Anna's Northern Adventures: Holiday Highlights

Holidays are sadly over and I have 3 months of school until the next ones (far out their school year is badly planned!). After Christmas both my host-sisters, their boyfriends, Ariane and I went to Heidelberg for a couple of days. The weather was a little stormy but we still had a good look around the ruined castle and the old part of the city.

Heidelberg castle

Goethe's seat

New Year is a big deal over here and we celebrated with a large group of family and friends. The traditional meal is called raclette and is a really fun and social way to eat a meal. Basically a small bbq is set up on the table and everyone has a small pan. You then load up your pan with meat (fried first on the top of the bbq), mushrooms, capsicum, broccoli, corn etc and then a layer of cheese on top. Your pan then goes inside the bbq and cooks. The end result is vegetables and meat covered in melted cheese. Yummy! At midnight we all went out on the street and let off fireworks and then played board games until 3am.

I then went down to Stuttgart for 5 days to see Claudia and Christian and their two kids, Lina age 3 and Klaus age 8 months. Claudia and Christian used to live just down the road from us in Dunedin and Lina was born while they were studying at Otago Uni. It was wonderful to see them again and to meet the new baby. I had a lovely couple of days joining in the family life and seeing a bit of their local area. Definitely a great time away.