Nothing like a little Taco Bell in Germany!

We just finished up Easter weekend here! Easter is big here in Germany with Friday and Monday also part of the holiday, so the only day stores were open was Saturday. Had to plan ahead! Kev had his final team party on Saturday night, so he has no further obligations with the team before we leave. I didn't go to the team party, but I heard there were a lot of people there. I had a quiet dinner with the chicks since our time is winding down together. One is already gone!

Kev played a teammate in a 1 period NHL match

And won... oh, Horst and Gale must be so proud!

 Sunday, we headed over to the Scherenbergs for an afternoon of coffee and cake. They had set up a great easter hunt for us and the weather cooperated so we were able to do it outside. We had a great afternoon with them and Kev held Ida for, not the first time, but finally longer than 10 seconds! Bea and Oli took some photos, so we have them to thank for the following ones:

Precious!

Hans would have found them all if we would have let him!

the finished baskets

Getting along!

As the title says, we treated ourselves to a version of Taco Bell tonight. Eating actual Taco Bell is impossible since there are none in Germany, however, my pinterest obsession has led me to homemade crunchwrap supremes! If you haven't heard of pinterest, check it out. But only if you have a lot of free time, it can lead to a serious obsession. I digress. Back to the crunchwrap supremes!

We gave them a try tonight and were not dissapointed! If you don't have a Taco Bell nearby (which most of you do) or are looking for a way to shake up taco night, give it a try! You don't need any different ingredients, other than perhaps some nacho cheese spread.

Looks the same!

 Yum! I'll leave you with the recipe, which is totally adaptable based on your taste. Tschüss!


Homemade "Crunchwrap Supremes"

Ground Beef (we used 1/2 kilo and had left over meat)
Taco Seasoning
Soft Tortillas (bigger the better!)
Tortilla chips
Sour Cream
Nacho Cheese Sauce
Lettuce, Tomato, Onion (anything else you like on your tacos!)

I didn't use measurements for anything because everyone likes their tacos different!

Brown ground beef and mix with taco seasoning. Microwave soft tortillas for a bit to soften. Spread sour cream on the tortilla (we found it folded/stuck better with sour cream up to the edges!). Layer as follows: ground beef, nacho cheese sauce, tortilla chips, lettuce/tomato/onion. Fold edges up and fry for about 30-45 seconds on each side (I buttered my pan a little before each one). Enjoy!!!

Less than a week will be the New Year!

We had a pretty fantastic, jam-packed busy weekend (which is why it is almost noon and Kev is still in bed!). Kevin was away Thursday and Friday for a game against Mannheim (won in a shootout) so I was on my own to play Christmas music and bake and cook for the weekend. Since they bussed to Mannheim, Kev didn't get home until after 5:30 a.m. Saturday morning. He didn't sleep well on the bus and couldn't fall asleep when he got home right away which wasn't great since I then got him up at 9:45 a.m. to go to the Christmas Eve skate organized by one of the other girls.

I was dangling all over Kev before this shot

It wasn't mandatory to go to the skate but we were glad we did because it turned out to be so much fun! I even got out there with a stick in hand and passed the puck around and took some shots on net. Hard to believe that after almost 4 years around Kev, this was my first time messing around with a hockey stick. Actually, it was probably only my second or third time even on the ice since we first started dating! It was so much fun though and there was some food after and a secret santa exchange for the kids. We had to leave the skate early in order to make one last trip to the grocery store before they closed for the weekend. The stores here closed at 1 p.m. Christmas Eve and didn't open again until today, so we really had to plan in advance! Nothing done last minute around here! Kev napped in the afternoon and I got things ready around the apartment for our guests that evening. I cooked a ham for the first time since we were having another couple over for dinner. After dinner 2 more couples came over for drinks, snacking, and to play some silly games. Even though we all miss our family this time of year, it's great to get together with all of the other couples that don't have family visiting as well.

Kev and some teammates

Christmas card worthy!

