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):