Our farewell party

After a week of hard work with packing boxes and getting administrative things done we gave our farewell party on our sixth wedding anniversary. Thanks to the help of my mother, mother in law, sister in law (who made a really fantastic cake),



Aunt Anna and Joey’s Pizza, we didn’t have to prepare more than the drinks and therefore could spend the day quite relaxed.
With having no furniture in the living room except the dining table we set up bar tables in order to make the party more comfortable for our 30 guests.



It was a great pleasure for us to have so many good friends around especially since even those with small children or having been invited to other parties managed to come for at least a short while.



Supported by a good amount of Zitronella and other spirits we had a great party which only ended in the early morning hours.
Many thanks to our guests for a really nice night, all the good wishes and the nice presents!



Please find some of the party pictures here.

Another short update from our weekend

Today is my birthday :-) and I had a great two-piece party. Yesterday evening my best friend Rafi stopped by for a beer, some Citronella (I will explain this in a post later on) some games on his Playstation and some chitchat. I don’t know how well known the game Singstar is, but anyway, we tock a toll on our neighbors’ nerves with our karaoke performance…

After I got a hearty serenade in Polish (Klaudia’s and Rafi’s families are from there) and really nice presents, we continued the evening in the Essence Club in Essen.

Today we celebrated with our families. Klaudia had won a “Party special” from a small brewery (Dampfbierbrauerei) in our neighborhood which she donated. We had homemade beer, fried sausages, sauerkraut, roast potatoes, cordial and lard sandwiches. This typical German food was good as usual and we had a very pleasant afternoon with nice chats. On our way home we stopped at a fun-fair so that our niece Emily had a ride on the carousel.

This was a really nice birthday. Hopefully we will be able to celebrate my next one with all the family members, again. This all the more since we will be at least one person more: We came to know today that my sister Mareike and her husband Thomas are expecting her second child! All the best to you!

New techniques or two worlds collide

It isn’t easy for our families that we are going abroad. They are very proud of us and are of the opinion that it was a good decision and we are doing the right thing. We made our parents the present of a webcam to give them and us the possibility to communicate for free and to see each other regularly via the web.

Our fathers use the computer regularly and Sebastian’s mother is used to word-processing as well, but for my mother this item seems to be somewhat a closed book. By all means it is great to see how everyone is willing and enthusiastic to use this new technology.

My parents moved over from Poland to Germany 30 years ago. When they wanted to talk to their families abroad they had to apply for a telephone slot and arrange this call in the village because there was only one telephone for the settlement. And nowadays you switch on the computer and you can communicate with people all over the world quite easily.

For our parents this is strange but for our grandparents it is like two worlds are colliding.

Nevertheless we hope that the new way of information technology will help us to stay in close contact and make the short distance to Oxford even smaller! We’ll keep you posted ;-)