Norway

Well we are here in Lillehammer! Our flights were good, we had a layover in Copenhagen, which is a really nice airport! Just got in to Lillehammer, lots of snow and cold! It is pretty here though, but our hotel is up on this huge hill so hopefully I will be able to make it into to town without falling on my face too many times. Hotel is alright, we don't have internet in our room which sucks. So I am sitting in the lobby and will probably be spending a lot of time here since i need to do schoolwork and use the internet! I will try to upload some pictures tonight or tomorrow.

Biking/Dusseldorf

Just a few pictures from our biking, I think the ones here are from in the fields behind Langbroich and some are of a park in Ubach-Palenberg that we rode too, also an old windmill that is semi-near our house, we rode over too it, on accident we were a bit lost. Also a picture of the Rhine river and Dusseldorf. I need to remember to start turning my pictures the right way when I upload them, such a pain though!

We haven't been too busy lately. The past few weekends have been really nice so we have been doing a lot of short bike trips, usually only about 10km or so. A few weekends back we went to Dusseldorf with Marita and Christian, it was really nice there, I love Dusseldorf it is one of my favorite cities!

More Karneval Pictures...

These are just a few with us in our costumes. It was SO cold, I think we all had on like three layers of clothes, luckily the costumes were a bit baggy so we were able to fit so many clothes! It was so much fun and I loved my costume...it was so comfortable to wear around. There is this great store in Heerlen, NL that has hundreds of cool costumes, I told Luke we will have to get some for Halloween. They had really cute Pirate ones but were out of them :-(



This was a really cute picture. My friend's daughter wanted to dance, but nobody wanted to dance so everyone told her to go bother Luke and Luke gave in and danced. After this she followed him around all day, knowing he would play with her!

Aachen Karneval

These are all pictures of floats from the Aachen Karneval Parade. There aren't too many because after awhile I got bored taking pictures and decided it would be much more fun to get the candy with everyone else! Plus I was in the back and all of my pictures had heads in them anyways.




Here is a cute picture of Luke and Kriss. They were both so cold! It was a cold day out however. It didn't help that we thought the parade started an hour before it actually did so we were waiting outside for an hour listening to an announcer talking in German. The only word I recognized was "Alaaf" because that is the Karneval saying. Oh ya for my own future reference because I keep forgetting, Karneval is called Fasching in Southern Germany (couldn't remember that for the life of me this weekend).

I have a lot more pictures from Karneval of us in our costumes but they are all turned sideways at the moment and I need to go in and fix them and then i will post them. Hopefully soon!

Langbroich Karneval

We had the big Karneval celebration this year in Langbroich. There was a huge parade and parties all over, it was a blast. The parade route went right down our street so we could watch from our windows if we wanted (which some of us did!) My friend Elizabeth and her two daughters came to our house to watch the parade and we sat outside and I brought Duke out with us. It was fun out and there was lots of music and the girls got a lot of candy and weird stuff like kleenex, dish scrubbers and even a carrot! We didn't get all the way dressed up today we just did crazy hats, tomorrow we are heading to Aachen for a big parade and we are going all out with the costumes. Should be a blast!



Cute picture! I like the black and white.



This was just a really good picture of Duke, he is so photogenic!



This guy was cool he actually posed for a good picture.



My pink hair is so cool! We only wore our hats today but tomorrow we are doing the full outfits.



This picture was too cute, you can tell Duke was enjoying himself at Karneval too! He loved the attention and it was a great socializing outing for him!



These two guys just came over and laid down next to Duke it freaked him out a bit at first, but he soon loved the attention. He was a huge hit all the people in the parade wanted to come over and pet him and play with him. (It probably didn't help that most of them were drunk!)



One of the floats from the parade.

Castle Hoensbroek & Tongeren, Belgium

This is Castle Hoensbroek in the Netherlands. It is only about 30 minutes from our house but Saturday was the first time we had been there! I can't believe how close it was and we never went before. It is a very small castles compared to others that we have seen but the outside was really neat and it is a moated castle which you do not see very often. The inside was a little underwhelming, at least in my opinion, too touristy and more for kids, but it was still interesting to see and it had some information about the history of the castle and the area.



I thought that this was neat. It was in the courtyard of the castle and it has the directions (N,S,E,W) in the stone.



Luke and I at Castle Hoensbroek



Just me messing up people's pictures, I learned everything I know from Kyle! :-P



On Sunday we went to Tongeren, Belgium for their famous antiques market, it is one of the most popular in Europe and the second largest in Europe. We got there late and only really had about 2-3 hours to look around which was not even close to being enough time, most people show up at 7am and shop until 2pm. Well we did have some good finds. Above is our new kitchen hutch, we have been looking for one of these for nearly two years!!! This one isn't an antique...yet, it is only about 60 years old but it is in near perfect condition and beautiful, the picture doesn't do it justice. We were lucky that the guy gave us a really, really good price and then after we decided to take it he knocked another 25 Euro off the already awesome price. So this made my day! We also got a small antique bookcase that is dark oak and over 100 years old, it has some really unique, interesting carvings on the side which i really liked. There was a nice trunk there from 1880 that I may have to go back for in a few weeks :-)



I know this picture is the wrong way!! Eeek! But it shows the carvings on the sides of our bookshelf that I really like.

Well now the weekend is over and back to school, hopefully we will go some more interesting places next weekend if the weather stays nice. And Luke just got back from Toledo, Spain and I will put some pictures up from there soon.

Christmas & New Years

Rudy is hiding like always. Every time the camera comes out he is running under a table or behind something, which is why there are not more pictures of him.



Duke with his favorite toy. He just loves this goose and carries it around with him everywhere.



Duke looked so cute in his reindeer ears, unfortunately he would rather chew on them than wear them, so they didn't last too long.

Yes I am a slacker, i know that. We had a good Christmas here in Germany. We got to sleep in and be lazy. I made a little bit of food, but not too much since it was just Luke and I. For New Years Eve we had a few friends over to hang out. We ate, drank and lit off fireworks, which are legal here. Everyone was setting them off all along our street at midnight it was actually pretty cool.