Christmas 2012 (19 images)

I decided this year to take a short trip around Christmas again.  But instead of heading to Edinburgh, I went to Germany. 

As an overall itinerary, I left on Friday the 21st from Poznan and took the train to Berlin and then on to Dresden.  I spent Friday evening and Saturday in Dresden wandering around and enjoying the oldest Christmas Market in Germany.  Sunday morning I headed to the city of Braunschweig, which I sort of picked at random to spend a day in before heading back to Poland on Monday, Christmas Eve.  I spent Christmas Day and Boxing Day in Poznan before returning to work on Thursday.

My co-worker Marva Kington travelled to Dresden with me, where she combined both the tourist thing with the Christmas thing; while I went off in a different direction and did a mix of the shopping thing, the tourist thing, and the Christmas Market thing.  :) 

This was the 578th Dresden Striezelmarkt, although this year there were actually 11 different markets of differing sizes spread throughout the city.  The Winterlichter market was being held on Pragerstrasse, just out outside the hotel we stayed in.  You can see the view from my hotel window below, taken Friday night, not long after we arrived in Dresden.

 

Poznań 7th International Ice Sculpture Festival (15 pictures)

Yesterday (Saturday the 15th) I went up to Stary Rynek (the old town square) because I had heard there were ice sculptures there (thank you Pawel for mentioning it in passing) and I wanted to see them before they melted.  It was first day over zero in a bit and it was raining, so I figured they might melt fast.

The picture below is of the winning sculpture, which won 1500 Euros.

 

More pictures after the break (if you are viewing this on the home page).

 

From Rain to Snow

I'm back in Poland after nearly 3 weeks back in the U.S. and I'm starting to wonder if I'm hauling bad weather around with me.

The five days before I left California included massive amounts of rain as three storms pounded northern California one after the other.  There was so much rain that one of the tree's in the neighbors yard behind my Mom's house fell and crashed through the fence, just barely hitting the edge of the roof (no damage I think).

As you can see, it made a bit of a mess.

However, while my Mom was lucky with this tree, there was another tree in the neighbors yard that was leaning at quite an angle and looked like it was going to come down too.  Unfortunately, while it wasn't aimed at her house, it was aimed directly at the utility pole that carried the power, phone, and cable lines.  Take a look at the picture below.