Christmas Markets - Part Duex

Last year, I made my rounds to several different Christmas markets between Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands. My absolute favorite from then was Aachen, Germany cause I managed to score some pretty cute stuff (here's the post from last year: Hood-Tastic ).  Here's another post talking about the ornaments I picked up: She who dies with the most ornaments...WINS! .

So, I had high expectations this year considering last year was so awesome. Then again, maybe since last year was my first time experiencing European Christmas markets, everything was just THAT amazing to me. I dunno! 

I headed to Aachen today since I had made plans with a friend if mine to go. Sadly, she had to opt out because her son seems to have caught a nasty bug that's been floating around (causes kids to look like the exorcist and puke). I ended up going solo since I was really excited to go and I was alright with heading up there by myself (I'm a big girl, I can handle it). Parking was a nightmare. Forty five minutes of frustration, people tail gating me, getting cut off and almost hit a few times... my blood pressure went through the roof and managed to give myself a nice headache by the time I finally found a place to park. I guess today was trash day, so a lot of the businesses where you can park (parking area's around the streets) were filled up with large trash cans or tons of trash bags, or people were parking very stupid / inconsiderately to where it was impossible to park another car.

After much aggravation, I found a spot. Luckily, I brought my jacket with a hood because it started raining shortly after began walking around! 

After walking around for about 10 minutes, I realized there weren't as many vendors there as there were last year. Doesn't seem like it at first, but once you notice there's "more room" than before, you tend to see where the "holes" are. Kinda disappointing :-/ If anything, it's just pretty to walk around and see all the different decorations that the vendors had up. Luckily, the lady who I bought my ornaments from last year was there:

I managed to pick up one that thought looked like Big Ben....but when I showed it to Eric, he said "Oh nice! It's the bell tower in Peer!". That quickly deflated my personal victory cause when I looked at it, he was right. It looks like the freaking tower! Now I gotta go back, or enlist someone for their services, and get a double-decker red bus so it's "FOR SURE" a symbol of London! It's all Eric's fault.

After I got the ornament, I picked up some potato fritters (they're absolutely UH-mazing)....definitely something I look forward to during Christmas markets! They offered me apple sauce with it, but I didn't want any considering I still wanted to walk around without dribbling sauce every where:

From there, I walked around a little more and killed some time since I was waiting for the local sushi place to open up. No, I wasn't eating for myself since I just had the potato fritter. Well, technically I was. I was picking up sushi for dinner since Eric and I wanted some.

On the way there, I figured I'd take a few random pics cause things looked pretty:

All in all, it was "OK", but not mind blowing like last year. The only thing that's really gonna make me go back is the ornaments and the potato fritters. I think Eric and I are going to venture over to Koln's market, or even Bernkastels since I know theirs is officially going on. Might as well kill two birds with one stone (Christmas market and get our pottery!)