The city is one of Germany´s most underrated treasures, if you ask me. The buildings were amazing, the cafes were cute and abundant, and cute little bookshops that have probably been there for ages were tucked into corners and alleys all over the place. I´d give the city 2 thumbs up, and I´d definitely visit it again. After a day of the most European activities I can think of: shopping, drinking coffee, looking at churches… we even found a Starbucks! There are a few things that make me really miss Christmas at home, and bright red Starbucks Christmas cups are one of them. We all piled inside and soaked up the warmth and smelled the espresso, before filing back out with a pound of coffee that Lisa had bought to satisfy out Starbucks needs back at home.

Things that I never realized were so different in North American than the rest of the world:

1. Malls. Here, there are Christmas markets. The shopping comes to you, you don´t go to it. Malls do exist in Europe, but only in cites, and strip malls are basically non-existent. In the towns (where a huge portion of the population resides) the Christmas markets float from stop to stop on each weekend, starting at the end of November. It´s the time of the year where everyone puts on their best coats and boots and stops and sais “hi”. The entire town is out, choirs are singing, snow is falling, wine and sausages are being sold from travelling booths. Every craftsman and woman is out with their little set up table of gifts and goods. Spices, wool, books, clothing, baskets, pottery, fine cheeses, smoked meat, hand-made Christmas decorations. It´s an absolutely fantastic time, lasting all day and fulfilling everyone´s social needs for the season.

2. Commercialism. Although everyone at home claims to hate it and complain about it starting earlier and earlier every year and people spend more money on more cheap stuff that´s made in China that we didn´t need in the first place, I kind of love it. I never realized that seeing blown up Santa´s and Christmas sales and all that actually get me into the Christmas spirit. Without them, I have to be self-motivated to listen to Christmas music (I haven´t been in a mall since September or seen a TV in even longer), put effort into going out and buying gifts (again, no malls, so there isn´t just one easy stop where I can pick up everything I need), and get myself into the Christmas spirit.

3. Christmas baking! Unfortunately, I don´t particularily like German bread or stollen or many of their Christmas specialties. Everything here is dark and rich and thick and the bread it made with rye (yuck!) and anything American is expensive to buy. This leaves me with few options: no Christmas baking, or do it myself. Luckily for me, the friend who I am staying with has an Oma, who is a wonderful baker. I added to the Christmas cookies with some good, old-fashioned North American gingerbread. Yep, the Germans had never had gingerbread. It was delicious and oh so fun to make together. Much better than just going to the store and picking some up, as I might have done if I were at home. One redeeming thing that Germans do have are these deliciously cheap cookies that are sort of a gingersnap tea cookie, in the shape of different buildings. They come in packs of about 100 for .89€, which allows me to binge quite frequently on them!

4. More of an observation and less of a complaint, Christmas actually falls on the 24th for most of Europe. I never realized this mind-boggling miracle. Presents, family dinners, decorating the tree… it´s all on the eve (today). I have no idea what we´ll be doing tomorrow, since everything will be done already, but Christmas will be over by the 25th. I have a feeling it might be quite lonely, especially with my family half way across the world, but I guess I´ll do what I´ve done all week here: sit in front of the fire, read my Narnia collection, drink coffee, eat, and nap. It sounds like a wonderful Christmas to me.

-We worked with prostitutes almost every night. It was definitely challenging for me, because I grew up in a city where I’ve seen prostitutes many times, but I’ve never thought about going up to one and talking to her. It seemed completely counter-intuitive to strike up a conversation with a prostitute or give her a gift, but our team decided that it was something that we valued, so we did it. We handed out chocolates, roses, and even wrote letters to one that we met and got close with. It was an amazing experience and the women were, for the most part, open to us praying for them and speaking blessings over them. Paris has a very large sex trade, run by pimps and ignored by police.

2. We paid a visit to a nice, little, old lady! This was one of my favorite days. Mmslle. Monique, an artist and entrepreneur. We had a chance to photograph her and her studio / apartment, as well as just bless her with chocolate and our presence.

3. We met quite a lot of artsy people. At the Pond Des Arts, a pedestrian bridge over the Seine in front of the Louvre, there were lots of street musicians and artists that we set up our cameras with and befriended. I got a few great shots, as well as made some French Canadian friends!

We did lots more, but those are just a few of the key things. It was definitely a blessed trip, and we did so much more than I ever expected we could in just a week. Paris is beautiful, historic, and in need of SO much help from the missions world. The population is very closed minded and cynical, and rejects Christianity quite bluntly. I would definitely recommend it for any wandering traveller, even though to be honest the tourist attractions are kind of boring. The Eiffel Tower looks exactly like it does in all of the pictures, believe it or not.

Here in Herrnhut I am on dinner preparation for work duty. Usually that consists of making a German dinner: dry bread, cold meat and cheese, veggies. Today, however, was special. I got to clean out, wash, stuff, and prepare 4 turkeys and 120 chicken legs. We did the whole dinner: beans, potatoes, meat, cranberry sauce… it was delicious! We dressed up and sat family-style for the meal. We even had chocolate mousse and vanilla pudding with peaches for dessert! Many people who were from outside of North America had never celebrated Thanksgiving. I’m seriously happy that we could bring a great thing from our culture into theirs.

