Busy busy...

I'm getting ready to hit the road to spend New Years Eve (and the rest of the weekend) in Amsterdam. Assuming I survive (don't worry, Mom and Dad, I'll be good), I hope to post about my Christmas in Luxembourg when I return on Sunday.

Update - Play

In the two weekends after I received my things, I went to 5 Christmas Markets (Luxembourg; Trier, Germany; Strasbourg, France; Freiburg, Germany; and Colmar, France). These Christmas Markets have a ton of booths selling various wares and of course plenty of food (sausages, potato galettes, waffles, crepes, chocolate covered [fill in the blank], beignets, roasted nuts, etc., etc.) and drink (mostly gluhwein, with the occasional hot chocolate).

The first weekend of December, I hit up the local markets - Luxembourg on Saturday and Trier on Sunday. A few pictures from Trier, where I also toured the Porta Nigra - an old Roman city gate:

Also spent some time in a museum in Trier. This is part of what I guess is supposed to be a great painting, but I couldn't get over the fact that this dude was in the most unnatural position. Just look at that crazy left hand.

The following weekend, I had planned to meet a former client in Strasbourg, France. Turns out the Christmas Market in Strasbourg is one of the most popular in the area. As such, there were no rooms available by the time we got around to looking for accommodations. We still wanted to meet up so we booked a hotel about 80km Southeast of Strasbourg in Freiburg, Germany, and drove up to Strasbourg on Saturday afternoon. The Market was really impressive and spanned basically the whole city center, but it was really cold and extremely crowded, which made it a bit more difficult to enjoy.

Sunday morning we spent walking around the much smaller Market in Freiburg before we parted ways. I then headed to another Market in Colmar, France, which was about 30-45 minutes off the route back home. Colmar's Market was larger than Freiburg, but still much smaller than Strasbourg. But it was a quaint little town and the buildings/decorations were very nice. I walked around for a couple hours, ate some more fattening food, and then jumped back on the highway back to Lux.

Finally, I spent this past weekend at home in Luxembourg. We had quite a bit of snow, which was nice. Unfortunately, it came with ridiculously cold weather. Saturday was in the neighborhood of -10C while Sunday warmed up to -5C (14F and 23F, respectively). I also confirmed on Sunday (and tonight) that I cannot drive in the ice and snow. On Sunday it took 8-9 attempts to make it up a fairly steep/long slope (at least it seems steep/long when you can't drive up it) when leaving the sport center that is located next to the forest trails I have been running lately. Tonight, I almost slid into a car on the way home and then almost rode the driveway right into the wall as I tried to drive down the slope to enter the garage. I miss Dallas where everything shuts down when there is the least threat of snow/ice.

This is the trail/lake where I've been running (taken on Saturday - before another 3-4 inches of snow were added Sunday):

Update - Work

I just realized it's been 3 weeks since my last post, so I thought I would give a quick update.

Work has been getting increasingly busier, which I suppose is a good thing. It has certainly filled up my weekdays as I've been working at the office a little later than I would prefer. One downside to working on projects with U.S. offices is the time change and the need to have late conference calls due to the time differences.

But even at work, we find time to play. Almost every Friday ends in a "drink" in the break room. One person in the group is usually responsible for providing the refreshments and, in addition to stocking the fridge with beer, there is usually wine and/or some kind of alcohol from the host's home country (which for some reason, always seems to be very strong). In the last three weeks, we've also had a Monday drink for a departing co-worker, a Tuesday drink to celebrate one partner's newborn baby, and a Thursday group dinner/bowling/billiards outing. Pretty much any excuse to get the team together.

For the holiday season, PwC also hosts a "Christmas Market" for employees, alumni, and clients. This basically consists of a bunch of big tents outside of out offices with booths serving all kinds of different food for lunch and dinner on a Thursday and Friday. The Christmas Market culminates with a staff/guest dinner/party on Friday night with music/dancing in addition to all the food. I decided to give all Texans a bad name by breaking out my cowboy hat after I had a couple glasses of gluhwein (hot wine with spices) - sorry guys. Here I am wearing the hat with a co-worker and his wife.

I got a lot of sideways looks all night, but it was fun to pass the hat around and get pictures of people: