Foodmass shenanigans

So today we celebrated Foodmass, the annual event of nomming at this time of year. As is traditional we did not get up early.

Toni and I kicked our day off with some crackling, cheese and wurst that we brought back from Berlin (the wurst was donkey, deer and pheasant/cognac). Absolutely delicious. This was accompanied by our first Christmas film, The Polar Express.

We then started prepping the turkey ready for our big feast later in the day. We cooked our gammon joint yesterday night to get ahead of the game which was how we could have crackling for breakfast so we won't be short on meat!

Tea was made and we settled down to watch Scrooged as part of our essential Christmas viewing.


More dinner preparations came next and then we treated ourselves to a wee drinkie and some nibbles accompanied by Love Actually.

At 19:00 dinner was finally all ready to be consumed!

Sam had an alternative Foodmas dinner, meat in stottie bread

Muppet's Christmas Carol was next in our list of essential viewing.


Today was the latest that we've ever done our gift exchange. It was nice to realise that this not a primary focus of our day.

One of the other things we bought in Berlin was this wonderful Weihnachtspyramide. Brings so many childhood Christmas memories for me :)


Our day finished off with National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

It was an absolutely wonderful day. Relaxed, good company fun, laughter, amazing food. Perfect!

Frohe Weihnachten, Merry Christmas, Yuletide Wishes & Season's Greetings everybody

Frohe Weihnachten, Merry Christmas, Yuletide Wishes and Season's Greetings to all my family and friends. I hope you all enjoy your holidays and time off no matter how you celebrate! However you celebrate (or even if you don't) have a fantastic day. Peace, light and love to one and all.

Twas the night before Christmas.....

It's that time of year again and so on this Christmas Night I bring you my annual tradition of posing some of my favourite videos related to the time of year (sort of).

I have to kick things off with my favourite Star Wars related Christmas video.


Mr B maintains a worthy place in the Christmas video chart with the excellently naughty Oh Santa...


This is a new one but deserves inclusion this year just for the insanity:


I'll round things off with this lovely classic from The Muppet Christmas Carol


Morgen kommt der Weihnachstmann

Berliner Weihnachtszeit, Peter Pane (again) and the long journey home

Sadly it was our last day in Berlin today. There were things we wanted to take back to the UK that we hadn't yet bought so we headed back to the Berliner Weihnachtszeit to complete out shopping. The TV tower was visible today.

Because I am incredibly childish I just had to take this picture (no apologies):

Due to the fog I didn't really manage to get a decent picture of the Rotes Rathaus yesterday so I made up for that today.

Here's another view of that Hellraiser meat that I showed yesterday.

We didn't indulge in this delight but we did however hit the wurst trail

Once we were all shopped out it was back to Peter Pane to kill off a couple of hours before we starting thinking about heading to the airport. We'd got to chatting with one of our waiters in previous visits and he gave us a couple of freebies as this was our third visit. Fresh mint and fresh ginger teas for the win!

Eventually the time came when we had to reluctantly get our backs and jump on the bus to Berlin Tegel airport to return back home again. Once again we really didn't want to. The make matters worse our flight was slightly delayed but eventually had a safe journey back and arrived home exhausted so we crashed out straight away.

What a wonderful few days we've had.

Berliner Weihnachtszeit, Peter Pane and Eisbären Berlin

Today we went to the Berliner Weihnachtszeit at the Rotes Rathaus, another Christmas market near to Alexanderplatz. It was much colder today and somewhat foggy first thing (I decided to not use the word mist as we were in Germany). This is the TV tower (you will see more of it later)

Awwww, how cute....

Of course it would be very rude not to pose in front of the weihnachtsbaum:

There was meat looking like an extra from Hellraiser!

The fog started to lift and so the TV tower returned (just)!

Of course when you are presented with a chuffing huge ferris wheel it is quite usual to consider a ride....

This was a much better weihnachtsmarkt experience for us. We might have bought quite a few things throughout the day. Of course that was the whole point of going in the first place so job done :)

We popped into Peter Pane for dinner as it is next door to our hotel. We love it there and visited quite a lot during the summer. The winter experience was just as good.

Peter Pane's Lemonade

Amazing burgers

My gorgeous wife! LOL

After the noms we hit the train to Warshauer Strasse and headed to the Mercedes-Benz Arena to watch Eisbären Berlin against Thomas Sabo Ice Tigers.

You don't see many crowds like this outside of hockey games in the UK

We had fabulous seats:

The team introduction was a spectacle just on it's own.....

Everyone was given a fan for making noise. Now this place holds 14.000 and it was almost full so there was a LOT of noise.

The atmosphere was electric. I don't think I've ever experienced anything quite like it. The Eisbären have a very vocal fan base with a large number of blocks all chanting in unison throughout the whole game with people actually conducting them.

Eisbären Berlin won the game 2-0. The first two periods were quite thrilling but they did try and defend the lead in the third. Great game though and we'll definitely be back again at some point.

This was an absolutely brilliant day.......