Fun story about turkeys today: the innars of the turkeys came in vacuum sealed packages that were stuffed inside of the birds. We decided that we didn’t need them, and since Germans recycle and compsot everything all the time, I was told to do so as well. I opened up the parcels of hearts, livers, kidneys, and spinal chords and threw them into the compost bucket. It never occured to tell anyone else until about 5 minutes later when I heard a scream. My poor, dear friend Lisa had walked by and thought that she was witnessing the leftovers of a massacre or something. Lucky, the guts were not enough to turn her off of her apetite for Thanksgiving meal.

Thank God for Americans, Germany, tryptophan, turkeys, long tables, dresses, and all of the other blessings, big and small that Iv’e recieved all year.

I arrived in from Paris a few hours ago. It’s about a 12 hour drive from where I am in Germany. I was there with a team of 12 for a week doing work with the homeless, in the red light district, and just praying for the city. As any photography students would, we also went to Paris Photo on the opening day.

I’ll post later about the details of the trip, but I want to give a quick shout-out to God for making the whole thing possible, plus more.

First, we needed accommodation. We thought we had a pretty good in with a church to sleep at, but as time got closer and closer they weren’t responding and we needed something quickly. So, we prayed, and we ended up in this old factory which is now an art studio. It ended up being so much more than just sleeping accommodation to us.

Before we left, we divided up responsibilities among ourselves. Lisa, a fantastic girl from Wisconsin, and I were the food team. We were given a budget of 4 euro per day per person for food. We knew that it would be tight but possible. We decided that coffee was a luxury and to cut it out of the budget. But we still wanted coffee, so we prayed not only for coffee, but for Starbucks specifically (we are a little gourmand). The day before we left, a woman on staff came up to Lisa with a pound of whole bean Starbucks coffee, saying that she didn’t know what to do with it before but she knew that there was going to come a time when it was needed. God knew we were coming and that we wanted Starbucks! She gave us the whole pound. Unfortunately, halfway through the week, since our team loves coffee as much as we do, we were out. Revising the budget for food, Lisa and I found room for a few extras, so we set off to Starbucks. Expecting to pay the same amount as in Canada for a pound of Christmas blend we were glad to discover that an entire pound was only 5.50 Euro! What a fantastic surprise to find out that we could afford coffee all week long.

Before we left, we were also trying to figure out how to get music. None of us had a guitar, although a few of us could play. We asked around to a few people but not many had a guitar to lend us for a week. We joked around about God providing one, but we figured that finding a guitar sitting in the middle of an old factory was unlikely. We prayed for one, but ended up borrowing a guitar. As soon as we got to the factory, we found a guitar sitting neatly in the center of the room, much like  most of us had probably imagined it as we were laughing at how ridiculous that would have been a few days earlier.

Another small surprise that God left behind for us was a towel. A few of us had forgotten towels, and were just planning on using pajama bottoms or something. One of us prayed for a towel, and you can guess by now what happened. As we were getting a tour from our lovely hostess, she showed us a pile of clothes and shoes that were available for us to hand out to the homeless or whoever we felt needed it. We were able to borrow towels from the pile for the week, and also bless a few people with the items.

There are many, many other stories including a free cheeseburger, a discontinued camera piece that we were able to find within budget in stock at a store, a broken metro toll just as we ran out of tickets, and meeting tonnes of people. I really think that we were in the right place at the right time. God provided more than we could have imagined. Paris is a beautiful city with a lot of brokenness, and I am glad that I could at least be a part of it for a small amount of time.

Last weekend a few girls and I went to Prague for a night. It’s about a 2 hour bus ride that costs about 3 Euro to get there. Very easy, very cheap, very worth it. The city itsself is gorgeous and very European, although unfortunately that cannot be said for the rest of the country.

Germany is very well kept. The country side is well maintained, green, orderly, well-plotted land. The buildings are renovated, often sporting entire Ikea gettups inside, and freshly painted, decorated, and furnished. The country is quite elegant and aesthetically pleasing. The second that you drive over the Czech border, there is a bit of a culture shock. Buildings are left in a dilapitated state, the language is harsher and uglier, leaning more towards Russian than German. The roadsides are full of weeds and abandoned cars – two things that would never be seen in Germany. The only thing on the drive that I enjoyed was a lake with a cliff on one side that mildly reminded me of Horseshoe Bay. Other than that, the drive was full of once stunning, detailed infrastructure designed by European architects (the best kind) that lay crumbled into bits.

