The Holidays

Eric and I had a really special Christmas and New Year this year. Our first away from home (well Christmas at least). Somehow we were able to rope the Appels into coming to us in England. Actually, it didn't really take any roping at all. The surprised us with about 3 weeks notice. It was fantastic and a real blessing to be with family when we weren't expecting to be able to. I am so reminded how special the holidays are with family around. Though I know Eric and I would have made the best of it just being the two of us in Cambridge, neither one of us were gonna put up a fight when the Appels asked if they could crash our Christmas. Stan, Cyndi & Jenny (Eric's sister) came out for a short but very sweet trip. Jenny's best friend, Karli, joined for the last few days of the trip, which was great. We were packed into our little apartment with two air mattresses blown up, filling the living room and part of the kitchen. It's a wonderful thing to wake up and have everyone all groggy and in their PJ's gathered on the couch with tea and chatting. Christmas morning was just like being a kid. We woke up to stockings overflowing and stuck under our little tree.

Eric and I cooked our first Christmas dinner and indoctrinated the Appels into a very British tradition of "christmas crackers". They are these paper toys where everyone pulls on an end, it eventually breaks and out flies some sort of nik-nack (like a deck of cards or a whistle). How expensive they are determines how nice the surprises are on the inside. Then everyone gets a colorful paper crown in it and proceeds to wear it throughout the rest of the dinner. Surely we explained this on our blog last year. We cooked up a fillet (beef tenderloin in the US). Our first really successful non-poultry roast.
It was a special christmas gift season. I got this keyboard as a combined birthday/christmas X 2 gift. It has been so much fun. I am taking lessons now and making myself sit down to practice for 30 minutes 3-4 X/week. I have recognized how hard it is to be an adult learner in an instrument and constantly have my moms voice from when I was kid ringing in my ears..."slow down". It really takes discipline but I am loving it. Poor Eric has some of the songs I practice stuck in his head. It does make for a great England hobby when the weather is crummy outside though.


Eric's special gift was a new bike this year. His old bike sounded like a bunch of tin cans dragging through the street. Once the mud flaps started popping off and his breaks stopped working in the ice, we knew it was time to invest in something a bit better.

Eric's most favorite gift that he gave to his dad were these two little figurines of a cowboy and a buffalo. Stan is originally from Kansas and the old show Jeremiah Johnson is close to his heart. These guys are awesome.

Like always, both the Appels and my parents are too generous. My mom had a mexican theme to our gifts and we got these rockin' aprons and everything but the bellpeppers to host a fantastic margarita party. Thanks mom. And PS: the authentic fresh tortillas are fabulous and we've been eating them for two months. There is just no substitute here in England. And how you got your gifts through customs baffles me!

We got to hang out in Cambridge for a couple of days. This is us at Jesus College.

For three days we took a small road trip around England. Our first stop was an old medieval castle in Warwick. There were some really cool falconers trying to keep up the trade. But it was a bit sad because you see a handful of gigantic, beautiful birds stuck sitting on a piece of wood with a 1 foot leash tied to his leg.
We took a drive through an old historic area known as the Cotswolds. The buildings are amazing. You can just see how old they must be by how they lean. Notice the thatched roofs on many of them. I don't think the Germans approve of some of the architecture in England.

We stayed in Bath which is known for the old Roman baths built over the top of the only natural hot springs in England. The site was rediscovered only 300 years ago but dates back to 60AD. People had been using the baths for over 2000 years before the romans built up the spa (complete with massage rooms, etc.) and a temple.
On our way home we stopped to see Avebury which is a town famous, like Stonehenge, for its large rock formations placed strategically all around one area. Avebury is about 4500 years old and is made of a large circle with two smaller circles inside of it. Like Stonehenge, the huge monoliths were dug out of a mountain about 100 miles away and transported some way. Experts speculate that they did it using rafts on the river.


Once we made it back to Cambridge it was New Years time. Unfortunately in my line of work, you are usually committed to one of the holidays during this time. So I was working night shifts over New Years. But Eric, like a champ, took Jenny & Karli out on the town.


We spent a beautiful day walking through the "winter gardens" at an old estate home named Angsley Abbey in Cambridge. The snow had just started to fall and we were all wearing our wellies (rain boots) exploring the beautiful grounds and part of the home. Some of my most favorite things are all the funny statues that people chose to be a part of their landscapes.

