Bavarian Shuffle

I realize Christmas is already long past so this is probably a good week overdue but... that's the way it goes around hurr. I couldn't even come up with a better excuse than that.

In light of last-minute changes to the original Christmas plan, The German and I headed back to his motherland to spend the holiday of all holidays with his parentals in their little village in the woods about an hour outside Munich.

The original plan was Venice and though I won't go into details of how it got axed, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise seeing as how the city got a lot more water than usual (hard to do, you say... but it seems it's possible) and the streets were flooded. So rather than invest in a quality pair o' rubber boots and splash around for a few days, we headed instead to the land of schnitzel and wurst... Wow that's weird, my first reference to a country mentions their food. That's never happened before.

I never thought I'd say it but I actually hoped for snow while I was in Deutschland. Shocking, I know, and unfortunately my wish was never granted. I thought 18 years in Canada would tide me over for life without feeling the need to see snow ever again, but turns out my heart longed for a white Christmas. Who knew. Instead it was just really cold and I found out really cold + snow = somewhat better than without snow, since you can throw it at people and at least things look pretty for a few days. Lesson learned.

The German, gettin' his cold face on.

It was cool to see how The German & his fam do it up for Christmas since his moms is Slovak and his pops is of solid German stock so holidays around his place are kind of a mixture of two worlds. Come to think of it, life at The German's house is kind of a crazy tower of Babel-type experience all year long. The young genius speaks Slovak with his mom and Bavarian/German with his pappy and - this probably comes as a surprise - English with me since my German/Slovak sucks too bad to say anything intelligible and I've decided Bavarian is a full-on language of its own, so it's clearly hopeless there.

Actually I didn't really decide that myself since I'm told by my other German friends from the north that whenever someone from Bavaria is speaking on TV it's also subtitled in High German so everyone outside their Southern 'hood can figure out what the eff they're goin’ on about. It turns out Bavaria is basically the Quebec of Germany (or Texas if that analogy speaks more to you), since they think they should be their own country, have their own constitution, are very proud, and speak a language the rest of the country could care less about. Kidding, kidding.

I may or may not be putting my relationship with The German in jeopardy here, but all in the name of truth for the masses... He's already preppin' the "You don't care about how many people you leave dead and bloodied along the way just as long as you can make it as an investigative journalist, no matter how many people you leave dead and bloodied along the way?" Zoolander quote, I can feel it.

Anyway, it really was nice to be with a fam for Christmas and I'll take off my cynical hat for a sec to warm your hearts with stories of Christmas lore. I'm not sure what that means but I've always wanted to say lore... We went to midnight mass, decorated the tree and ate like kings. In my case, a bit too king-ly and I have my work cut out to recover my girlish figure. Yipes.

That's one cookie, or 8, too many...

So the whole trip was a delight until we left on our 3 AM train from Munich to Paris. This sucked in every single respect except one solitary glimmering moment in the whole ordeal which was when I had 2 "conversations" in German; the first was with a drunk man at 2 AM who told me & The German about the book he'd written on Britney Spears(he was the "only one that believed in her! And where did she go? Right back to #1. Minimum #1! Maximum #3! I'm just waiting to get paid. Any day now."), the other was with a cleaning lady who straight up told me my German was good. Say what...? The cleaning supplies may have been intoxicating her too.

Part 2 of holiday adventures, the Barcelona chapter, is coming soon…ish. At this rate, I should get my game face on and write about it sometime before Valentine’s day.

'Twas.