From Europe With Love

A big hello and happy holidays to my loyal readers, and those just passing thru.

Reporting live from The Netherlands, we've been touring Europe for the past couple of weeks, starting off in Vienna for a week, continuing on to Budapest by train, and winding down our last week with family in NL. It's been a busy and thoroughly enjoyable trip through Central Europe. Much warmer than we'd anticipated. The Christmas markets in both Vienna and Budapest were quite welcoming and full of great stuff, not to mention the nice mulled wine and the Wiener alternative, Punsch.

Here at the moment, Second Christmas evening is in full swing, we ordered Chinese take-out for dinner and can hear the fireworks starting up for New Year's Eve. Here in NL, the fireworks come out in full force on the 31st, but the kids get their hands on fireworks as early as mid-December, and proceed to fire them off day and night until year's end.

Where do they get the MONEY? Those packets of (illegal from Belgium) imported pieces really add up. And how they can get them so early? By law, the fireworks can only be sold during the week leading up to New Year's.

There's so much to write about both our Viennese and Hungarian experiences, but highlights would have to include an old bath house in a park in Budapest, sitting all afternoon in old rooms dating to the 1800's with little of the massage rooms and machines changed since then. . . and delicious restaurants in Budapest. Learning the one very handy word while on our train from Vienna to Budapest: nem dohanyzo! = Non-smoking in Hungarian. Finding our palatial room at the Le Meridien in Budapest, after having spent five nights in a little room and even tinier shower area in Vienna. Watching an opera in the Budapest National Opera House, a work of art! Finding out our flight on Christmas Eve to Amsterdam was cancelled and then being re-routed to Prague, and then onward to Amsterdam from there, flying in a little propellor plane on Tyrolean Air! Seeing Ad's family again all together for Christmas dinner.

Off to enjoy a coffee and tomorrow it's on to Arnhem for a day of shopping with my sister-in-law, meeting an old ex-colleague in the evening and a good friend and her family on Thursday. We'll probably be back before we know it. Just in time to ring in the new year in Vancouver.

Signing off for now,

Ariane C