Christmas in Germany

I has been 2 years since our last visit to my family back in Germany, so it was long overdue to see them again. And what time could be better for that than Christmas!

For the first week we planned to stay with my family in Göttingen and then we would move north to celebrate New Years Eve with our friends in Bremen. Finally we would take the train to Amsterdam for our flight back home. Our trip to the Netherlands will be in a seperate post.

Our flight left Vancouver on the 23rd and we arrived on the 24th at around 11:30 am. The first surprise was, that my luggage didn't, which had almost all presents we were bringing in them. Apparently it was still stuck in the U.S., but would be send to my address the next day. I crossed my fingers and we went on our way to Göttingen with the train.

Göttingen

I was not sure what I expected but coming back to the city felt like I just left a few days ago. Not much had changed in my time abroad and it felt good to be back.

Christmas Tree — My sister was well prepared for the event

As soon as the greeting session was over we started getting comfortable and preparing for our Christmas dinner.

The next day we visited the parents of my sistes boyfriend Lennard, since they had a big Christmas celebration as well and wanted to meet us for the first time.

At Lennards Parents — Here we are playing a card game called Codenames, highly recommended

The funniest thing of the night was probably when my brother Nico let out the cat, started looking for it and then getting lost himself (he had a few drinks by that point). The cat was back already at that point of course.

Fish Art — Here we are back in Göttingen doing some exploration. This is one artwork which can be found at the Paulinerkirche

Another excursion we did was to the Brother Grimm Museum in Kassel.

After that our time in Göttingen came to an end and we headed on our way north.

Bremen

Our first little excoursion brought us to the Universum Bremen, a sience museum which has many "hands-on" exhibitions explaining physics, biology and empathy. We stayed there a few hours with Nice to try out as many as we could.

JJ on chair — It's all a matter of perspective

Earthquake room — Here we could experience the effect of an earthquake first hand

Weser Outdoor Camp

This was a small excursion I did with some of the guys next day. We biked about 30 km north and slept overnight at a beach. Since it was in the middle of winter it was freezing cold in the night, but we were well prepared.