Germany for Christmas...almost, first Ofortsin

Well...I am almost to Christmas. Before we got to Bonn, where we were spending Christmas we stopped in Ofortsin, a little town in the Black Forest. Viki's grandparents live there and when we arrived at their house around 8 at night we were pretty hungry despite our large brunch earlier in the day. So Viki's Grandfather drove us into town (in one of his numerous cars...there were at least 8 in the garage, wow) to a nice hotel where we had a wonderful German dinner of spetzel, soup, german beer, a bunch of meet, and some other things that i really don't remember the name of...sorry, but it was all really good. I was super full by the end of it...that became a very common theme during my stay in Germany...I at a lot of food and a lot of little cookies and chocolates...but hey, it was christmas...or so Viki told me. Once we got back to the house Viki's grandparents went to bed and the three of us (me, viki, and katy) curled up in big comfy chairs and watched love actually. it was a really nice calm night.
The next morning we got up at our leisure, which i think was surprisingly not very late, maybe ten. After breakfast and a kind of sad and pathetic attempt on katy and my parts to stave off the coming ridiculousness of the holiday season by doing some abs we all got ready for the day. we decided we were going to have a day out on the town, so we went out in Viki's grandmother's hats...i must say, we looked rather adorable. first we went off with viki's grandmother to the grocery store to buy food for dinner (in the end we had salad, boiled potatoes (john's favorite..., luckily i don't mind it either once in a while), and bratwurst) and breakfast the next morning. then we drove 20 minutes into town. we stopped at an internet cafe...to deal with katy's insane holiday disaster...long story, you don't want to know (in the end she ended up coming to spain for new years...but that is a whole other story) we wandered around the christmas market for a while, had some gluhwein and didn't really find much. plus, we were getting cold. so we took refuge in a nearby mall, where ironically, we stopped at a cafe and had ice cream...go figure. but we had been restored and were really very productive in buying holiday gifts after that. Then we headed home to help get dinner ready since we were eating with viki's grandparents and we didn't want to keep them waiting.
Viki's grandmother pretty much had everything under control, so we just made the salad, set the table, and had dinner. Dinner was nice and calm and afterward we trekked out to the garden house to get some wine. it was actually pretty funny because it was very dark and there turned out to be no electricity in the garden house. we found the bottles of wine fairly easily but we couldn't read any of the labels...so i grabbed a bottle and gave it to katy, she ran outside to read it, confirmed that it would work (it ended up being a red spanish wine) and we ran back through the cold to the comfort of the nice warm house. Viki and i didn't drink that much wine, but katy got tipsy enough that she started speaking german with viki's grandmother...it was pretty funny. after viki's grandparents went to bed, we truly had a girl's night. earlier in the week in st. gallen we had purchased some face masks...we decided this was the perfect night to try them. We had a blast...and don't worry, we took plenty of pictures...after we cleaned the masks all up we watched Bend It Like Beckham (which in germany is actually called kick it like beckham). viki had bought the movie ealier in the day because katy and i both really liked it and she had never seen it. but viki really didn't like the movie at all...so i inherited it. katy promptly went to bed after the movie...but viki and really weren't ready for bed. so we went for a midnight walk around the neighborhood. we got all bundled up and had a good little walk. the next morning we all got up at a reasonable hour (we had to...we had to be at the airport in frankfurt to pick someone up at noon) had breakfast, packed everything off and headed to the airport. But here are some pictures, and later there will be more adventures to follow: http://drexel.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2042353&l=97365&id=10500847