Blurb book

I put together a blurb photo book of our Europe trip and finally received the finished product.

I ordered the book from blurb and used their design it yourself templates for Adobe InDesign. This is
the program that I use at work all the time, so I am comfortable with
the software and the templates were very easy to use. The album I made is a 12"x12" hardcover book. I set up each
page with a 3x3 grid of 4-inch blocks and then added and resized my
pictures to fill the blocks. Some photos fill one block and others fill
up to 6 blocks of the page. It was a little overwhelming to fit all of
the pictures in the book, so coming up with a simple grid to use made
the book easy and quick to put together.

I stuck with one color bar for each city that we visited and added
some of the text from my blog entries and some of my own additional
commentary. Friends and family are having fun playing "spot the typo."
Luckily only two have been found so far!

Blurb was great to work with. I used Blurb for my parents'
anniversary album earlier this summer. For the Europe book, I used the cover wrap option which turned out nicely. For my parents' album, I used the dust jacket option, which turned out nice too. Here's two tips that I
discovered myself through purchasing two books and through reading
Blurb forums.

1. Don't pay to upgrade from Standard to Premium paper - it's not much of a quality jump to justify the cost.

2. Don't pay $15 extra to remove the blurb
logo from the last page (custom logo option). I was able to tear out the final logo page
myself for free (blank white page with a tiny logo at the bottom
center).

For past trips, I have just put photos into 2-up or 3-up albums
and written captions and information. The scrapbooks and photo albums
are starting to take over our house, so getting a photo book like this
printed is a great space saver for the amount of pictures that it can
include. It fits easily on our bookshelf and is only about 1/2" wide.


A coworker of mine has had great success using Walgreens for photo
books, too. She came up with the best idea for creating a yearly album.
She started a new book on January 1 and adds pictures to her online
album layout throughout the year when she has a chance (once or twice a
month). At the end of December, she'll have a complete album with all
of the pictures she's taken this year included in it and won't have to
scramble around to remember what she did or where she misplaced photos
of a certain event. I think I'm going to try this method out for 2010.

German Christmas Ornaments

Here are the two ornaments we bought in Bamberg.

They are so darling it hurts! I wish that we had enough money to bring all of the adorable ornaments in the store home with us.

I hope Jon and I look like this when we're 80! He can keep me warm with toasty fires and I can keep him warm with knitted goods. :)

Brussels

Brussels was our final destination on the trip. We had been in and out of Brussels all week staying with our friend, Jodi, between city visits. It was so nice to have a home base to return to during the trip and to get to meet lots of Jodi's friends throughout the week. Jodi was a wonderful host and pointed us in the direction of many great spots to visit.

The view from her apartment's terrace.

On Sunday afternoon, we headed out to Place Flagey for pommes frites. These thick cut fries are double fried and served with your choice of condiments...Jon went with the traditional mayo and I ordered cocktail sauce which turned out to be tartar sauce. A really delicious treat served with fun mini forks.

Then, Jodi and her friend, Israel, got oysters and champagne from a street vendor. After Israel showed us how to properly eat an oyster, we all tried one.

I'm pretty sure that will be the last oyster that I eat.

Jon's reaction: "It tastes just like the ocean"

After the oysters and champagne, we walked around Brussels and saw some of the many art deco homes in the city.

  

 

Then we tried our first taste of Belgian beer at a café. Jon and I both really like the beer, probably because it was a deliciously sweet lambic brew. Jon's was made with cherries and mine was made with raspberries. It tasted more like sparkling juice than beer, which is probably why we enjoyed it so much.

 

Well, Jon enjoyed it a little bit too much...he was feeling the effects pretty quickly and provided quite the entertainment as we asked him questions and he had a 4-5 second delay in answering. (We can blame the lack of sleep on the train ride for that, too!)

On Sunday night, we visited the Atomium, the installation originally intended for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. One day, the Atomium will give the Eiffel Tower a run for it's money (or not).

Then we headed back to the Grand Place for more waffles...

One of many waffles consumed last
week! We went with the traditional gaufres de liege, soft inside,
crunchy outside with a thin sugary glaze. Yummy!