Christmas day we got up to have a mini-Christmas together before we headed to the Scherenbergs for brunch. It was really nice to spend Christmas with them and we got to experience a very typical German brunch. There was a cheese plate, bread plate, fish plate (cooked but cold), a cold cut plate, along with different spreads and fish salads. I don't eat food like this often so I was excited to try everything and I really enjoyed it! Kev isn't a big seafood (especially cold) fan, but Oliver made him some scrambled eggs and bacon so all was good! Han's really loved the Freezers gear we gave him and we came home with an amazing Hamburg book. We were there up until Kev's practice in the afternoon. When Kev got home later, we had about a 3-4 hour date with Skype which was absolutely amazing. We were able to talk to all of Kev's family and all of mine. We even got to see my dad, brother, Suzzanne, and Sheridan open their presents from us on camera! Pretty cool, what would we do without Skype!? We really missed everyone but were lucky to be around so many great people this time of the year.

Hans gets picture shy but loved his Freezers stuff!

Ida, the next Mrs. Clause

She is so precious!!!

Yesterday was a bank holiday here as well, so the Freezers had a game. We were pretty lucky it was a home game too. The guys won and are alone in 4th place in the DEL now. Kev has 2 more games yet this week, one tomorrow and Friday. I have the rest of today and tomorrow off and it is back to work for me on Thursday. My classes have been on break this week also, which has been a nice vacation so far. Anyway, that's all for here! I hope everyone had an amazing Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day for all you Canadians! Tschüssy!

Thanks to the Curry's I'm able to blog again!

I was in the middle of a blog post Friday night when our internet cut out and we've been without it since! After a few days without internet, it's easy to see how much we depend on it! Since all of our english TV-watching capabilities depend on the internet, we've been pretty lost and only accessing BBC World News(Gale and I were pretty stir-crazy after about 15 minutes of that). Anyway, bear with this post seeing as half of it was written Friday and the other half tonight (and thank goodness for Shannon and John not only feeding us tacos tonight but letting us steal their internet too!).

 We had an absolutey fantastic American Thanksgiving here. I am pretty lucky because out of everyone celebrating I was the only American. We had 3 Canadians and 4 Germans. Gale and I spent the whole morning cooking a feast of Turkey, mashed potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower, brown sugared carrots, stuffing, deviled eggs, pumpkin pie, and chocolate chip cookie pie. The Scherenbergs came over and had their first Thanksgiving meal! Bea made an "apfelkuchen" for the occasion, an apple cake. We drank wine, feasted, and even got to see the Packers go 11-0. I think that the Scherenbergs had a great time (Hans enjoyed watching a slide show of Kevin's hockey pictures from Bowling Green) and I really appreciated everyone making my Thanksgiving feel like a celebration like home!

everyone  and our great meal!

all of our desserts, can you tell which is which?

Today (Friday), Horst and |Gale rented a car and went down to Augsburg to watch Kev's game. The team won which moved them into 1st place in the league! They are all staying in the same hotel in Munich which means I was free to eat all the leftover Thanksgiving food with no one here to stop me. Horst and Gale said that the Augsburg fans were crazy throwing lighters and cups onto the ice when they disagreed with the calls (not to mention the police with guns patrolling the freezing open walled rink) What an adventure for them!

Wednesday, we went to Hamburg's Modeleisenbahn Miniatur Wunderland. Kevin and I have been looking forward to going to this for quite some time! The Miniatur Wunderland is the world's largest model railway. It covers 1,150 square meters which took over a half million hours of labor. Most of the constructions were made from scratch. They say that most of their scenes are imaginary, but based on actual locations and they tried to replicate those the best they could. The exhibit has over 800 model trains, 300,000 lights, and 200,000 tiny human figurines. This place was spectacular and they did an amazing job replicatng the areas. We started by walking into Hamburg's area where we first saw Imtech Arena, home of the Hamburg HSV soccer team. The pictures we have don't do the place justice, but hopefully you will all be able to get an idea of how much detailing went into the model railway!

Soccer stadium and its parking lot

quite the spot on replica!

We then moved on to see Hamburg's landing pier for the ports, the Hauptbahnhof (Hamburg's main train station), and Hafencity complete with canals (which is where the Wunderland is located).

an amazing replica of the boat we took when we went to the Lion King Musical

Landing Ports

Hauptbahnhof

Hafencity

A Schmidt Truck!

After seeing Hamburg we went across the room to see America! In the America section, we saw Key West, Miami, Las Vegas, Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, and part of Yosemite National Park. Every 10 or so minutes, they entire exhibit would turn from day until night and seeing the Las Vegas strip at night was pretty neat.

