Alles gut.

>>Bram wearing his new festive hat at the xmas market<<

Today is a good day. It's sunny in Germany! We found the winter red wine ritter sport chocolate at Plus on the way home from class. Delish! The winter edition of everything is popping up everywhere here.. chocolate, soup, wine, tea, markets.. it's so festive! Today the Christmas market in Darmstadt opened. A bunch of us went to check it out. There are all these adorable wooden huts all lit up in the center. I had candied nuts, Glühwein (mulled, spiced wine) and a sausage.

Class was really great today too. I think Amanda and I both had and a ha! moment as we finally understood everyones' concepts. The past couple of weeks were a little confusing, but today everyone had more work finished to show. Also our professor really made an effort to speak to us in English to make sure we understood each one and asked for our opinions. Some of the concepts were really interesting. One guy is designing packaging for tobacco. (It's popular to get the bags of tobacco and roll your own cigarettes here, but if you want them pre-rolled, our school cafe sells them! ha) Anyway, he created a snapping pouch in black with a white dot pattern. When you open the flap, the pouch is abstractly the shape of lungs and the dots symbolize the "bubbles" in your lungs. After using this pouch for awhile it will eventually start to wear. The white bubble pattern will begin to get dirty symbolizing the effects of tobacco on your lungs. –Cool! but my favorite part is always seeing him leaving with a cigarette behind his ear when we have a break. haha. My presentation also went well. I'm starting to feel good about my concept 1 for hot cocoa packaging and am beginning concept 2. Concept 1 revolves around the idea of gemütlich. As I explained before, it's the feeling word unique to the German language roughly meaning cosiness and cheerfulness. Two packets are connected by a string (like mittens). The tactile feel will be the contrast of flocked (fuzzy) graphics on cold translucent paper. The contents are poured in to the two cups, then the packets can be used as coasters. Because they are connected by string it encourages the users to get cosy. I'll put up pictures as I the production progresses.

Updates on my last 3 weekends of travel to Prague, Zürich and Berlin coming soon!

Tschüss!