Once in Prague though, things could only get better. The streets were full of music, artists, tourists, locals.  Every corner had a little cafe or antique book shop. Works of Kafka were being displayed in every shop window. The streets were cobblestone and filled with little carts selling sausages and cinnamon buns and hot, sweet & spicy, mulled wine.We took a tram up to the top of the hill overlooking the city and spent a good chunk of time walking down and seeing castles, cathedrals, and the city from above. The streets are colorful and filled with beautiful apartments, opera houses, churches, bakeries, and in the middle of the town center lies two gems: the astronomical clock, and the Prague castle. Every building that has a view of either of these landmarks takes full advantages by setting up large patios where people can lounge and drink  mulled wine or coffee and watch the astronomical clock tick by. I could probably spend an entire day at an outdoor cafe in Prague and not have a single complaint. The city is also surrounded by rivers and lakes, and the bridges made me incredibly happy. I do miss bridges often.

We shopped and ate and walked and ate and talked and ate and walked some more. In the evening we visited the Lennon wall – a wall full of Graffiti inspiring love and peace, started in the 1980′s. We signed it, as everyone does when they visit. You can now find (until it gets painted over) “Love from Canada – Jessica Brodeur” written on the wall in ball point pen if you search hard enough.

I would recommend Prague to anyone searching for a great, truly European city. There’s lots of history, and lots of tours including a ghost tour! (I didn’t go on it, but I do love these. They are expensive though. Prague is said to be the most haunted city on all of Europe) The next morning we indulged our North American taste buds with Starbucks and McDonalds, but it was definitely worth it.

Next stop: Paris. In the morning I head off to a 12 hour drive to Paris for the week! Expect news upon my return!

The Prague castle / main square at night

The Astronomical clock

-Quick cold snap. Snowed for about three days in mid-October. Really weird, even for a Canadian. Also, there were a few students who had never seen snow, so it was fun to witness them.
-Visiting Dresden. The entire city is basically 10 Commercial Drives (the trendy part of Vancouver) in a row.
-Breakfast at Ikea. Mmmm… bacon.
-Fall DTS arrived. It’s been a month, and we’re all good now. They’ve integrated well, and I look forward to hanging out with them for the rest of my time here.

So, today is Halloween back in North America. I guess everywhere, but the familiar festivities are on the other side of the pond. Here, Halloween is not celebrated. At least, not in this community. Maybe a occultish or pagan community would. There is no trick or treating. No costumes. No scary decorations. No wasted money on plastic parafanilia. I quite like this, actually. I have seen exactly 3 pumpkins this year. Carved or uncarved. Three. And they were all   of one building. I do miss the carved out,  glowing pumpkins.

What did I do to celebrate these festivities, you might ask? Well, not much. Last night I strolled through the graveyard in Herrnhut with a few friends. I didn’t even realize that it was the night before Halloween at the time. The thing with Herrnhut is… the biggest attraction of this entire village is the cemetary. It sounds weird, but many missionaries who risked their lives and / or died in their calling are buried here. It’s a beautiful walk, with a small tower at one end from which you can see Poland and Czech.I guess that that’s a legitimate thing to do for Halloween.

Tonight a few of us, North American and not, made a bonfire. It was beautiful and warm in the midst of the freezing cold German countryside, but we huddled and prayed over our homes and Halloween and the town we’re in. I definitely am glad that we did. So much unrighteous crap goes on this night, it’s so hard to know what to do, so we just did the only thing we knew how to… hand it over to God.

Anyways… happy Halloween back home! Eat candy and have fun for me!

1. Pray before everything. Meals, travelling, class, even shopping.

2. Communicate with God and He will communicate back. He is the best communicator in the world.

3. Write down your prayers and conversations with God so that you can look back and see how He has answered prayers, and give Him the thanks He deserves.

4. Germans recycle EVERYthing. Don’t throw away anything without asking a German first.

5. The grocery shopping is limited. Ask a German (especially one that lived through the depression) for alternatives for things like brown sugar, peanut butter, mayonnaise and ketchup.  Most are very creative and delicious.

6. There are no closets in Germany. The dorms in the castle had no closets. My flat has no closets. The guys flat don’t have closets. The staffs flat doesn’t have closets. Only dressers, never closets. (Like in Wally’s World!)

7. People from all corners of the world have heard of Michael Buble. Way to go, Canadian artists!

8. “Your Mother” jokes exist in all languages.

9. Pray for missionaries! Even though travelling a lot and talking about Jesus sounds like the best life ever, it’s super stressful. Living on no income, especially missionaries with children, is a constant struggle. Visa applications, currency exchanges, language barriers, etc… Continually pray for them.

10. Talk to everyone. If you have more than 5 minutes, ask someone their testimony. Everyone has a little bit to offer. Even if language is a barrier, get creative.

-Moved. Love love LOVE the apartment, or “flat” in European. Living with 5 girls from the school, a few staff, and a married couple as my flat-mates
-New school arrived. Lots of new people from new nations.
-Learned to use the Hasselblad (Google it if you don’t know what it is, it is pretty awesome)
-Went to Dresden – lovely city. Will return.
-20 year anniversary of the Berlin Wall falling. Germany celebrated peace and happiness by shutting down all of the stores and having an eerily quiet day.