Frohes weihnachtsfest aus Deutchland

It's Christmas time for sure in Germany. It couldn't really be more perfect for us, with snow everywhere. The last couple of days we spent in Bremen with Eva, which was lovely. She lives with her parents in a very little village near Bremen. The second day we spent in Bremerhaven, the fishing port where the River Weiser meets the sea. It has two very significant museums, both of which we visited.

The first is the Climate Museum, which cleverly follows the line of longtitude 8 degrees East all the way around the globe, featuring the different climate zones and the issues each is facing with climate change. It was very interesting and extremely well done. We've visited enough museums now to know that some are good and some are ... boring!

Yachts snow and ice bound in Bremerhaven

The second museum was the Museum of Emigration, a clever recreation of the experience of the hundreds of thousands of Europeans who left from the German ports of Bremerhaven and Hamburg during the late 1700s through to the mid 1900s. You got a really good idea of the feeling of everything as they had recreated the port scenes and also the insides of the ships. There is a database of all the emigrants, so we tried to find more information on Grant's forebears, who left in 1871 from Hamburg, but no luck - Johann and Anna Hoffman is like looking for John Smith in England!

Lohne on Christmas Eve day

We are now in Lohne, a town southeast of Hanover, where we will have Christmas with the Hohmeyer family. They had a Kiwi Christmas with us 3 years ago when they visited their daughter Henrike who stayed with us for six months. The snow is all around and even the Germans are amazed - it's apparently the most snow in 100 years. The autobahns are backed up all over the place and the trains are jammed. Honover train station yesterday was like bedlam, but we managed to get on the right train to deliver us to Lohne. Today (Christmas Eve) we will go to a church service this afternoon, then there will be the decoration of the tree, the presents, then another church service at night. Chrismas Day itself is a continuation of food, family and various traditional things. We have completely given up trying to watch our diet - it's just too hard!

Working off the German calories