We spent our last day exploring London and its awesome markets. I don't know how I hadn't discovered them before. Now that I have, hopefully my christmas gifts will start getting much cooler in the future. Eric and Stan ate at a pub watching a "football" (soccer) match (something which Stan had longed for the entire trip). There were some really loud and roudy supporters that made the experience complete. All in all, our holiday was really special! I missed my family most definitley!!! But I must say- I am a lucky girl to have the Appels.

Christmas Party and Snow

Now its time for Christmas dinners and things. We went to the Graduate Christmas dinner in Hall at Jesus last week. It is always so fun to do things like this in college. Not only good food but about 170 graduate students wearing silly little paper crowns (they come from Christmas crackers, a fun remnant of victorian christmas celebration) while wearing tuxedos and ball gowns. The night finished with everyone standing up and belting out the 12 days of christmas led by the college brass band playing from the back of hall.

Tonight though was the annual Melville christmas dinner with everyone from the lab I work in. The Melville is a subdivision of the Chemistry Department and is special for polymer research. It was in hall as well with all of the fun christmas things, just without the brass band. 

It started snowing a lot, right as we were getting ready for the dinner. The umbrella made it about 10 seconds as it was super windy.

Me, Andreas, Monika and Rosie. Monika is a postdoc who sits next to me and Rosie is a masters level student working in our lab.

When we came out of the dinner there were several inches of fluffy snow covering everything and much more was coming down.

We had a quick little snowball fight on the way home.

The next day all of Cambridge was absolutely beautiful. This is a local green space called Christ's pieces.

Nicki knew it was my job to do the blog post for this while she was working nights this weekend and so she snuck in a fun little surprise.

Germany with the Wells and Bullards: Christmas Markets Hooray!!

So we made another trip to Germany for one last big party with our friends Kyle and Pam before the depart back stateside. Kyle has just finished (this week) his PhD and so they are moving to Santa Barbara to start real life with a real job. Some new friends, Collin and Candice, also joined us. They are from the states also and Collin has just started a PhD here and so they will be around for a couple of more years too. 

We got really lucky in booking a car and a wonderful house for a long weekend to hit up the Christmas markets in several places around western Germany. Before we got there, the car we had booked was supposed to be for 5-7 so we were really hoping for the 7 seater. When we arrived they were out of the car we booked and so they gave us a 7-seater VW van. Totally awesome and something almost american in style and would never happen in England. Here is Pam and Candice trying to figure out the map for the first leg to the house.

Candice looking skeptical and Pam looking very unsure. After this Nicki kept saying that I was a really really great map reader and navigator. Lucky for me it was only about 15 min before Collin figured out the SatNav unit in the van so that I was off the hook.

Here is the van and the very happy crew.

Our place was in a very nice little village. A very nice little village called Enkirch about 90 west of Frankfurt towards Trier. 

Later on the first day the boys went on a beer run, singing the song (which got stuck in nicki's head straight away so that she was singing it to herself the rest of the trip). We came up to the little shop and bought some local beers and some not-so-local beers for about 0.50 euros. The same beers are about 2.5 pounds each in England. Crazy. A half block down the next street we found this place that looked like a feed store, except that there was this guy loading crate after crate of beer onto the back of his tractor. We went to check it out and it was a beer distributor. Fun fact: Germans are ranked 3rd world-wide for beer consumption per capita.

We had a wonderfully comfortable place that was so green with a low carbon furnace and solar powering everything that we had hot water for only about 2.5 showers and could only use two burners on the stove at one time, without lights.

Our first real German Christmas market.

Real German mustards.

Huge advent calendar!!
Pam enjoying a wonderful glass of warm Gluwein. The German version of mulled wine that is actually much better than mulled wine.

Here we all are in the kitchen cooking up our first dinner at the house. German engineering is absolutely incredible. This place was actually really efficient and the lazy Susan was the first one I have ever seen that closed on its own, fully closed, without over spinning. 

Us and Kyle and Pam

I love a good sausage with mustard. So incredibly awesome. 

After visiting Trier we made an afternoon/evening trip to Luxembourg. 

Despite her happy face in the next picture, Nicki was really upset about the coffee cup that we bought in Luxembourg to continue our tradition of cup gathering from the places we travel to. I really liked the cup, but nicki wanted a different one that was more expensive. So we spent almost 10 euros on the cheaper one (Luxembourg is the richest country in the world per capita). Then we found out that the Gluwein tents had awesome cups that were very much to her liking and were only 2.50 if you bought a glass of Gluwein and didn't return the cup. But its OK, I still like the one we got.

