Christmas Market part 2

Our second day in Cologne we explored more of the markets and just took in the city.  

We of course tried more of the food options at markets!

Had to start my day with a fine German pretzel :) It was delicious

Market during the day

Baileys and Coffee for B and a keepsake mug of course! 

 Train that was giving rides in between the markets

Entrance to the market outside of our hotel 

Amazing mushrooms! 

These stars are in a ton of homes in the Netherlands, really wishing we would have bought on at the market! 

Brent loved the way the cooked this fish and could only imagine how amazing it would taste

Some delicious potato cake things- we each couldn't even finish one of them they were so filling!

After walking through Cologne for awhile we drove about an hour to Maastricht(the most southern city in the Netherlands) for the night.  Because the city is so close to the German border it has a ton of German influence and of course had a Christmas market. 

The ice skating rink in the market. I thought this tree was so pretty 

Carolers singing in the rain

The biggest difference between the German markets and the Dutch one, was the people selling the brats in Germany had ketchup and mustard for toppings and in the Netherlands they had ketchup and Mayo. Anyone who has visited knows that they love Mayo here!

The night on our way back to the hotel the was a lights show along the river.  They had Christmas images and music displayed on this huge screen.  The picture isn't the best but it was pretty cool and had a lot of people out watching it.

It was a really nice weekend and look forward to visiting Christmas markets again next year!

Christmas Market Part 1

The weekend before Christmas Brent and I went to Cologne, Germany for the Christmas markets.  It was so much fun! They definitely do Christmas right.  The markets had many homemade gifts for sale and a lot of food and drinks.  We got there Friday night so everything was lit up with Christmas lights, which made it so festive and got us in the Christmas mood.

First thing for Brent was of course getting a brat 

 One of the buildings in the market

One of the markets with the Dom Cologne in the background 

This picture is blurry because this Ferris wheel was going really fast- way faster than any Ferris wheel I would ever ride! 

The drinks(hot chocolate, mulled wine and spiked cider) all came in these mugs and you pay 1 euro more when you order and after your finished you can either keep the mug or return and get your euro back 

So many fresh fruit items dipped in chocolate, we also had the chocolate covered strawberries..Amazing!!

Entrance to one of the markets 

Inside one of the markets

There were a lot of families out ice skating

One of the fun signs

I loved these markets! Everyone was so relaxed and happy and that is not something you always see the Friday before Christmas!

I'll recap the rest of the trip in a separate post this week!

Have a good Monday!

Weekend Recap

Hope that everyone had a great Easter! Brent and I spent our first holiday married by enjoying our new city just the two of us.  We were able to find a church that had an English service at 12:30 so we went to that. It was a bit of an adventure though.  On Friday we decided to find a catholic church so we would not have to worry about finding it on Sunday morning, we would know where it was.  So we get to the church on Friday and they have a sign up(all in English) that every Sunday at 12:30 they have a mass in English.  We were happy about this since we assumed we would be sitting through Easter mass in Dutch.  So Sunday morning we get dressed and head back to that same church.  When we got there 5 minutes before mass the church was empty.  Turns out the sign was advertising for another Catholic church.  We walked fast to the other church and ended up only being 5 minutes late for church. We were also very happy to be able to skype with our families this weekend. Skype is amazing and I don't know how we would do this without it!

Backtracking to Saturday.  Brent and I were really excited about going shopping at the market this weekend.  Every Saturday in Utrecht (other cities too) they have a big market set up in one of the squares in the city center.  They have everything you can think of from clothes to chicken wings to freshly roasted nuts.  Armed with our change...seriously we have so many coins!  They get heavy to carry around! Anyways, we got some really good stuff.  Neither of us are huge olive lovers, BUT one stand had sample of these pesto olives and they changed our lives forever(or just our opinions of olives).

 Seriously delicious pesto olives

These Peppers were spicy and stuffed with cheese. Spicy and cheese, two of my favorite things!!

The best part about the market is that they have samples of almost everything. That is how we ended up with the peppers. One bite and Brent was instructed that "we need these."

 We decided after we bought the olives we needed some cheese to go along with them.  And of course we had to sample all the cheeses they had out before we decided on one. All of the cheeses are always displayed on these olive wood trays. Brent now insists we need an olive wood tray.  This is the same man who every time we got another serving tray as a gift from showers etc. made a sarcastic comment about the quantity of serving dishes and trays we had. :)

 Below are all of our market purchases assembled for our late lunch.  I am not posting the after pictures because it is slightly embarrassing how we demolished the food.  We also got a new macro lens for our camera so it gave me an opportunity to play around with it.

Be sure to check back tomorrow for the first of my weekly favorite things post!
Hope everyone has a great Monday!
Mindy