For today’s Monday Podcast I took my daughter, Sarah, ice skating in Frankfurt.

The main indoor part of the complex was being used for ice hockey practise, so we watched that for a while and skated on the outdoor rink and ring.

Listen to the podcast to find out more:

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Eissporthalle Frankfurt

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I haven’t had much of a chance to visit the Christmas Markets this year. I had good intentions of blogging and podcasting from different ones, but in the end the weather has stayed bad and to make things worse I was ill for the past week.

So yesterday we braved the elements and wrapped up warm to at least visit the Frankfurt Christmas Market. Last year I was critical of the high prices on some of the stalls, so I was interested to see if they had got any worse. I found out that it is easy to spend a lot of money on very little!

I also found out that Sunday evening was not the best time to go – it was absolutely full and there was little or no chance of taking a leisurely look at the stalls. You either went with the flow or got out of the way!

Listen to the podcast to find out more. Have you visited a Christmas Market this year?

(Press the “play” button to listen to the podcast)

Download the MP3 file

… or “the one that caused us problems”.

This podcast was first meant to be put online in August, but despite on editing the soundtrack it became apparant that some of the music at the festival could very clearly be identified and so we tried to find out what sort of permissions we would need to use the recording.

Needles to say, it took a while to get an answer and the solution would not only cost us 60EUR per year to keep the MP3 file online, but there were so many conditions attached that in the end we decided to leave it for the time being.

Now the recording has been re-edited so that you can at least hear some of the festival atmosphere, even if some of the interesting parts of the recording have had to be left out.