After spending over three months hitchhiking my way through Britain, I found myself back in familiar old Germany to enjoy a holiday reunion with friends and family. My parents flew in from the United States to join me at my grandparents’ house in Au am Rhein, and my Dad being an old vagabond himself, was eager to go exploring as soon as he arrived. We joined my aunt Elvi on a roadtrip to her favorite region of Bavaria, where we stayed in a quaint wooden cottage in the even quainter village of Unterammergau in the shade on the snowy German alps. It was my first time in the southeast corner of Germany and I was surprised to discover how much I struggled to understand the Bavarian German accent. Imagine a Canadian visiting Texas for the first time and you have a pretty good idea of how I felt in Bavaria. We explored the area thoroughly, going to see Mad Ludwig’s castle in Linderhof, an imposing monastery in Ettal famous for its beer brewing monks, the Olympic ski slopes of Garmisch-Partenkirchen under Germany’s highest peak the Zugspitze, and picturesque Christmas markets in small towns like Oberammergau and Mittenwald.

After we returned to our home away from home in Au am Rhein, we picked up my college friend and fellow world traveler Cheeseman from the airport. He was fresh off of his semester abroad at Kingston University on the outskirts of London. He was joining us for the snowy German holidays, but the two of us were already plotting our escape from the cold to the warm beaches of southern Spain. I took Cheeseman on a tour through some of my favorite cities in Baden-Württemberg in the meantime, showing him the mountainous Baden Baden, the walled city of Gengenbach, and of course to Scruffys—my favorite Irish pub in Karlsruhe.

On New Years Eve Cheeseman and I took a tram into Karslruhe to watch the fireworks display in front of the castle. There was an ice skating rink set up around the giant statue of Karl Wilhelm and there was a tent set up in the castle gardens where traditional winter drinks like Glühwein (hot spiced wine) and Jagertee (herbal tea with rum) were being sold. We sipped on some drinks as we waited for the fireworks to start, but when midnight finally rolled around we were in for a surprise. You see, fireworks of all kinds are illegal in Germany, but for the two weeks leading up to New Years Eve the ban is lifted and the Germans go wild buying up all manner of rockets, comets, mortars, and missiles. So the midnight fireworks were not a professional display launched from some distant barge by experts like you’d expect in America, but rather it was a few thousand pyromaniac Germans who all brought their own ordnance to the park to set off in all directions at the start of the new year.

When the church tower bells chimed at midnight, all hell broke loose in the castle gardens. It felt like we were in the middle of a warzone as the sky became a cacophony of color, ill-aimed rockets flew just over our heads and a fog of gunpowder smoke obscured the snow packed grounds. We watched on in amazement as the fireworks continued for almost an hour. Eventually we circled back to Scruffys Irish Pub to socialize with some old friends of mine. When we realized we had missed the last tram out of the city and were now stranded in Karslruhe without a place to stay I had a plan B ready. The student dorm where I had lived during my study abroad semester a couple years back was nearby, and I remembered that each of the building’s ten floors had its own lounge area with big comfy couches. So we made our way there, and unbelievably, the door code had not changed in the last two years. The fourth floor lounge where I used to hangout when I lived there was empty and but as well stocked with pillows and blankets as I remembered. It was a most nostalgic place to wake up the first day of 2015.