photo because if we went too close with the dogs, the cats would run.  Noah had to photograph the cats first, then our girls.  Either way... eerie...