Nuremberg Christmas Market

Here is the crew in front of an old church that the market is set up next to. Poor Grandma doesn’t have snow boots, so I think her feet were cold…Oliver loved the huge Weihnachts Pyramid. Here we are eating some Nuremberger Bratwurst. Three sausages on a french role for 2 euro. The best sausages in all of Europe come from Nuremberg in my opinion.Oliver didn’t eat the sausage, so he just had a roll. Here he is in front of a horse drawn beer carriage.One of the stalls had a nice hansel and gretel ginger bread house. The kids could go up to it and open up the oven and get a free box of gingerbread. Very cute. Except for the part of the story where the kids found the house with free gingerbread and then got thrown (almost) into the oven! Then the free candy from strangers becomes a little creepy.Here’s Karen and Grandma, shopping in the cold wet snow. Can you spot baby Marion?Tons of nut crackers and smoking men. One of the best things about the Christmas markets is just seeing these stalls filled with tons of decorations. Plus the food and the treats are pretty good too. We’ve never purchased the fancy gingerbread cookies. They look too nice to eat.Really, are you supposed to eat these or decorate with them?Same question! Who could eat that?Fun wooden decorations. We bought one of the pyramids from here last year. It was a really great deal. This year the prices seemed a bit higher.One of the few family pictures we have since we finally had someone to hold the camera. Thanks Grandma! By this point the kids were getting pretty cold and wet. The fact that they both like to step in every puddle they find didn’t help any. But Karen the $20-a-piece ornament shopper had more things to buy!Ahhh… look at all the Christmas-y stuff. It’s way too easy to spend way too much money at these markets.Elora came across old St. Nicholas. Santa Claus here has much more religious overtones to his appearance, which is interesting considering how much less religious society is here (generally).And finally the kids wanted to pose in front of one more stand. We took the kids to McDonalds to warm up and get some chicken nuggets since that’s about Oliver will eat these days while traveling. And then we loaded up the car and continued our drive toward the Frankfurt Temple. Only 3 more hours to go! Except… we pulled on the highway and 1 hour outside of Nuremberg all traffic came to a complete standstill for about 2 hours. All we could make out on the radio was that there was a geisterfahrer – which translates as ghost driver. Strange word. After safely reaching our destination around 10pm I asked someone what it meant. Apparently it’s a word means there is a driver going down the wrong side of the highway (driving in the opposite direction). So maybe it’s good we pulled over in Nuremberg for the hour long detour!