Ausfahrt: Münster

The first weekend in December, Matt and I joined 5 of our friends for a true Christmas market experience in Germany. We packed into Ross and Sascha's car on Friday evening for the 2.5 hour ride down. We had some laughs in the car about the German word for highway exit - auhsfart. How old are we?

Münster is a city in northen Germany with about 270,000 inhabitants - many of which are students. The rest are all old people. The Münster tourism website claims that people "as far away as Amsterdam" travel there for the Christmas markets (remember,just a 2.5 hour drive). But we weren't looking for a major happening city - just some markets where we could have glüwein and German sausages and good conversation.


Since we were two cars, we didn't get the gang all together until almost 10pm on Friday night. We met up at a bar in the main square that was teeming with people watching the football game. Finally when we got our act together to get dinner, no restaurants would take us. The only restaurant willing to seat 7 at nearly 11 was the Italian place - not what we had in mind, but at that point we just wanted to eat. After dinner we headed to one of the student bars and had some nice German brews.

The next morning I was laid out with a 24 hour flu, so missed the breakfast and the first shift at the Christmas markets. I tried to go out for about an hour and have a hot chocolate with everyone, but I couldn't stand up for very long without feeling like I would pass out, so I headed back to the hotel to rest up, hoping I would feel better by the evening. A few hours later, Matt came back to the hotel to check on me, and we ended up falling asleep for 2 hours. We called the rest of the group when we woke up to see where they were, and they had all just headed back to their hotel to take naps too. We had a few hours to kill before we met up for dinner, and I was feeling slightly better, so the two of us headed out for some glüwein. Though feeling crappy didn't help my opinion of my first Christmas market, I realized this is probably not my thing - standing in the cold, drinking really sweet, weird tasting wine-like liquids, getting shoved around by old people is not my idea of a good time. I'm Brazilian, people. Put me on a leather couch next to a fireplace instead.
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We met up with another 2 friends that had just arrived in town that afternoon for some Irish coffees, and slowly the gang reunited for dinner. Earlier Matt and I had scoured the town for a place that would seat 9 of us for dinner that night. Most places laughed in our face and asked if we were telling them a joke. But one place could seat us, albeit in the bar area, where people were allowed to smoke. I wasn't feeling 100%, and the smoke got to all of us - it's hard to believe we've only been smoke-free in Amsterdam for 5 months, since we were so not prepared for that stench. There was also someone in there smoking a cheap cigar, which smelled absolutely gnarly. But we had some really yummy schnitzels, good beers and many laughs, and we were just happy to be together. We got some horrible news about other friends and were all a bit thrown by it, so took that time to be really thankful that we were all alive and well. Some emotional "I love you guys!" all around.

The next day the sun made an appearance, and put us all in better spirits. We got some food and hot chocolates and did a bit of shopping at the markets, though nothing they were selling was very appealing. You'd think there would be some original stuff in the markets, but everything looked like it came from China. Matt and I went home with a knit cap for his brother, some socks and a candied apple. We hit the road at around 3, making it back to Amsterdam with plenty of time to catch the Giants game.