When you’re stranded in a foreign country for the holidays and surrounded by people you’ve only known for a few months, there are only three real solutions: fly back to your family, get out of Dodge and travel around, or band together with your fellow expats and make the best of it. Just for something new (and cheap), I picked Door Number 3.
Thanksgiving has never been a huge holiday in my book, but this year I got the harebrained idea to throw my first “Friendsgiving” dinner. And so I roped a fellow American into the plan, threw out invitations like so many fishing lines, and started cooking. The most unexpectedly difficult part of this entire equation was converting Imperial measurements into metric (why the hell do they have different measurements depending on whether it’s a liquid or dry ingredient?!), but I managed not to poison anyone. It’s also kind of nice when no one knows what things are actually supposed to taste like, because when you mess it up they have no idea.
We had more people show up than expected, which is great because it means you have more friends than you thought you did. We wrangled a mishmash collection of chairs from all over the house and squeezed elbow-to-elbow around the table, heaping our mismatched plates with literal volcanoes of international foods. The wine ran like the Mississippi in May. The conversation ebbed and flowed, only truly dying down long enough for us to stuff ourselves in true Thanksgiving spirit.
Now obviously Europe does not celebrate this holiday, so at some point someone asked the inevitable question: “What exactly IS Thanksgiving?”
Unfortunately for these poor souls, their teacher was me. I managed to stall for awhile, but after a few glasses of wine I finally relented. I could have given them the sugar-coated version that’s forcefed to Americans in Kindergarten, when we dressed up in headdresses covered in paper feathers and made turkeys out of our handprints. Instead I hit them with the smallpox-blankets version, in which the Pilgrims repaid the Natives’ kindness with atrocities. Sorry, kids.
Shortly after Thanksgiving, there comes the month-long Weihnachtsmarkt season in Germany and its environs. This is a magical time when nearly every town sprouts Christmas markets like a festive fungus. Wooden stands bedecked with lights and pine boughs form mazes in nearly all the open spaces in Germany. Ornaments, fancy liqueurs, candied nuts, candle holders, fur-lined mittens, wooden toys, puppets, and shiny things are all for sale. But here’s the best part: you are allowed – nay, even encouraged – to drink this wonderful hot sweet spiced wine while shopping: glühwein.
For those of you who are glühwein virgins, allow me to paint you a picture. Glühwein is wine, often locally made, that has been heated to a balmy temperature and poured into an adorable collectible glass cup. It’s infused with cinnamon and cloves and more than a pinch of sugar. It’s inexpensive, but doesn’t taste cheap. It’s a brew best served with a side of friends, and also a heaping plate of schupfnudeln. One sip is enough to chase the night’s chill away. Two sips and it burrows its way deep into your soul. Be careful, though….any more than a couple glasses and you may just end up making friends with enormous walking Lebkuchmänner.
My time-intensive class called Human-Environment Interactions held me back from experiencing more than the odd nightly jaunt to Freiburg’s Weihnachtsmarkt for a few weeks, but I was finally set free one Saturday morning to hop a bus to Strasbourg, France.
Strasbourg sits in the awkward “Alsace” region between France and Germany, who fought over the region for a long time (I’m great at history). Today Strasbourg screams “I HAVE AN IDENTITY CRISIS,” but in the cutest way possible. Some streets are filled with German-style half-timber houses leaning drunkenly against each other, but then you turn the corner and feel like you’ve been instantaneously teleported to Lyon or Paris, staring up at stately stone buildings with rounded metal roofs.
Per usual I found myself in the city without a map, but the great thing about Christmas markets is that they’re usually centered around churches (whose towers can be seen from almost anywhere in the city) and can be found in multiple locations. And so I wandered. I let my feet ramble where they would, weaving down alleyways and avenues until I inevitably stumbled upon a square filled to bursting with people and enticing scents and music of strange persuasions. The sun shone in a bluebird sky and I stripped down to a t-shirt as I shopped. I watched the light deepen from a pale gold to burning red, painting the cathedral bloodred for a few minutes before darkness finally fell and the market lights burst into life.
When you find yourself engulfed in such a crush of people, odds are very high that you’re going to run into at least a few of them. But here’s the interesting part: when you do this in tourist hotspots, you have absolutely no idea what language that other person speaks, and you end up playing language roulette. I can apologize in three languages, so each time it happened I had to instantaneously pick between “Pardon,” “Entschuldigung,” and “Sorry.” It’s a strangely fun game to play.
I’d heard that the Strasbourg market was one of the best, but was unsure what to expect given the recent atrocities in Paris and subsequent rumors of both subdued markets and heightened security measures. Luckily, when I hopped the border in early afternoon, I found the city full of life. However, it was also crawling with security personnel from what must have been every single branch of law enforcement and military available, some of whom were wielding pretty scary-looking weapons. Besides getting that inevitable thought of “oh shit” that happens every time I see a cop-like figure and think of all the illegal things I’ve done recently (look away, Mom), I felt safer with their presence than I would have without.
I also made a daytrip to Colmar, which is similar to Strasbourg but even more cutesy. The pictures for this one more than speak for themselves, so listen up:
While I’m not religious, Christmas has always been the big yearly reunion time for my family. People gather in small-town central Michigan where my mom’s family grew up, baking cookies and catching up and playing vicious card games. My parents had graciously offered to fly me home for the holiday but I’d declined, stubbornly clinging to the idea that I wanted to stay put in Europe for an entire year just to see if I could do it. I’d missed the celebrations only once in my entire life, and while I was a little sad about missing them again, I figured that enough people would be in Freiburg to remove the sting of loneliness. Unfortunately the closer it got to Christmas, the more people told me they were leaving town. On the 14th of December I realized I was probably going to spend Christmas alone, and sent a pathetic text to my brother.
Loving sibling that he is, he immediately jumped online and started researching flights. Within two hours we’d hatched a plan to secretly fly me home without telling anyone. I literally had the longest Christmas Eve of my life – a full 30 hours spent on the same date, hopping a train to Frankfurt, a plane to Paris, another plane to Detroit (with an empty seat next to me so I had a makeshift bench, score!) where I met my brother, and a three-hour drive to my aunt’s house. We’d tried in vain to come up with a clever way to surprise everyone, but the best our sleep-deprived brains came up with was to run up on the porch, rip the door open, and start singing a Christmas carol. Seeing the baffled joy on my relatives’ faces was worth the pain and suffering of both the last-minute translatlantic journey and shivering through the unexpected 24-hour power blackout.
It was a short trip, just six days in the States, but I made a significant effort to cram all the best parts of America into those days. There aren’t many things I’ve missed about the US: real wilderness, my people, and legitimate peanut butter are at the top of that very short list. I drove a car for the first time in four months, rode shotty while my brother spun some donuts after an ice storm, patronized a Buffalo Wild Wings, and stocked up on some cheap American drugs. I’m currently wrapping up this saga in the Detroit airport, glad that I made the trip but also stoked to be heading back to my current European life and all the future adventures.
Window Seat Odyssey 
Bravo, my dear! Love, Mom
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