Christmas markets, Christmas parties and Christmas guests

Here are a couple of photos from the very pretty Christmas market in Essen that I went to last week with some friends from work.  Some of the lads from work were planning on cycling there (it's a LONG way to cycle), but ended up chickening out.  The girls were going to meet them there, but in the end this is the group who ended up going.  It rained quite a lot, which was a shame, but the market was fun.

This is a piccy from the work Christmas party.  It was held at a Tapas restaurant in Duisburg, and was really fun.  We did our secret Santas then too, and I got a lovely Christmas cross stitch - a very well thought out present.

Sam and Amy came to visit us last week.  They arrived on Wednesday evening and went home yesterday.  It was great having them here, and made our last weekend in Germany before heading home for Christmas lots of fun.  They amused themselves around Duisburg and Dusseldorf on Thursday and Friday while we were at work.  Friday afternoon we finished work for the holidays early, and they came for after school drinks at the pub near work.  We had gone out for dinner on Thursday evening with some people from work too.  It was really nice introducing Sam and Amy to our lovely new friends, and showing them the bars where we hang out.

On Saturday we decided to go to Cologne for the day.  The weather was unfortunately miserable, but it didn't stop Cologne from being absolutely packed with people.  Cologne has 7 Christmas markets, and we did quite a few of them - the Cathedral market is the photo above, in the shadow of the beautiful Cathedral....

This was in the Old Town market.  We had a gluvine here and lunch (bratwurst and Salmon in a bun)....

Below was the Angel market, which was my favourite.  The lights in the trees were lovely when it got dark, and the stalls were all crafty things.  Just my sort of market.

Below was St Nicolas' town, where we had more gluvine......

Here is where I got a text from my school friend saying that her girlfriend had proposed to her in Prague!  Very happy for her, and excited for my first Lesbian wedding!!!

We also went to the Gay and Lesbian market - lots of chocolate willys but not much else, and the harbour market, where we tried hot glubeer - sounds disgusting but is actually really nice.

So we made it to all 7 markets!  We had a great day, but were exhausted by the end of it, and standing up on the train back to Duisburg didn't help!

Of course we had some Gluvine in Duisburg Christmas market too.... So basically Christmas markets and gluvine sums up the entire weekend!

Today we are heading home for the holidays.  3 weeks at home will be wonderful, as I haven't seen Dad for 4 months and Mum for nearly 3 months!  We're both really looking forward to it!