Christmas bells are riiiiiiiing-ing!

So, like you may have read in the previous post, the big birthday odometer clicked over for me on Friday! Fortunately, I had some time to do some proper celebrating this past weekend. A few weeks ago, I bravely asserted that M. is smarter than I am. Luckily, my assessment does indeed hold water: he successfully passed the USAEUR drivers license last week: whoo hoo! (Now I just need to do the same, but I digress.) M. works in a small, pastoral town about 15 minutes south of Wurzburg, which we have discovered is roughly a 60 minute drive across to Frankfurt/Darmstadt. Brand-new drivers license in hand, he drove to Darmstadt on Friday evening, and we wheedled our way around town, finally settling on an Italian restaurant in Eberstadt (a suburb) for my birthday dinner. What was really fun about this whole escapade was that the Italian waiter spoke very little german, and no english, so we were having to translate things from italian into german and then into something resembling broken english. I must say, the whole situation definitely went a long way to alleviating any pressure either of us might have otherwise felt to use grammatically correct Deutsch! Our waiter was really nice, and somehow, despite all of the gesturing and language difficulties, made my birthday dinner a good one.

On Saturday, we drove to Wurzburg to the Weinachtsmarkt (Christmas market) to shop and to take in a little Gluhwein....mmmm: it's all the boiling hot alcoholic goodness you can ask for and it fits conveniently into one little mug, perfect for drinking while standing outside in the cold with everyone else in the early-December night! Later on Saturday evening, we continued on to Giebelstadt, where M. is staying. It's an adorable little town, so small that despite only being a 15 minute drive from Wurzburg, noone that we asked for directions was able to tell us where it was! Somehow, we managed to get there anyway. He'd been telling me about how cute the town is, and how the gasthaus (guesthouse) that the Army has put him up in temporarily is directly across from the town church, which is also really cute, yadda yadda yadda. Okay, let me also preface the following by saying that M. is, quite possibly, the most good-natured person that I, have met thus far in my short life. Nothing bothers him. I mean it. Like, nothing. Having said that, I can also tell you the following anecdote. So, we get to his temporary lodging in the gasthaus, and there it is, directly outside the window, the cutest, quaintest church you've ever seen. So I say, "Hey! You're right that's adooooooorable!" At which point he shoots me the most withering look that I've ever seen him muster up. He then explains, with as much restraint as possible, that he has discovered the following since he offered up his initial assesment of the church. What's that, you ask? Ahem. Aforementioned cuuuuuute Bavarian church comes equipped duh duh daaaaaaah.... an equally adorable belltower. What's the problem with that, you ask? Oh, yes! The functioning bell. M. broke it down for me like this: at a quarter after the hour, he explains, it goes: boooong. Okay, not so bad. Then what? Well, at half past, it goes Boong boong. 45 minutes after the hour? You guessed it: Boong boooong booooooooooooooooong. And for the grand finale every hour? That's right: every hour, on the hour the belltower goes crazy Boooooong-ing and BOOOONG-ING and BOOOOOOOOOOONG-ING! Fortunately for the sake of my funny bone, I actually got to hear this in person, and see M.'s decidedly less-than-charmed reaction to it MORE than once, and let me tell you, I can vouch for the fact that this whole scenario does, in fact, go on four times and hour, every hour, TWENTY-FOUR HOURS A DAY! All I can say is: Poor M.! He's been living there for a week, so every time the formerly ADOOOOORABLE bell rings, his whole body tenses up, he shuts his eyes REAAAAAAAALLY tight (as though THAT'S going to block the horrendous noise!) and I think that he'd even admit to shuddering just a little bit. His reaction to it, given how charming he initially thought this was, just makes the whole, ridiculous scene even funnier. And yet, he hasn't complained yet. Get this guy some water torture! The bell's not working, people! Not surprisingly, the very next day, he found a new apartment. In a different village. Far, FAAAAAAAAR away from the clanging of this very, very chaaarming part of Giebelstadt village life!