Wednesday, December 26, 2007

What we learned this Christmas Eve!

Lesson 1. Life tastes better when someone else cooks and serves -- especially an Italian chef and two American sous chefs.

Just for the ladies...today the guys prepared pasta with fresh ricotta and mushrooms. And pasta with hot peppers and parmesan.



Lesson 2. No matter what fur or disguise you cloak yourself in, your friends see you for all you are.



What we learned this Christmas!

Lesson 3. Building something great takes team work.



Lesson 4. Friendship can help lighten the the load.



Lesson 5. And sometimes in friendship, you get more than you bargained for. You find family.



Lesson 6. It doesn't matter how old you are. You're never too old to be a brat!

What we learned this Christmas Eve!

Lesson 7. No matter how old you are, we can't seem to lose that juvenille fascination of the opposite sex.




What we learned this Christmas!

Lesson 8. No matter how frosty a person is, we all come to life with a little limoncello.




Lesson 9.
Some of us need more than just a little.



Lesson 10. We're all sisters and brothers. If we're lucky we grow up with fabulous siblings. But more often than not, we find each other while climbing our own mountains.




Lesson 11.
Family just isn't family without a little violence. You don't truly love each other, until you've survived one good fight and laughed about it later.

Happy Birthday to You!

10 days before Christmas we hosted a community birthday bash - all Nov-Dec. birthdays with one Latin-themed party with Hispanic food, gift baskets for everyone, Matt's singing silly tunes, board games and cupcakes!



Christine and Pat adore and collect German nutcrackers.



Matt and Kendra were fixated with Rob's metal puzzles he got in Munich.

Monday, December 24, 2007

Germany's Christmas Markets!

Just a week before we arrived in Munich, we were in Florence rubbing the nose of this very same sculpture.



At 11, the church bells ring and these mobile displays do their little song and dance for onlookers.





While in Munich, recognized as the birthplace of the Nazi movement. So we went to Dachau. It's one thing to watch films about Nazis and concentration camps. It's another to stand in the gas showers, crematorium, and torture rooms. I could not shake the dread for days.

We took no photos there.

I had always thought that these camps were out in the middle of nowhere. Dachau concentration camp is practically in a neighborhood, which makes it that much more gruesome that thousands were being starved, subjected to terrible human experiments, and exterminated...and Germans were going to church and to the market right just steps beyond the barbed wire. In the footage shown at the camp, American liberators parade the townsfolk thru the camp and show them the hundreds of bodies piled in mass graves (Coal was no longer available to keep the crematorium running.)

This is where the "Bitch of Buchenwald" reigned with her Nazi officer husband and made gloves for herself from the skin of prisoners.

Germany's Christmas Markets!

We went to several of Munich's beer halls and Hacker-Pschorr (for Bavarian food) and Augustiner (for brew) were our favorites! Augustiner is hands down the favorite of every local we asked. And the overpriced, toursity Hofbrau was the least.



The street food was so good! In fact, we raided a local grocery and butcher shop on our way to the airport to bring home brew, bread, sausage, mustards and kraut so we share the love and prepare a German meal for our friends at home.



A flourescent orange cop car!

Germany's Christmas Markets!




Germany's Christmas Markets!




Rothenberg's Christmas Market





Nuremberg's Christmas Market is one of the oldest and most famous!




Friday, December 21, 2007

Benvenuti Venezia!

Here begins our big Tuscany adventure of the three amigos - Victoria, Jacque and Rob.

To me, Venice is pure eye candy. No matter which way you look - up down, left - right. There is something to see.

In fact, there's more faces to Venice than there are Venetian masks.

Here's three faces that captured my attention. I love gawking at nuns and monks. It's this weird thing I have. Especially when they're eating (like ice cream) or selling something (like wine and beer).

Rob gets mad when I stare. But Italians are shameless starers. So when in Rome...LET ME STARE.

It's a curious fascination I know. But any way...this is my first memory of Venice...since we're gonna forget about schlepping my luggage across all those damn bridges at midnite.

"The Mob" of Birds!

Pssst...We think this bird is The Godfather of all the others at St. Mark's Square. They all work for him.



You see they've got a racket going on. They get their Venetian friend-humans to hustle the seeds for a cut. The tourists take the bait. The birds get the food. And we all keep the whole avian flu thing on the low down. Got it?



This giant pigeon chased Matt all the way to the Pisa airport!



It was terrifying!!!

Monumental Venice!

It's a bird. It's a plane. No! It's...It's life imitating art. What a bunch of retards!