Now that both of our kids can walk and put up with some degree of shenanigans, we decided to do the full Halloween thing this year. Halloween is a holiday that was non-existent in Germany 20 years ago and has been slowly gaining popularity over the past few years. I’m not sure how it got started here officially, but I’m sure it had something to do with all of the American media (TV and movie) influence here, where Germans watch…
In a lot of ways, daily life in Germany is comparable to life in the States. Living standards are similar, the basics are readily accessible, status quo exists, and people love to complain about the weather. Then, when you least expect it, baaaam – you are confronted head-on with some brutal reminders that you are living in a country that was ravaged by two world wars on its own soil, both of which it sorely lost. These are very strange…
Zakopane, meaning “buried” (i.e. in snow) in Polish, is located in Southern Poland near the Slovakian border and was the destination of our mini family vacation last week. We booked an AirBnB apartment with mountain view in Zakopane for a bit of fun before attending a relative’s wedding a few hours away. Not that the wedding wasn’t fun too…it was wonderful and filled with tons of food! I was just the only one there who didn’t speak Polish (besides my…