January 6th, 2016
Frohes neues Jahr means Happy New Year. We learned this from our landlord, Herr Schmidt, today when he greeted us with a warm smile and a short German lesson. He was very patient as we attempted to repeat after him. It took us a few tries until he approved our jumbled words. The language piece is a big learning curve for me!
New Years was quite the unforgettable experience here in Germany. Once the clock struck midnight, the sky lit up all around our apartment building for approximately forty minutes. We’ve seen some incredible firework shows but nothing that compared to this all out neighborhood explosion. Neighbors were shooting bottle rockets off in front of their houses, which exploded right outside our windows and landed on the surrounding houses. Billows of smoke filled the air. I couldn’t help but wonder when the fire department was going to get called in!
We attempted to take a couple of pictures from the safety of our living room but couldn’t capture the intensity. Here’s our meager attempts…
Somehow, our boys slept through it. We have no idea how because IT WAS CRAZY! As we slowly drifted off to sleep, we could still hear intermittent explosions above our roof and around the neighborhood. Thankfully, we awoke later that morning with our apartment building still standing. A happy new year indeed!
