Ice sculpture

Today I went up on the Albis-the mountain that is near where I live-with my grandma. It's 60 years since the seilbahn (gondola-ski lift thingy) opened, and so they had a day where you could go up to the restaurant and get free hot drinks and watch this guy carve an ice sculpture. The ice sculpture thing was really cool.

It won't stop snowing here, which makes me really happy. Is it weird that I missed being cold? Probably. Oh well. It was lots of fun and I got to spend some quality time with my grandma. :)

😊

Today I cleaned my room, did some studying, drew some stuff,

and put up multicolored fairy lights over my window that I plan on keeping up all year:) I also got a super nice surprise-Grammy called me! Love you! 💕

Woot Circus!

Today I went to a circus with my cousin. It was really really really cool. The physics of some of the stuff the artists did are beyond me. Pretty insane stuff.😳

We also got ice cream & had front-row seats. :) 

Zürich also looked absolutely gorgeous today with snow. 

SNOW

So it finally snowed here. Up in the Alps there's almost always snow, but down in the valleys it's a bit rarer. It was so wacky not having a white Christmas, but yay now there's snow!!

Tomorrow I'm going to the circus with Lara (Christmas present from my aunt & uncle)! I'm excited!! 😊

Stephanitag??

In Switzerland (and I don't know how may other countries) the 26th of December is another holiday, called St. Stephens Day. That means everyone has another day off of work and such. So happy Stephanitag!

Tonight we went to my Aunt & Uncle's and ate leftovers from Christmas dinner. Then we were made to watch a movie called Doctor Zhivago. It's a movie set in Russia during the Russian Revolution and it's super long. I didn't particularly enjoy it. We watched it because one of the main characters is named Lara, and my cousin's name is Lara. Also, her friend Lara was named after the Lara in the movie, which is pretty cool. 

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Today I got up earlier than I wanted to so that I could unwrap my presents from Montana. It was a super awesome surprise to see my stocking here... My mom gave it to my grandma in New York. Merry Christmas! 

Christmas Eve Day

Today I helped my grandma prepare for dinner pretty much all day. Then we had my cousins and aunt & uncle over, and ate a yummy dinner and unwrapped presents. We Skyped with my parents and then I got to unwrap my presents from my swiss relatives:) Then my grandma, cousin, and I went to midnight mass. It was gorgeous!

1 more day!

Oh my gosh tomorrow is Christmas Eve! Today I helped my grandma clean & prepare for the Christmas dinner tomorrow. My aunt & uncle & cousins are coming over:) Here they open presents on Christmas Eve, so I'll be opening the ones from here then, and the ones from Montana on Christmas morning.

I'm also probably going to midnight mass with my grandma and cousin tomorrow, so I'm going to bed a bit earlier. I can't wait for Christmas!        🎅🎄🎁

Presents(!!!)

I dorm like to get out the wrapping paper and tape and scissors and markers and paper and cards and bows and such to wrap presents with until I have all the presents I want to wrap. Which means I wrapped all my Christmas presents today! It's really strange picking out presents for people that I usually don't, and not giving things to my brother and parents. Meh. I have way fewer presents to give this year. Only my grandparents and cousins and aunt and uncle. 

Only two more days until Christmas! Yippee! This was the sunset when I was walking home with my grandma after grocery shopping. 😱 So gorgeous. 

Christmas tree, swimming, & cookie fail

Today I got up late and helped my grandma decorate her fake mini Christmas tree. Apparently my dad calls it the Charlie Brown tree. It's tiny. It only took about 1/2 hour to decorate. I'm used to a real & much larger tree that takes most of the afternoon to decorate... But it was still fun. My grandma has to have everything just so, therefore it was basically her giving me ornaments and then rearranging them until they looked symmetrical enough. She's adorable. 

After lunch I went swimming in the indoor pool literally across the street from my grandparent's apartment with Lara & Dominic. It was pretty fun:) We basically just hung out & talked.

Then I went over to Dominic and Lara's house and we attempted to make cookies. There's a particular type of cookie (I don't know if it's a swiss specialty or something?) that's called a "Spitzbueb". I honestly don't know how to translate that... Uhh... "Bueb" means "boy" in swiss-german, and "spitz" means "tip" (like the tip of the tower), but together they mean something along the lines of "mischievous boy". I don't know why. It just is that way. They're two cookies with jam in the middle, and usually a face or a heart cut out of the top cookie, so the jam peeks through. With powdered sugar on top. They're so good. However, it took us forever to cut out the cookies, because the dough is impossible to work with. Then we only had a small amount of dough, so we couldn't make very many. (26, to be exact) And lastly, when we put them in the oven, they melted quite a bit... So basically all the careful cutting out we'd done was useless. Oh well. I got to eat some yummy cookies, and we had fun.