Christmas and Dresden

Meg:

I'm gonna jump RIGHT into it! So, we finished class, and like I said before, I started my job, which I'm in LOVE with. It's an international school. I'm teaching 2nd and 3rd grade. I have a Czech co-teacher, and we split the days, so whenever I'm teaching English to one grade, she's teaching Czech to the other. It's an incredible system and I'm so impressed by these students who have been in this program through most of their school-lives. There are a couple new kids, but most of them are now completely bilingual because of it! It amazes me everyday. So I've got 10-12 kids in each class, depending on the day, and they already feel like a little family to me. My favorite part right now is that I get to teach art and music on top of the normal classes. Music is hilarious and fun and so is art, especially with the help from my live-in art teacher! :) Speaking of that art teacher, Tom did a helluva lot getting things ready for us to move again and running around the city, preparing things for our work-visa (there's like 5000 pieces of paper you need notarized and stamped and really just rubbed on so many butts to make them legal).

Then after that week, it was Christmas break! For the first time in my teaching career, I felt like I didn't need it, but I was of course, happy to have it. On the previous Thursday, Tom and I moved all of our things to an apartment of 3 of our new friends. Our time was up at the first apartment, and we needed to move out, but with no where to go just yet, our generous friends took us in. :) They live close to two churches. 

This church here, we call the toilet church because it does kind of look like a toilet. :)

 

And this one is in the middle of a square that is pretty central and has a cute little Christmas market in December.

So, we stayed for a few days until they needed the bed for other visitors, and hearing our plight, another teacher at my school offered her apartment, as all of her roommates and herself would be out of the country for Christmas. We still cannot appropriately express our gratitude to all of these people that so graciously took us in. 

Once we moved, it was just about Christmas time and we were leaving again for Dresden, so we didn't want to leave a living tree in our friends' apartment, so we went to the dollar store and picked up some green paper and made our own! We're not sure how long it lasted because the fridge is always a happening place, but it was perfect for our little first married Christmas.

When I posted this picture before, everyone tended to focus on the wine bottles in the corner, but believe me when I say, we only contributed one bottle of champagne which was one of the many gifts given to us from my new school. Christmas Eve we were able to skype with both sets of parents and some siblings. It made us feel so good but also made us miss home. I know we've said this before, but while we've been crazy, moving from one place to another, and working on crazy Visa-stuff and adjusting to a new culture, our families have been so supportive and encouraging. They hated the fact that we didn't have an address to send things to for Christmas, but somehow they compensated for that by sending a million hugs and kisses over Skype. For Christmas Eve dinner we made cheese fondue and meatballs and got packed up because on Christmas Day we had decided to take a bus to Dresden, Germany! 

It sounds yucky, a bus on Christmas, but ACTUALLY, this bus has video screens for each person, a free cappuccino or hot cocoa, internet, and a bathroom! Sweet deal huh? Also, we passed a castle on the way.

We arrived at the station and there was a huge tree. We meant to get one of the two of us, but got too busy meeting our CouchSurfing host and heading to the grocery store that we forgot. So here's one of my happy hubby.

I'm sure I've told you about CouchSurfing before, but if you haven't heard, a short explanation would be that it's like facebook, but for your couch/extra bedroom. Everyone has a profile, they have references that they can't take down (good or bad), and a picture of the place they have available for you to stay and it's location in the city. It's FREE and MUCH more enjoyable than staying in a hotel. We were lucky to stay with a guy named Alex who had a bunch of positive references. He picked us up from the station, took us grocery shopping, he bought stuff for dinner and we bought stuff for breakfast. For the next four days, we played TONS of card games, table soccer (they were so surprised to find someone who could actually play with them-and beat them), cooked all our meals together, drank lots of tea and wine, and looked out this window of the spare bedroom we got to stay in:

Alex also took us through town on a mini-tour (it was super cold so it was fast, but perfect!). Turns out most of Dresden was bombed, flattened, and burned in the war. They have been working SINCE then, to replace all the blocks right back where they should be. A lot of the buildings actually look speckled because they have rebuilt them, putting the burned ones in exact places and filling the rest in with new blocks:

You gotta read about this Frauenkirche church sometime, it's gorgeous. I think they just finished it in 2008 maybe? Check those stats.

We wanted to hang out by the Frauenkirche for a while, so we stopped for some Gluhwein in this cute little Christmas Market :) For the record, Tom's the one that called it cute, I just called it normal.

Apparently all the Dukes of Dresden are on this thing:

Here's a pretty theater :)

THEN....

We went to a cool coffee shop and later a pretty sweet "hole in the wall" bar to have Dresden beer (which was delicious-obviously).

I'm sorry this is so quick and just the facts! But I wanted to catch us up so that we could talk about what's going on LATELY instead of way back then!

Dresden was wonderful and we loved the look of the city. We were told it was very similar to Prague, and I think someone told us that they bombed the city thinking it WAS Prague (lucky for Prague). I'm so sorry if my facts are wrong, my brain was very cold and on Christmas break in Dresden. hehe

This is long enough...I'll send more later. We love you all tons and tons and tons. More updates are coming soon!