this neck of the woods

Posts Tagged ‘Germany’

Merry Christmas! Schöne Weihnachten!

To everyone reading this blog, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas filled with family, presents and heaps of food! We’ve had a huge dumping of snow today and are looking at a white christmas tomorrow.. everything is so pretty :) We are currently hosting 9 members of our family here in Germany, and are loving it. If we’re not eating, we’re tripping around in our ‘party-bus’ (giant 9 seater van) getting ourselves into precarious situations in certain tiny Strasbourg parking garages! Thanks to some precision driving by Dave, we did actually maneuver our way out of the garage and found our way home, just to sit down and do some more eating for a few hours :)

Here are some photos from the last couple of days.. and now I’m going to go and eat.. again.

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Dear Eames, I love you.

Welcome home.

lovely legscurvesEames baby.

Spring has sprung

We went for a walk in the forest yesterday with some friends that were staying with us. It’s beautiful to see the first signs of spring.. I never thought I’d get so excited about a season change, and yet, here I am.. jumping-up-and-down-excited! (Be sure to find the little mouse in the third last photo)

boysapple blossomsDaveusboyswalking walkingthere's a mouse in thereDave and the canola

One view, different days

One thing we love about our apartment is that if you lean over our balcony, look to the right and squint a little bit – we have a pretty nice view of Basel. The other day, whilst in the middle of taking a photo of said view, I realised that we’ve actually taken quite a few photos of it over our time here.. so I went hunting. And now I’m sharing. So – here is our Basel view, from the balcony on various days over the last 1.5 years.

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Weekend gone

Flag garlandkitchenPie

A visit from some old friends

Wow, ok… I’m running a bit behind with the blog! Sorry! We’ve had a pretty crazy couple of weeks here.. between 2 lots of friends visiting, work, German lessons, driving lessons and taking a trip to France, we haven’t had much spare time at home. But no excuses! I’m going to make up for all that lost time now..

So, two weekends ago we were lucky enough to have two of my friends from primary school come and visit. I was a little bit nervous going into this weekend, because, while I’ve kept in contact with one of the friends (now living in Paris), I hadn’t seen the other friend for about 14 years. As it turned out, I had no need to be nervous because we all still got along like we did in primary school, and we had a great weekend! We couldn’t help but find it funny that we’d never kept in contact while we were living in the same country, but now that we’d all moved overseas it came more naturally!

Here are some photos of our weekend/mini reunion.. (yes.. more raspberry picking! This time at a proper berry farm though)

Me and AnnaOur stashAnna, Me and SimonLuzern

Pie/Gravy Update

GravyPie

We’ve nearly had the bunnies for a month now (although it feels like longer!) and they’re finally starting to get comfortable in our company. They’re still not very comfortable with each other though.. after what we thought were the beginnings of friendship, they had another huge fight and now we’re back to square one. It’s a little bit frustrating for us because we want to be able to leave them alone with each other and not come back to find chunks of fur missing, and Gravy cowering in a corner!

We’ve also had a couple of  rabbit-related casualties over these past few weeks, involving: one half-chewed-through speaker cable (which caused one speaker to stop working properly and had Dave completely perplexed for about an hour), 3 completely severed tomato plant stems (now fighting for life in a vase of water), and one completely-chewed-through speaker cable (yes, the same one – we’ve learned now!). Since then, we’ve also learned that it is very difficult to reprimand a rabbit.. especially ones that look at you the way ours do! Far too adorable.

Wild Raspberries

Dave hunting raspberriesOur stash

This week we had the pleasure of having a friend from London come and stay with us for a couple of days. On Tuesday we took her for a drive into the Black Forest, ending up at a tiny lake (Nonnenmattweiher) where we could pick wild raspberries growing around the shore. We weren’t really sure what to expect, having never really picked wild berries before, but they were small and really sweet – great on pancakes the next day!!

Beeren

fünfschilling berriesraspberries and strawberries

We went out to dinner last night to one of our favorite restaurants in the area, Fünfschilling. They have a store connected with the restaurant that sells fresh produce and wine from their farm. As you can see, its berry season!

Oh Dahlia…

Dahliasomeone's amazing drivewayDahlias in pink and redwild flowers

This is the first summer we’ve spent here in Europe, and so far it’s been fantastic! We moved here just in time for winter last year, so are only just (finally!) starting to experience the outdoor culture that comes with Spring and Summer. At the moment there are ‘Stadtfests’ (town celebrations) happening in all the villages around this area, as well as ‘beach’ parties, outdoor movies, and even a big music festival here in Lörrach called Stimmen in a couple of weeks.

In an attempt to be outdoorsy today, Dave and I headed just across the boarder into Switzerland to get some flowers from a self-service flower field. I’d never seen anything like it before coming here, but think it’s a wonderful idea and should be adopted in Australia too. The field we went to had about 30 different varietites (the biggest I’ve seen so far), payable per flower. If you would like to see more photos, just head to my flickr page!