Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to everyone! We had a fun New Year's Eve, or Silvester - as they call it here in Germany (after a pope from the 1600s) - here in Dusseldorf. Art's brother Karl was here visiting us. The day started with us missing the 9:40am tram to church and taking the 10am tram. We still only missed 1 song from the service - they NEVER start on time! Then we went to the Altstadt (old town) to see if they still had the Christmas Market (Weinacht Market) booths up, but they didn't. So we walked around a bit and looked at downtown. We finally ate lunch at Space Burger. Burgers = great. Service = good. Zachary's behavior = abominable. Having had a big lunch, and Art just being a huge fan, we had a 'snack' dinner, where every course was a snack type food. I did insist we alternate a fruit/veggie for every other course. Some courses were currywurst, ham & cheese, chips & salsa, mango, paprika chips, cucumber, etc. Even Zach got to be part of the festivities by staying up until a little after 9pm! The evening's activities consisted of playing Cribbage, watching music concerts, taking turns comforting Zach (he had a bad night - waking up screaming every few hours), and talking to family (And Karl on the phone w/ his girlfriend). We rang in the New Year here at the apartment and spent 30-40 minutes after the New Year out on the balcony watching and listening to crazy German fireworks. Keep in mind that we live in a very residental neighborhood and these were serious fireworks, going 100ft into the air! They take their post-New-Year partying pretty seriously! Dexter unfortunately did NOT enjoy the fireworks. He would come to the balcony door very tentatively, and when I would open the door, he would run under the bed. This repeated several times. He was glad to crawl into bed with us around 12:45 and get some rest!