Las Vegas

Vegas strip at night

They even had drive-in movies!!

We moved into the next room to see Scandanavia where we saw the Northeast Sea where model boats would actually come in and dock and the it even had a 4 centimeter tidal range for high and low tide. We saw Harz which had a festival going on complete with a Large Ferris Wheel with approximately 30,000 lights. We moved from there to Knuffingen where we saw a train bridge connecting to Austria. In Austria, we were able to see an amazing ski hill with lifts which looked so real when they turned off the lights for night time.

Harz festival

Skiing in Austria!

We then moved onto the final room of the exhibit which had Switzerland and the Hamburg Airport. Switzerland is the most elaborate of all the areas and reached from the 3rd to fourth floor of the building. The Hamburg airport is the most recent and Horst and Kevin's favorite part of the exhibit. It was, in our eyes, identical to the actual airport and they even had planes taking off and landing!

Switzerland

Airport parking garage

literally identical to Hamburgs airport entrance!

Also within the exhibit, is the control system for the employees to make sure there are no kinks with all of the different movement of boats, trains, airplanes, lights, etc. The control room itself was insane with seats for up to 7 different people. The Minitur Wunderland even has plans for up until 2020 for 4 more layout sections: France, Italy, Africa, and India.

Wunderland control area

Sorry for having such a long post about the Miniatur Wunderland, but we wanted you to see how cool it was! After we went to the Wunderland we all went to the Christmas Market to have a hot chocolate with Baileys before dinner.

The boys won their game yesterday to stay in 1st place in the league. Horst and Gale left today and we miss them already! We hope they had as great of a time during their trip as we did with them!!! Our internet guy is supposed to be here soon to take care of our problem, so these blogs will be back running regularly again soon! Have a beautiful week, tschüss!

Horst and Gale's Trip thus far and the Bergen-Belsen Memorial

Horst and Gale are about halfway through their trip and it seems like their visit is just flying by! Since they arrived last Friday, they have been able to see 2 of Kevin's games. It is pretty rare for him to have 2 home games in one weekend, so that was great for them! I ended up getting sick again and missed my first of Kev's home games. I think all the flu and sickness is almost behind us now in this apartment! Good news though, the Freezers have won the past 2 games since returning from the break! They are in Augsburg on Friday, and Horst and Gale will be driving down to watch that game as well!

Since the weekend was filled with games, Horst and Gale didn't get to explore much of Hamburg until Monday. I was back to work on Monday, but Kevin had the day off so he went down town with them and took a bus tour of Hamburg. Now, we already did one bus tour during Horst's first visit, but this was a different bus line with a different route and they said it was fantastic. They got to see some different beautiful residential side streets that we didn't get to see on the other tour. The Christmas markets are up and running now! They started those on Monday, so hopefully we will go see them all lit up tonight!

Yesterday, Kev didn't have practice until the afternoon so we got up early planned to get up early and drive towards Hannover to go to the Bergen-Belsen Memorial. We overslept by about an hour (oops!) but were still able to go and check out a bit of the memorial.

The Bergen-Belsen Memorial started out in WWII as a POW camp operated by the German army. The 20,000 prisoners that died were mostly from the Soviet Union and were buried in a cemetery about one kilometer from the camp. In 1943, Bergen-Belsen was established as a concentration camp. At least 52,000 men, women, and children died at this camp. British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen in April of 1945. When they came, they found thousands of unburied bodies and many other prisoners on the verge of death. The victims of this camp were buried in mass graves and the memorial currently has these mass graves, and monuments and memorial stones commemorating the victims' suffering and death. There are only a few structural traces left of the camp. After the British troops came and liberated the camp, it was then set up as a displaced persons camp. It was the largest Jewish displaced persons camp in Germany, holding up to 12,000 people until 1950.

Backside of the memorial in the picture to the right: Russia

The exhibit of this memorial was set up to be able to walk through the entire time period of the camp, beginning with a prologue of interviews of the survivors before their time at the camp. There were interviews throughout of the survivors telling everything they had gone through while being at the concentration camp to being a part of the displaced persons camp. It was very difficult to even look at the photos they had of all the prisoners that were unfed. It is impossible to explain everything that this exhibit had between letters from the camp guards and prisoners, to drawings the children did that stayed at the displaced persons camp. In order to get a full feel of everything that went on, we would have needed a few more hours to spend looking at and reading everything the exhibit had to offer. It's completely impossible to feel and understand what these people went through, but reading all of the survivor and guard's experiences was totally disheartening and seeing the photos made me feel so disgusted about what these people experienced.

