DAY OUT AT THE GERMAN MARKET

I love living in Birmingham, there's always something happening and at this time of year when the German Market is all set up the town centre looks beautiful. Where I'm from, the town centre isn't any different in December to the rest of the year and after moving to Brum last year I was upset that I never got the chance to properly go to the German Market so I wanted to make sure I got the full festive experience this time round.

To get myself fully in the Christmas mood, I started my day off with some classic festive music and turned on all of my Christmas lights despite the feeling in the pit of my stomach reminding me of the electric bill. As I had spent the entire previous evening watching Belle Jordan's Christmas make up tutorials, I wanted to look glam and feel super confident, plus I had been picking at my face and decide I needed to cover that up. Originally I put on a Christmassy red lip forgetting the fact I was going to be shovelling food and drink in my mouth all day, so that came back off pretty quickly. If you'd like to see my make up, outfit and a little bit of my day, I have an IGTV up on my Instagram!

The main reason to visit the Christmas market is for the food and the drinks - I'll be straight up. As lovely as the items some of the stalls there are selling, the main bulk of market is made up of bars and food stalls. All of the food smells absolutely delicious, I could've eaten literally everything if I was able to take out a small loan to pay for it. I bought a Bratwurst for £6 and it was literally the biggest sausage I had ever seen (please get your dirty thoughts out of your mind), I couldn't eat all of it but I gave it a good damn try. As much as I had planned to eat as much as possible, this hotdog filled me up and I couldn't even think about eating anything else all day which, on the bright side, my bank account was thankful for.

I also got a delicious hot chocolate after much deliberation about the price, £4 for this tiny mug! But it was super yummy so I guess can't complain, plus you're paying for the experience of 'having a hot chocolate at the German Market' which bumps up that price. I had to stop myself from attempting to steal the adorable mug, I can't lie that the only reason I didn't was because of my morals but instead the deciding factor not to take it was that I had to put down a £3 deposit on the mug before she would give the hot chocolate to me, and I couldn't part with that £3.

My boyfriend bought three bags of hand packaged sweets, they'd be the perfect little presents for friends at £1.50 each, I particularly liked the bag of gummy snakes, you know the ones with that foamy stuff on the bottom?. For £1.50 you got a lot of sweets which I didn't expect at the market. He also bought a box of donuts which weren't anywhere near as expensive as I thought they would've been! Maybe I created this image in my head that with pretty, christmassy commercial things like the German Market, it can't be affordable, which is true in a lot of cases but not in this one.

I thought that I could spend hours on end looking at everything the market had to offer, but after eating, doing a lap of the stalls and drinking something to warm up a bit, we had seen everything and ran out of things to do. I thought there would be music but maybe that's just on the weekends when the town centre is jam packed, I wasn't underwhelmed but I also wasn't overly excited by anything. Like I said before, the stalls are nice and all but they're quite pricey and, in my mind, a little gimmicky.

So do I think the Christmas Market is worth it? I think if you're coming to Birmingham specifically for the market then it's underwhelming but if you're going shopping in the town centre anyway, then the market is a nice little extra place to go to get something to eat and drink as well as mooching around to get a bit festive. It's something different than just sitting in a pub and it's always nice to have a change of scenery. I think it looks really pretty and gets everyone in the Christmas mood, the food and drinks are great and not too expensive but the stalls aren't my favourites - I'll leave it at that.