Now the first time I’d seen proper snow was in Dublin, and I have to say that this experience isn’t exactly as memorable as I wish it had been. I awoke one morning in my freezing hostel that had no shower to discover my roommates saying ‘Oh wow, it’s snowing out there! I haven’t seen snow for like a whole year!’ Little did they realize how exciting this sentence was to me. Without hesitation I ripped on as many clothes as I could and ran outside. To my disappointment, the snow was a dark brown, and just looked like strange mud. It was awful and my excitement went from level 200 to 5.
In Belgium, there was no snow. It was cold enough and it rained a lot of the time, but no snow.
Then I arrived back in Hamburg, where I’d already spent a lot of my trip so far. The reason I came back was for the Christmas and New Years period. I can imagine that apart from the cold and snow, a British Christmas wouldn’t be much to write home about, especially if I didn’t know anyone there. Sonja’s family in Hamburg was the closest family I had available at this stage, so I decided to utilize this opportunity.
It was most definitely snowing here. I could see white everywhere, and even in the city, on the roads and footpaths, it was still a lovely crisp white, not this sludgy brown rubbish I had to endure in Dublin. On that note, it was a couple digits colder than what I had experienced in Ireland too. Ouch.
I arrived at Sonja’s place and after 10 minutes, her parents had left for the weekend and since Sonja was at university, I had the house free to myself for the next three hours. After soaking myself in some bubbly German water and ridding myself of all the rubbish (Beer, Irish take-away, the general smell of Amsterdam after my stop-over and the stagnant smell of sitting on a bus for 18 hours), I spent the remainder of my time alone to marvel at the beauty that is snow.
Sonja came home and we immediately went outside and played in the snow. The river next to her house was frozen over and there were ducks sitting on top. Where the snow had fallen on top of the ice, you could see little bird footprints all over the river where they had been walking over the ice.
I don’t know how I can possibly express how cool the snow really is, and the Christmassy feeling you have throughout the whole winter. The Christmas carols actually make sense now.
Despite all the Christmas feeling and Christmassy stuff that was around, I still hadn’t done anything typically German and since I was in Germany, and that was the reason I came back, I wanted to start straight away. Gina is Polish by birth, and didn’t move to Germany until she was in her 20’s, so the family still carries on many Polish traditions as well as German. One thing particularly Polish is a kind of Christmas ‘biscuit’ or mini-pastry called Chruściki.
With Gina’s help, we mixed, rolled, cut, crafted, fried, drained and garnished the best Chruściki the world has ever seen. Instead of baking them, you deep fry them.
Before cooking, the dough is pretty flexible and tough and can therefore be crafted into lovely little shapes and patterns, but only one is traditionally used, and where we didn’t stuff up, that’s the shapes that we ended up with that you can see in the pictures.
The Chruściki themselves aren’t hugely flavoursome, so we had to absolutely drown them in icing sugar, but in the end, they were still bloody brilliant.
On another day, we took it upon ourselves to find the best and cheapest, dodgiest sled in Hamburg. Apparently the most fun and fastest sleds available are the old wooden one’s that are still popular from whenever sleds were first invented. Because of that, they can cost up to and over €50, roughly $70. A student and a backpacker can’t just throw this kind of money around and therefore we were subject to some of the cheaper alternatives. We managed to find something that looked like a crappy plastic shovel that the sign attached claimed was a sled for €3. There was also the upgraded edition which was a blue construction that looked far safer, but as fragile as an egg. I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of even sitting on the thing, let alone riding it down a hill. That was about €15 I think.
Sonja knew of the perfect hill and so we trudged up there with both ‘sleds’. About half way I realized how unfit I’ve become over the past year, having not undergone any form of exercise more strenuous than walking around and lifting one litre beers. A couple times I felt like throwing up and we hadn’t even reached the hill yet.
Needless to say, when we started sledding, no amount of tiredness could have stopped me from running up the hill each time to whizz down it again. I freakin’ loved it!
The bigger blue sled (Our sheet of warped blue plastic) had two little handle things, which if you pulled, would dig into the ground which, in theory, should work like breaks/steering. In reality, they done nothing but sometimes shoot you even more off course, or would just make the entire craft flip over. It went pretty fast too.
Our plastic red shovel wasn’t quite as fast, but was a lot more fun. It was harder to stay on, there’s was nowhere to stick your feet, and if there was a 10% chance of being able to steer on the blue one, there was no chance on the little red sled.
My excitement and fun was too extreme for me to realize that I almost had no feet left due to the cold and freeze factor, I had been sweating, but this was now starting to freeze too and absolutely everything on me was covered in snow. After Sonja started complaining about not being able to feel her feet anymore, I reluctantly admitted that it was indeed probably a good time to head off.
This is just one of many snow escapades we had over the course of my time again in Hamburg, but alas, most of my experiences were right there in the moment, and my fun can’t simply be put into words. In the next blog, my mind is opened once again to the world of public nudity in the German sauna’s as we visit the ever so popular public swimming pools/fun parks.
Tchüss!
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