I love Christmas time and London is definitely a place to love it. While in London there aren't houses to hang lights on, each major shopping street (there are a lot) is completely decked out in lights and each street is a different theme of lights. Also a lot of the big department stores decorate by the outside of the building being under "sheets" of lights, we are talking major electric bills. So, if you don't mind the large crowds walking around in the evening is beautiful/gaudy :) My whole goal this past weekend was to forget work and be all about Christmas and was quite successful.
Friday night I went with a couple of girlfriends to three markets. The first titled the 'Super Christmas Market' which shopping wise was totally lame and not worth the £4 entrance fee but they had interactive games that were highly entertaining. I saw my first santa with a British accent and one room of this market was set-up as santa's office and a market attendee could sit down at santa's desk and he would give them a lie detector test and ask them ridiculous questions and be silly in order to determine if their name should be on the naughty or nice lists hanging from the wall. We only observed someone else doing this.
Another room had two 'life-size' reindeers made out of wood with a plastic air pump on their backs and a red balloon on their nose. Two people would race and see who could blow up and pop Rudolph's nose the fastest with the air pump to win. So Michelle VV and I had our hands ready to start pumping while Yang was setting up the camera when the people that were supposed to be running the booth walked it. To our displeasure we found out how the game realllllly worked. You are supposed to sit on the back of the reindeer, but your feet in the stir-ups, hang on and pump the balloon by thrusting your butt up and down on the pump! Well it was too late to back out so we put on quite the show for a crowd of strangers that quickly formed including some guy taking a video on his I-phone. Hilarious.
Market 2 and 3 were more low key, one was a chocolate festival with amazing chocolate art and yumminess and the other was a traditional German style market with booths of crafts, beer and mulled wine and bratwurst. Saturday, Christmas continued with shopping for decorations for the apt and going to a Christmas party with a White Elephant exchange at Michelle VV's. It was a lot of fun to hang in with everyone (not at a trendy club - our recent scene) and eat food and play games. Jim taught everyone Zumi Zumi and it was a hit! Hilarious.
Sunday, I actually hung up (with Jim's help/height) the 64 ornaments bulbs that I purchased and individually tied and strung. Looks pretty and economical! We also went to the Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park a carnival/German Christmas market. It has so much going on and the food was awesome and tons of beer. There are "Bavarian pubs" throughout the market. I was discussing this yesterday with a guy from Amsterdam and he said the reason the German Christmas markets are so popular is because of all the drinking.....this all makes so much more sense now and something that definitely hasn't been adopted State-side.
Definition: Mulled Wine - have you heard of it? Extremely popular winter drink that is essentially red wine served hot with cinnamon and can have fruit in it. Picture warm Sangria, really good!
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