Grandma's Here!

Stefanie, Rachel, Grandma, Dominic & AJ
outside St. Ulrich

Steve's mom arrived on the 18th of January to visit for a month. She is escaping the Ithaca winter by joining us in Munich.  Escape might be the wrong verb... Everyone is so excited to have her here. And, she reads the blog, so hopefully she will enjoy being featured!

We started out her visit with AJ's basketball game, church, and a visit to our town's temporary ice skating rink. If you missed that post, see it here: Ice Skating

One might think the ice skating would have been the coldest activity we did; but, one would be mistaken. Turns out it is church. Our church isn't heated. There are heaters under the pews but they don't seem to ever be in use. It wasn't even warm on Christmas Eve.  Another ex-pat told me churches in Germany aren't heated. However, please don't hold me to that.  My experience is limited to our church. It is not. Although everyone clapped after the homily last week and the priest was rubbing his hands together while he was talking about how cold it was(we understood that part!) so maybe, just maybe, he said something about heat?

And did you catch that?  We go to church in GERMAN.  We are hopeful we will someday understand more of the mass. For now we follow along with an English missal on the iPad and a prayer sheet with English and German prayers side by side. For an English mass we can head into Munich, but our church is a 10 minute walk from our house.  So easy.

We survived church but as you can tell from the picture at the top, everyone was pretty cold when we were leaving.  It probably wasn't the best way to welcome Grandma. Although we did end the day with a fondue dinner so hopefully we redeemed ourselves!