Since this is our first New Year in Germany, I was interested to see how the Germans celebrate it. First of all, they call New Year's Eve, Sylvester, after St. Sylvester who's saints day is celebrated on Dec. 31st. For Sylvester we hosted a party at our flat. We had two other families come over for the traditional German Sylvester dinner of Raclette. Raclette is both a cooking device and a cheese. The Raclette (cooking device) sits in the middle of the dinner table and you cook meats and vegetables on the top hot stone while at the same time melting the cheese in little trays underneath the cook top. This meal takes hours and is quite social. Below are a few pictures of our dinner. The kids had their own table with their own Raclette. For the kids we had some extra special "kid food" to cook up. They got pasta to put in the tray and melt cheese on top, and they also had wieners to cook on the top part. Fun!
Charlie, Rosalia, Andreas, Uli, and Susanne
Prost Neue Jahr!
Lucky kids!
Nathan, Magnus, Sebastian and Paul
After dinner, it is almost a requirement that everyone sit down in front of the television and watch an old British comedy sketch called "Dinner for One". It starts at 9:00 pm and plays over and over again until everyone in Germany watches it. I have added the video below so you can watch it too. It's only about 10 minutes long and worth the time. We laughed so hard!
After the movie, we bellied back up to the trough for dessert. The kids got chocolate fondue and the adults got italian semifreddo with raspberry sauce. Yummy! When we finished dessert we realized that it was already 11:15 pm and we decided to get ready to go to the lake for the fireworks. I thought we would go down and watch some professional firework productions since we can see several towns along the other side of the lake from us. However, when we arrived we discovered that just about everyone in Herrsching was there and they all had brought large bags or boxes of fireworks. We also brought our fireworks and joined in the fun. I was amazed at how it sounded like we were in a war zone. Here is a video that I shot that will give you an idea of how crazy it was.
In the morning we got up and decided to go back down to the lake and see how it looked after all the ruckus the night before. There was so much trash, spent fireworks, bottles etc. strewn all over the beach. A few people were trying to clean up some of it, but it was really a lot and it seemed like they weren't even making a dent. It will be interesting to see how it gets taken care of. I think probably that the city will have their workers go out and clean it. We'll see.
1 comment:
Chris Lasch
said...
Awesome post. We learned about raclette while traveling in Switzerland and promptly bought one. That was before we went vegan, we haven't used it much since. :(
1 comment:
Awesome post. We learned about raclette while traveling in Switzerland and promptly bought one. That was before we went vegan, we haven't used it much since. :(
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