Happy New Year!!!

Monica and I celebrated New Year's Eve with Melanie and Andrew. We went for Indian food and the restaurant was festively decorated, then we walked to Mel's and watched the countdown, drank champagne, ate Berliners (a German tradition I just learned about), and Melanie let us call home to wish a happy new year. The sky was crazy with fireworks from people doing them themselves, no official ones (since the reject man in charge of the official ones forgot to sign it on the right day and therefore no fireworks for Hamburg for the first time in decades!) We watched from Melanie's fifth floor apartment and pretty soon couldn't even see the street anymore because there was so much smoke! The next day the sidewalks and streets looked like someone had dumped a trash can all over them.

I'd never really been for sushi before, and since I live in a harbor city, Monica and I tried out a little sushi place. Quite fun! And sushi is much easier to eat with chopstix than Chinese food! (I know, some of you are thinking, how sheltered is she?!) I liked the sushi bar where the food just rolled on by and you could grab it. I'm so easily amused.

There is a lovely mosque about ten minutes from my house, so Monica and I walked down one day and got to look around inside. I liked the Christmas trees outside of it. : )