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I know I haven't posted anything in a while but I felt like I needed some time off. Lately I haven't had much free time, yet I haven't done much.

Allow me to take you back and tell you what happened these past few months..

In July we took a trip to attend a conference in Boston and then stayed an extra week to visit the big apple. I loved getting to revisit this city and got to knock a lot of items of my NYC bucket list.
Once we got back from our trip, Avi went back to her last week of school, and my cousin came to visit.. but I kinda screwed up and Avi ended up missing the last day of school (we took a day trip to Berlin instead).
We had all of August free, and we took advantage of this (and a wedding in our hometown) and went to visit our family in Mexico.

We had a packed two weeks in Mexico, during which we were able to catch up with a lot of friends, visit the BBVA Stadium and Avi took an intensive swim course, she was able to get the basic done, but she still needs to learn more.
In September I had quite a few appointments, first one being Avi's first day of school, and the first day of first grade is a big day in the German's lives.
We got to go see Liebe Stirbt Nie (Phantom II) before it left Hamburg.

My in-laws came to Germany for the first time, they stayed here for a week, during which we went to Berlin, Schwerin and the Fischmarkt.
They left three days before Pablo's birthday since his sister was expecting a child around that date.. the baby happened to be born the day the arrived in Charlotte!
Instead of throwing Pablo a party to celebrate his 29th birthday we took two separate trips in October. Avi and I went to Braunschweig to visit some friends that just moved there while Pablo went to visit a friend of his at Würzburg.

Towards the end of the month Avi had two weeks off for Herbstferien (Fall Break). We spent it with friends and sleepovers.

On November 1st, (after Avi's two weeks off from school) Pablo went on a guys trip to Dublin. He returned Nov 4th to find a house full of friends celebrating Avi's birthday. The surprise party was needed, she said she didn't have a good day at school (for the most part), so it was nice to have her friends here to cheer her up.

For the first time in four years we did the Laternenumzug with snow! It felt like winter that day, especially since they were selling Glühwein at the fest.
Another friend of Pablo's came to visit this month and we took him around Hamburg and visited the recently opened Elbphilharmonie.
The snow went away and the Weihnachtsmarkts are open for the season, we went to the one in our area the day it opened.
 And we've been taking advantage of the nice-weather days and teaching Avi to ride her bike.

I read Rachel's post: liveblogging  a 12 hour flight to Bangkok and loved it.. granted not every flight is a good one but I figured I'd give this a go and try doing a similar post.

I decided to record happenings on my most recent flight, even thought it was less than eight hours it seemed to go okayish and so i'm sharing it with you today.

Here's how my flight went down:

Before the flight, we were kind of worried about not having any in-flight entertainment since we booked our transatlantic flight with eurowings.

13:03 Board the plane. We get happy the plane does have in flight entertainment. We also noticed that every seat has a water bottle. Sadly only the ones with extra leg room get a blanket/pillow.

13:17 Find out the in flight entertainment requires a 9,99€ payment.

13:44 Time for the safety procedure demo.

13:53 Prepare for take off, then eventually take off.

13:56 Kid behind me says: "guck mal da unten die kleinen Autos."

14:16 The steward comes by selling 3 euro earphones.

Come by giving us food, but only to the ones who pre-booked it. The guy next to us then requests to buy a hot meal and the steward says "no, sorry you had to pre book it..." and offers only cold food to him. He buys two sandwiches.

15:30 Stop by to pick up trash, guy next to us asks if he can order coffee the lady says they aren't serving anymore "that time has passed."

17:45 Avi wakes me up because she needs to go to the restroom and she can't open the door, turns out they're all occupied! But then it turns out that once she was in there she had a little problem trying to open the door to come out

18:34 They turn lights on and they pass out a snack, again, to those who paid for it.
20:35 Avi comes to sit with me (on top) and says her tummy hurts. I braid her hair and then we watched muted movie trailers and I narrated them. #funny

21:05 Start preparing for landing

21:24 (15:25) prepare for landing

21:50 land

21:55 get your bags stand and wait

2200 getting off

Have you booked a transatlantic flight for cheap? 

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When going from Europe to North America you get a couple of  moments that  require adjusting , but those are easier to adjust to.

It's coming back from a trip to the states that makes me feel weird. it is good to be back home and I really appreciate our trip to the states we just had. but here's a recap of some differences between both places.

I've noticed that over the past three years, more and more people are speaking Spanish in the states. Or maybe it's just because there are a lot of international people at the airports. Nonetheless, I am able to understand the people all around us... And it feels good to be able to explain myself clearly.

Being in North America means everyone can understand us , and when Avi says "mom, I need to fart" in English. on a plane from Atlanta to Charlotte. the whole plane starts laughing (well at least the people around us)... Don't worry I proceeded to tell her she couldn't because everyone would know it was her. Hehe.

One thing that didn't take much adjustment was being in the same time zone as everyone back home, My phone isn't buzzing randomly at 2 am.

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Later once it gets dark I keep trying to flip the light switch on, but here you technically have to press it down. So that took a while to get used to again.

Thankfully it doesn't take much adjustment within my cooking, especially since half a suitcase came back full of american food.

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We happened to be in Boston for the fourth of July, this was Avi's first time seeing fourth of July fireworks, and we were excited. We met up with Pablo's cousin this day and they were talking about how the fireworks were going to be really cool (and gave us recommendations of where to sit).

They took us to the river where the firework display would be, and although it was still early, it was packed. They told us of a good spot to be, but we decided to go eat dinner before settling there. We ended up eating yummy burritos at Boloco.

I came prepared, I took my camera and tripod in the evening and set everything up. I managed to take 14 pictures of the fireworks with my camera. my  pictures were taken with a Canon 30D + 50mm, 8s at ƒ/11.0  ISO 100. 

While not all of them came out good, I decided to post all of them on here, just to give you an idea of what you get with these settings. You can tell by looking at the pictures that it's best at the beginning, because there is more smoke afterwards.

In the end, the Boston Pops Firework Spectacular was not as cool as I expected. There are many reasons leading to this opinion, for instance; people come very early to start saving spots for their groups, and I think this is pointless, at least where we were, since as soon as the fireworks started people started standing up. 

The spectacle didn't live up to the hype, and although it was supposed to start at 10:30 they started around 10:34... yes those four minutes annoyed me, especially since it still ended around 10:56 and not 11:04. 

In my opinion, the fireworks we saw at Disney's Magic Kingdom back in January were much better, especially since Avi's reaction at the end almost made me tear up! But I am still glad we got to see this.

Have you shot fireworks, how'd it go?

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