(And in case you're thinking, "what exactly did they eat on Sunday?"...I'll tell you: We each ate one marzipan croissant for breakfast in the Cologne train station, one large pommes frites, one glass of champagne, one oyster, one glass of lambic beer, and one waffle. Our stomachs were in uproar that day!)

And then, we saw Brussels' beloved Manneken Pis for the first time. After hearing all the hype about this statue, I though he would be a lot bigger than he was. Some of the molded candy and chocolate in the store windows were even bigger than the statue. I'm guessing he was less than two feet tall. Lots of different groups like to dress him up in costumes and there's even a museum filled with past outfits he's worn.

Actual size

Jon and I spent Monday, the last day of the trip, leisurely exploring the city on our own and stocking up on Belgian chocolate. We had seen most of the sites during our evening explorations of the city with Jodi, but we wanted to check out everything during the day.

Getting lost on the way to meeting Jodi for lunch resulted in discovering this lovely mural.

Royal Palace of Brussels

European Union

Artist Gu Wenda's lantern installation on the Mont des Artes

Église Notre Dame du Sablon

The Grand Place

Check out the rest of the Brussels photos on flickr, here.

Thanks for following along on all of these trip recap posts!

Bamberg

 

On Friday afternoon, we left Berlin on a train bound for Bamberg, Germany. The train ride through the German countryside was beautiful. Everything was lush and green and fall leaves were starting to change colors.  Bamberg is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is one of a few places in Germany that wasn't bombed during the war. Our friend, Catherine, just moved to Germany this summer, so she was our faithful tour guide and navigator of German menus.

The city is absolutely darling and we pretty much spent our entire time walking five steps, exclaiming "oh, that is so cute," taking pictures, turning to our right and left and taking pictures and then walking a few more steps to do the same thing. I don't think I've ever seen a cuter town and one that cried out "Germany" so much!

 

We didn't take any tours or go to any museums and it was so nice to be able to just wander around the city and stop for pastry breaks or meal breaks whenever we felt like it. We had a great time walking through the Saturday market, window shopping and catching up with Catherine.

We found a really neat travel store and stocked up on cleverly designed German bags. Jon got a man-bag made completely out of recycled PET bottle material, I got a Reisenthel city shopper tote bag for more knitting projects, and Catherine bought this awesome Reisenthel carry cruiser for Saturday market days (see above). We stumbled upon a German department store selling lots of yarn, including Regia sock, but I was able to hold myself back (I'm not a sock knitter, after all).

We also visited a darling German Christmas store, Käthe Wohlfarht, and bought two cute little wooden Christmas ornaments (I'll have to take a picture and post them soon). The store was adorable and we were totally lured in by the cuckoo clock collection but managed to refrain ourselves.

Bamberg has lots of very crooked buildings that have settled over time.

One day, Jon and I will adopt a pug (or two!)

• • •

We left Bamberg on Saturday night on an overnight train bound for Cologne, Germany. Well, we thought it was an overnight train....

We ended up taking 3 separate trains to Cologne. First a one hour train to Wittenburg, then a one hour train to Frankfurt. We realized on our train to Wittenburg that we would be having a three hour layover at the Frankfurt station. Then we remembered that it was Daylight Savings Time in Europe (one week earlier than DST in the U.S.). So, we ended up spending that extra hour of Daylight Savings Time in a cold, outdoor Frankfurt train station huddled up next to each other on a bench watching Dexter on Jon's ipod. Our other entertainment of the evening was watching a drunk man sitting across from us blow his nose without the assistance of a tissue and spit repeatedly on the ground. I was sure that I was going to catch swine flu from him with all of the bodily fluids he was leaking.

Sitting in the cold, train station was pretty depressing as we watched all of the clocks stuck at 3AM for one hour. But we made it through and are able to laugh about it now. What are the odds of being stuck with a long layover in a train station in the middle of the night on Daylight Savings time, after all? After our four hours in the Frankfurt station, we had a three hour ride to Cologne with a private compartment and then another 2 hour train ride back to Brussels. Luckily, we were both able to sleep on both of those trains.

Even better was that we got to celebrate my favorite day of the year again in the States yesterday with an extra hour of sleep in the warmth and comfort of our own bed. It definitely made me much more appreciative of  yesterday's time change!

The rest of the Bamberg photos are on flickr, here.