Christmas, Day 2

Merry Christmas! Even though it's the 26th, it is still Christmas over here. Germany celebrates two days of Christmas as official holidays (25th and 26th), although I'm not entirely sure why. One of the more unexpected results of having two days of Christmas is that grocery stores are not open on either day. And on years when the 27th is a Sunday (like this one) grocery stores aren't open for three full days plus they close around 2:00 PM on the 24th. In past years Brenda and I have been caught off guard and been forced to either go out to eat or go to a market at the main train station to choose from a small selection of "food" (which basically means we survived on a few bags of chips). This year, however, we were prepared, and on the evening of the 23rd we went to the grocery store and stocked up. We're optimistic that our rations will last us until the stores open again on Monday morning.

Drew flew back to the U.S. on the 23rd, and we miss him already. We're going to fill you in on more details of his trip (including pictures!) in a later post. Since we still don't have internet in our apartment (which may take until the end of January or early February to get sorted out), loading pictures to the blog is tricky. We're going to Berlin in a little over a week for a revival of Ariadne auf Naxos, and we should have a good internet connection there. Fortunately, our neighbor's internet signal seems unusually strong today, which is allowing me to write this post and to share a couple of pictures with you...

 Brenda and I went up to the top of a mountain in Kitzbühel to meet Drew for a late lunch during his day of snowboarding.

We only saw Drew snowboard briefly, but he clearly knew what he was doing.

Here's a glimpse of our new apartment. As you can see our pictures are not up yet, but they will be soon. See that mantel behind the tree? It came with the apartment. It is wooden, easily movable, and works well during the Christmas season. We'll see if we have a place for it after the tree comes down.

It's a beautiful day in Frankfurt today, and we're going to get outside and enjoy it. I hope you are all having a very happy holiday season, and we'll talk to you again on Tuesday!