Today I finally conceeded to the fact that it is indeed nearly Christmas. I bought a Christmas present the other day, but not in a 'oooh I'll get my presents early' moment, no no no, in a 'I have to have bought a Secret Santa present before the 8th so I'd better buy it soon' moment. That made me feel a bit Christmass-y. Then I went into town today and actually looked round the German Market a bit. I say a bit, what I mean is I went searching for the stall with baked camembert and also the chocolate covered fruit stall and then got pissed off with the crowds and escaped. I will be exploring it properly before it goes on the 23rd though. And then I went to investigate the ice skating situation. The ice rink in Centenary Square is back and I'm more than a little excited, especially since last year the Birmingham Wheel was in the way and the result was a 'U' shaped rink with a Christmas tree in the gap of the 'U' which made it look relatively nice but made it bloody hard to skate round. This year, no wheel, hence a nice rectangular ice rink. So I went to look, since it was only properly set up this weekend, and decided that since it wasn't too busy I was going to go. So I paid up, guessed my skate size and put my bag in the cloak room. At this point I would like to point out that I took my phone and iPod out of my bag and put them firmly in my jeans pocket leaving my wallet in my bag that went in the cloakroom. You work out what I didn't really care about being stolen... I was on the ice for forty five minutes and I managed to skate at a pretty average speed. I fell over, however, when I tried to skate fast and should have been concentrating instead of singing along to Girls Aloud's cover of I Think We're Alone Now that was blasting out of the speakers surrounding the rink. I fell over about ten minutes later as well whilst trying too hard to avoid some kid that was in the middle of falling over and in my attempt to do this I fell forward landing on my hands and knees. But I figure that in order to get better at ice skating, you have to take the falls. And plus I'm sure at this rate the ND are going to get group discounts at A&E...
After collecting my stuff, wallet an' all, I traipsed back through the German Christmas Market to Starbucks for one of their gingerbread lattes, which they rather sadly did not put red sprinkles on top of.


FYI, ice skating is not conducive to recovering from a cold and cough, but it's ok because my whole house is addicted to Lemsip.

Labels: christmas, german christmas market, ice skating, starbucks