It was really cold when we went to Heildelberg so everyone else stayed down in a coffee shop while Kyle and I headed up to the castle. The city is absolutely beautiful. The red color of the stone making up all of the old buildings is really unique and really pretty.

Here is a huge wine vat that they had in the castle. The people give you just a bit of a glance at how huge this thing is. I don't know how many trees must have gone into making this thing. It is about 30 meters long too.

At dinner that night we went to a dark and interesting place for dinner that turned out to be really good. Here we are giving each other "The Lazy Eye". Thats not what it is really called, it is just that Germans and Austrians find it very offensive to cheers with someone without looking them directly in the eyes.

I was getting made fun of for wearing my periodic table shirt. Nerdy Chemist. 

On our last day we went to a small village just up the river from our village. We missed the last tour of the castle by 15 min and so the only way to see even part of it (only the courtyard) was to pay 5 euros to see a nativity play in German. So we took a walk instead. 

It was a pretty awesome trip and a really good time with Kyle and Pam. They are our best friends here and we will really miss them when they leave next week.

would you know it if you were in a bug's stomach?!!

So last night nicki all of a sudden curled up in a bit of ball and started squirming around and yelled out loud (very loud) "would you know it if you were in a bug's stomach?!!" I woke up rather surprised and said very nicely, "what?" She responded by yelling out the same thing. I asked her again, because clearly, there is no way she had actually said that while curled up and squirming around as if she was actually in a bug's stomach. Yet she yelled out again the same thing. And all of this while she was still sleeping.

Thanksgiving in England

So we had thanksgiving this year with one American and two Canadians. The american is Jonathan who we know from our time in Palo Alto and has just undertaken an MPhil program at Oxford in Philology and Linguistics. The canadians are Jeff and Andra. Jeff is a post-doc in biochemistry and Andra is a nurse in the ICU at the same hospital as Nicki. Since Andra is one of Nicki's best friends here they were happy to come over to our house for American thanksgiving, especially because the missed Canadian thanksgiving. 

For some reason Nicki's biscuits didn't rise at all. They tasted great, but very quite dense.

While Jonathan was here we also went to High Table with the Fellows at Jesus. Our friends Kyle and Pam came also. We hadn't had them over for a single college dinner yet and we had to have them over for a good one before they headed back to the states. 

Here we are displaying our Jesus mints. Last year we had a vote at the college to bring back official Jesus mints. A couple of years ago they had gotten rid of them in order to save a lot of money with generic mints. But the undergrads really wanted special Jesus mints.

In the coat room there is a funny closet with a real skeleton hanging in it.

Right after thanksgiving we had our little fake tree up and had a dressing party with Jonathan. We got some weird looks from passers by (mostly old ladies) because we had our tree up on the 30th. They don't do it here until Dec 1st and any day early is just very taboo. 

Fall is upon us!!

Now someone may have noticed that this has come up after the snow post I put up yesterday. So we're a bit behind. What's it to ya! eh!

Cambridge was absolutely beautiful during the whole fall. The weather was really nice. It got a bit cold at times, but we had a ton of sunshine and beautifully clear days.

And lots of autumn leaves were around Jesus Green behind our college.

The swan on the right is one of 5 baby swans that are now not so babyish. For the past couple months we have gotten to watch this family of 2 adults and 5 babies hang out on the same section of the river and on Jesus Green. The babies were super fluffy and grey with black feet and black beaks. They are only just now turning a bit white and more sleek. Their beaks have still not fully turned orange. It has been really fun to watch them grow up. They were about the size of a shoe, now they are the same size as the adults.

The Queen

I don't think I had ever envisioned this moment, but it is so cool that I had one. I saw the Queen of England herself, in all her glory and peach from head to toe. She was visiting one of the Colleges here for a lunch celebrating Cambridge University's 800th year as an academic institution. I had just happened to be wandering town when I saw this crowd of people. I asked someone what the deal was and they said the Queen was going to be coming out any minute. 60 minutes later but well worth the wait, I saw her. She was super cute and very little. Here are photos from a new friend I met while standing there. It is her procession out from the gates of Kings College into her car (which by the way was driving her MAYBE 150 yards down the road). It was a great moment and one I realize I was really lucky to have.