Wishing you all a ...
Happy New Year!!!
Frohes neues Jahr!!!
And greetings from Oberursel, Germany! I'm currently ensconced in spinsterbiddy 's sister's flat, watching (as is indeed traditional for Germany or so I'm told) the ski-jumping on the telly. With my extensive knowledge of ski-jumping and slightly erratic command of German, of course, the proceedings mean absolute nothing to me, so it's kind of pleasantly meaningless to watch, a kind of Zen but with lots of men in tight lycra.
We had planned to go out to Frankfurt on New Year's Eve to celebrate the New Year and watch the fireworks from really close up. Unfortunately the combination of the cold, our sloth and the fact that neither of us were quite at our best meant we elected to stay in and follow our usual tradition of watching cheesy pop music on the telly and just nip out at midnight to watch some of the more local fireworks, of which there were a lot.
Of course, we ran into the party that appeared to have no clue about how to operate fireworks (or perhaps just got a kick from watching their rockets speeding along the surface of the road, so by the time we'd chanced our ankles with them, and with the party before then that liked really, really powerful roman fountains (which of course belonged in the middle of the road), we'd kind of missed them. So we stood in the middle of the fields and looked up at the stars instead, identifying the really common constellations and blaming our failure for the rest on the cordite from the fireworks.
So far, that's as exciting as Germany has been. I come here every year, so the exciting stuff will really start on the 7th January, when I take the train from Frankfurt to Paris and have my first youth-hostelling experience since the age of 20. I'm looking forward to it; though right now I'm really enjoy the chance to gather my wits as time for that has been in understandably short supply for the last month or so.
Hope you're all having a great New Year! Stay warm, you all!