New Years Eve German Style

We were fortunate to get to spend New Years Eve with our friends.  We drove down the night before  and had a delicious traditional meal of what looked like giant meat ravolis.  Greg kept calling them that just to make them laugh.

The real name (besides German ravioli) is Maultasche and here is a picture of what they look like.  I had to borrow the picture from Wikipedia as I was too busy enjoying them to remember to take a picture!  They serve them in a broth with lots of extra onions.  They are filled with meat and spinach and were really wonderful.



During the day on New Years Eve we walked around the town of Reutlingen, we arrived around lunch time and the place was hopping, but by about one pm all the shops started closing..it was very funny!  I wasn't sure why the shops needed to close...plenty of time before midnight?

Here are a few photos of the beautiful buildings downtown.

It has a very cool skatepark and Charlie was happy to borrow a scooter!

We aren't at Epcot...just strolling through a regular old German town!

Our friend's daughter takes music lessons in this cool building!

We got wonderful sausages from the stand.    While we ate them Greg told us his made up stories about the statue that was right by us in the square...

Here is the statue...

I liked this cool house, it had the river on both sides...probably a bit cold in the winter!

Back at our friends they awaited the arrival of two more families to also come for NYE...twenty in total and we were all sleeping over-quite the party house!   At dinner we helped set everything out for a traditional meal of raclette. However, before we could eat there is this tv show that Germans watch every NYE.  We all sat down to watch it...it is a 20 min comedy sketch from the BBC that plays on repeat all NYE in Germany.  It is called Dinner for One and its in English...I still can't quite figure out why it is a NYE tradition or why they love it so much...but here is a link in case you want to see it for yourself!  Dinner for One YouTube  (it also has an introduction in German, but I don't know what exactly they say)  Our friends watched it as children with their parents and now they watch it with their own kids and laugh together.

They told us that another of their NYE traditions is to shoot off fireworks.  We are no strangers to fireworks...as some of our fellow Stark Ave residents can attest to, but we completely underestimated how crazy they are about fireworks.  When people in Massachusetts or New Hampshire shoot off fireworks there are a few houses that are known to go all out, but that is about it.  This town in Germany..it was every house going all out and people out in the town fields lighting off everything you could imagine...everywhere you looked all you saw was fireworks.

Greg equated it to a movie called the Purge.  I guess the context of the movie is that for 12 hours all rules go away and you can do whatever you want.  This is what it felt like to be in law abiding, rule following Germany on NYE and seeing them all losing their minds over shooting off fireworks!   Our friend Katrin said everyone would be out cleaning up all the mess in the morning and sure enough, the next day, we saw people out with brooms in the cleaning up all the debris!

Charlie loved helping to shoot off as many fireworks as possible!  We were glad our dog stayed home in Belgium as she is not a fan of fireworks.

A final tradition they did that evening was to make & serve a flaming rum punch.  The German name is Feuerzanenbowle.  They have the coolest little holder for the giant sugar cone, and they drizzle it with rum, cook red wine and then they light the whole thing on fire.

I had to take this photo from Google Images as mine came out very blurry.  The giant sugar cone was so cool and it burned for several minutes. They turned the light off in the room and all we could see was the blue flame.   The wine/rum and hot sugar was delicious all together!

My only regret is that I did not take a photo of our giant group all together! (but I was fighting a cold and not at the top of my game).  However, it was a New Years Eve we will always remember and we are very happy to have such cool friends willing to show us all of their traditions!  Thank you Zurn family!