It's beginning to look a lot like Weihnachten!

Hello Friends and Family!

It's been over a month and the awesomeness of Christmas in Germany is in full effect! I don't know what it is about this country, but they know how to do the holiday season better than anyone else. I mean Rockefeller Center is great, as is Union Square in SF and Paradise Drive in Napa, but nothing I've seen can compare to the Dresdner Striezelmarkt, which is just a 5 minute walk away from my house.

They had a beautiful Christmas market in Klagenfurt last year, but the one in Dresden wins purely because it is absolutely ginormous! Set-up for this seasonal festival began in early November, and it officially opened on our Thanksgiving Day, so you can tell how serious these people are about making sure the holiday season lasts as long as it possibly can!

To give you an idea of what a Christmas market is, you have to picture a the downtown area of your nearest city. Now think about all open space in the downtown, perhaps the main large city square, or maybe just the areas between large buildings. Now picture 10'x10' wooden huts constructed side by side across these open spaces, until small wooden-hut villages have taken over the entire downtown area and you feel like you're hanging out in the North Pole for Christmas season... that's what a German Christmas market is like!



While these little Christmas villages are everywhere right now, "Striezelmarkt" is the biggest market that has taken over Dresden's main square. There are hundreds of vendor huts, selling Christmas gifts, ornaments, roasted nuts, bratwurst (and other delicious German foods), crepes, and of course GLUEHWEIN (hot spiced wine which is delicious but causes unexpectedly bad hangovers). A bunch of us met up for the Striezelmarkt back in November when all of you back home were sitting down to carve the turkey, and Tesha and I have been frequenting the place ever since!

There are a couple downsides to having an amazing Christmas market outside your door, the biggest being that there is traffic in Dresden ALL THE TIME. As in traffic that makes a 15 minute drive into a 45 minute drive, just to get across town! It's unreal. Plus, there's NO PARKING ANYWHERE. Ok, there are a couple spots here and there, but the snow-plows have used most of them as their dump sites, so unless you have a plow attached to the front of your car (I don't!) there's absolutely no hope for getting into them. Therefore, I've been relying on parking karma (it always comes through in the end), and I've been walking into the city in the bitter cold and 2 feet of snow even more frequently than I did when it was sunny and 70's out!

Despite these bummers, I wish Striezelmarkt would stay until March or April or whenever it gets warm again in this cold cold land! The snow makes everything harder: it's harder to drive, it's harder to walk, it's harder to use your hands in the morning, it's harder to get out of bed, you get the idea. But when there's a party going on 24/7 in downtown, under the guise of providing kitchy Christmas gifts for tourists in Dresden, it is so much easier to find motivation to leave the house!

For example, on any gray day when I would otherwise cuddle up with a movie in bed, Tesha and I find ways to lure each other out.. "Oh, Tesha, you need to go to the pharmacy? Let's stop and get a Gluehwein!" "Oh... great idea Lo! (have I mentioned that my team here calls me "Lo"? as in Cmay-Lo?) And then let's eat at Vapiano's, and for dessert lets get crepes! Sounds like a plan!" Basically, Striezelmarkt, Wintersdorf (a market strictly for alcoholic beverages and wurst) and the generally awesome holiday atmosphere that they have in Dresden makes these cold winter days so much easier to endure.

In other news, I'm living and learning, mostly with regards to driving in the Arctic. Here I'll share some of my latest lessons, in DOs and DON'Ts:

• DO wipe that fresh layer of snow off the top of your driver side door before opening it. Otherwise, you might be sitting in a cold, wet seat all the way to practice. Not fun.
  
• DON'T be over-confident in your ice scraper. It is not made of titanium, it is made of plastic, and plastic will break if you make too many violent attacks on the iceberg that has somehow attached itself to your side mirror. This could lead to shards of plastic coming dangerously close to your eyeballs, and your coach might get mad if you go blind during season.
  
• DO splurge on a car with seat-warmers. Ahhhhhhh.
• DON'T get all excited about the great parking options on the street where no one walks. It might look like prime real-estate, but once you get half into the spot and your tires are spinning out both forwards and backwards, you're going to need a nice passerby (or two) to help push your helpless self into (or out of) that spot you were just so excited to find.
  
• DO try kaki (persimmon) if you haven't tried it before (I said it was mostly about driving!)
  
• DON'T underestimate the importance of gloves. They can make the horrible job of digging your igloo car out of the snow so much more bearable. At the same time, a lack of gloves can render you too frozen and numb to even push the "unlock" button to open said car.
• Finally, DO say a little thankful prayer every day for the person who thought of putting heated wires in a windshield. What a wonderfully life-saving little piece of technology right there!

Besides my world being turned into a total Winter Wonderland, life in Dresden is pretty normal! We started our German league (Bundesliga) matches at the end of November, but we also play in the German Cup (Pokal) and a European Cup (CEV Cup), which means that we're really busy with matches right now! So far, within Germany we've played matches in Suhl, Sinsheim, Berlin, Potsdam and Hamburg, and we've also traveled to St. Niklaas, Belgium for a match against Kieldrecht. We've been dealing with a couple unfortunate injuries and illnesses on the team, but despite those setbacks we've been playing well and are constantly working to keep a good rhythm.

We play again tomorrow at home against Aachen, and then in Sonthofen on Wednesday, which will be our last game before Christmas break for 3 days. I'm feeling pretty darn excited especially for the game in Sonthofen, because Marco will be picking me up after our game for a 3 day Christmas vacation in Klagenfurt! While it would be wonderful to spend time at home in the states for the holidays, I'm really looking forward to celebrating with Marco and his family, and spending a few days out of the volley routine.

Other fun things that I've done since my last post:

• gotten kicked out of a club at 2AM because it was "Totensonntag," or "Dead Sunday," when apparently everything is supposed to be... well... dead....?

• got an amazing visit from my long lost cousin Nina (Uncle Boris' side) at our game in Hamburg

• tried eierlikoer, or the German version of eggnog, which I had also never tried.. verdict: yummy!
• hosted Thanksgiving dinner at my house with some awesome friends! Wasn't quite the crazy ordeal as last year, in fact Tesha and I put it together in just an hour and a half after practice, but it was a blast! (Story of the night: the base fell out of the spring form that Tesha was using for baked mac-and-cheese right as she was putting it into the oven... that led to a total noodle, cheese, milk, cream, preheated oven hot mess. HA)

• read "Wuthering Heights." LOVED IT!

Hope you are all having a wonderful pre-holiday week, and that you have fun and non-stressful plans for the upcoming week. Need a last-minute gift idea for that special someone who lives in a cold cold cold place? Nothing says love like a heating pad.


XOXOX

Anna

PS: If you want to see some funny volleyball pictures from some recent games, here is a link to a gallery from a volley photographer. My team is in black :)