After we left the exhibit, we took a stroll through the outdoor memorial. There were graves stones everywhere that were not actual graves, but symbols of the victims of the camp. They even had a grave stone for Anne Frank and her mother, because she was at this camp. In addition to the memorial stones, there were mass graves everywere with engravings showing how many people were buried there. Some said they held 800 and others over 1,000 people buried.

One of the many mass graves in the camp memorial

The commemorative grave stone of Anne Frank

These grave stones served as symbols of the victims

We left pretty early in the afternoon to get Kevin back in time for his afternoon practice (and interview!). He was interviewed by one of the newspapers in town, so we will have an eye out for that one in the next couple of days. Gale and I went on quite the search last night for our Thanksgiving meal tomorrow, and man oh man, was that stressful! And up until today, we still were turkey-less! However, thanks to Bea, we have a nice fresh turkey to pick up from a local poultry store! Anyway, this post is getting long so I'll put an end to it! We have a busy rest of the day so I will have lots to write about in the next few days!  Tschüss! And Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends and family at home! GO PACKERS!

Our time in Paris... with the Flu

Yep, you read that title right. Our Paris vacation was taken over by the flu.

Needless to say, it was not quite what we were hoping for out of Kevin's much needed break and vacation. We had a ton planned: a bus tour, bike rentals, trying French cuisine, meeting Kev's teammate and family from Hannover's team, shopping on the Avenue de Champs Elysees, seeing the Eiffel tower and the many beautiful parks and churches all around the city. We did get to see the Eiffel tower, do a little shopping, take almost all of the bus tour, meet the Chamberlains for dinner ... and not much else. We spent the majority of our trip lying in bed going back and forth from having the chills to hot sweats from our fevers and aches and pains everywhere. At first we thought it was food poisoning from some duck we ate Thursday night, but after some consultation with Gale when we got back, the flu it was.

It all started Thursday night with Kev having a fever after dinner (luckily we got in a little shopping and a trip to the Eiffel tower before then). Friday we woke up to bad headaches, but thought we would try to venture out a bit. We took some of the bus tour and were back in bed with fevers by 3 p.m. where we stayed until that time the next day. Saturday we met the Chamberlains for dinner and headed back for one last look at the Eiffel tower at night. I think even if we were healthly the whole time, I would have asked Kev to take me back to the Eiffel tower every night, so beautiful all lit up! Sunday we were relieved to come home and be back to our own beds. I never thought I would be so happy to hear and see German words again, but my was it comforting!!

However, the parts of Paris that we did see were absolutely beautiful and we will just keep it on the list of locations for another time! It was great to be able to muster up some energy and meet the Chamberlains for dinner, even though at that point we were still set on the food poisoning idea and were a bit paranoid about what we ate. So much for branching out and trying new French foods! The architechture on the different churches and museums that we saw from the bus were absolutely amazing and made for some great pictures! Check out the video at the end to really see how they illuminate the Eiffel Tower at night, bear with the fact that you have to watch it with your head on your side!

We stopped to watch some breakdancing on the first night

too foggy to see the whole thing!

Still too foggy the next morning

Notre Dame church

Galeries Lafayette, 6 floors of shopping available

view of city from top of the Galeries Lafayette

Saturday was much nicer and no fog!

The nice weather on the weekend made the lines ridiculous!

So beautiful!

The Chamberlains! So great to see you guys!

On the hour, every hour at night they illuminate the Eiffel tower

In other news, we are almost back to feeling 100%. Kevin has been back to practice already yesterday, and I got back to work Thursday. We have visitors coming again, Horst and Gale fly in Friday morning! Just in time too, on my way to class today I saw them setting up the Christmas Markets downtown! Even though they make me so excited for Christmas there will be no decorations in this apartment until after next Thursday, American Thanksgiving!!! That's all for now, check out the lit up Eiffel tower video below! Tschüss!

Oh, and HAPPY 25th BIRTHDAY to my brother, Thayne!