If I start a new blog, I will probably email everyone or put a link on here. Until that time, you will have to talk to me in person if you want to know what I think.

There will be no more blog posts here. Thanks for reading.

My travels are over.

Cities visited: Frankfurt, Würzburg, Prague, Rome, Nuremberg, Rothenberg, Vienna, Bamberg, Berlin, Potsdam, Munich, Salzburg, Hallstatt.

To summarize, Frankfurt is the airport. Würzburg is where I lived. Prague has nice buildings. Rome has good food. Nuremberg has sausage sandwiches. Rothenberg is all Medieval-looking. Vienna has a big Jewish museum. Bamberg has bacon-flavored beer. Berlin is where I had my birthday. Potsdam has old buildings. Munich has churches and beer. Salzburg is a short ride from Hitler’s very nice summer home. Hallstatt is the most pleasant town I’ve ever been in with lakes, mountains, old hotels, and ducks.

Change of plans. We are in Hallstatt, Austria instead of Füßen. It’s a small town in the alps and next to a lake. The prettiest place any of us have ever been.

Because Mom is begging me not to embarrass them on the blog, I really have to write something. Dad has tried to be in the vacation mode, but when the tour guide said the Alps contained limestone, he had the business idea to mine them and flatten Austria.

Mom didn’t do much to embarrass herself. She probably did kill a duck, though. At lunch, we were throwing bread to the ducks on the lake, and mom threw a crouton from her garlic soup. It freaked out a little bit, dipping its head in the water a lot. It probably can’t fly now.

Here are links to all the photos that were filling up my camera. Although every photo in the Mom and Dad Visit set should have the correct date, some have the wrong time and thus are wrongly ordered. (Geeky note: investigation reveals that this is all due to my dad who forgot to change the clock on his camera. His camera is stamping photos with central time.)

Mom and Dad Visit - this is the set of pictures I am still adding to. It starts on their arrival in Frankfurt, then onto Munich, Dachau, and Salzburg. Some good photos of Mom.

Farewell Dinner – This is where I eat pizza and say goodbye to everyone in the program. Some of these guys are really cool.

Berlin, Potsdam, and my birthday - Some great photos of exactly that.

Bamberg - Some mediocre pictures from our Bamberg excursion. They have beer here that tastes like bacon. Yes, it is disgusting.

July 4th Grilling - A small picture set. Check out that photo of Christa eating a hotdog. The hotdog buns came from the US Army base in Würzburg.

We were the bad family on the bus tour. We all refused to sing Sound of Music songs with our tour guide. Dad was especially uninvolved and grumbled a bit about being on a movie tour. Mom was excited about the tour at first, but quickly became more interested in the mountains and lakes we saw on our bus stops.

Despite the grumbling, we still agree it was a good idea. We saw a lot of Salzburg and the surrounding area. We wouldn’t have seen those things otherwise. We are not the kind of self-directed travelers who could fill a day with our own planned schedule of sights.

There is talk of skipping Füßen and just spending a few more days exploring the mountains. We are planning on taking the Eagle’s Nest tour tomorrow morning. This will take us up to the top of one of the mountains by bus and some kind of mountain side lift. If we feel there’s more to do, we’ll stay put.

I have no idea where my father is, but I know Mom went for a bike ride. I am limping around downtown with a sore foot.

We finished up Munich and are now in Salzburg, Austria.

Getting used to the foreign country thing wasn’t too rough on the parents, but there were a few incidents. When I left them alone for thirty minutes, my mom put her Visa card into a machine that she thought was an ATM. It was actually a machine that sells parking passes. We are not certain, but we think she didn’t actually buy one. (In her defense, an ATM is called a Geldautomat here–not exactly obvious).

Today we are taking the Sound of Music tour which Dad thinks will be silly. I was skeptical too, but our guide book insists that it’s a good tour of the area.

I think my dad is more interested in the Eagle’s Nest tour that would take us up to Hitler’s mountain retreat. This summarizes the different interests of my parents. My dad is more interested in places involving great atrocities, wars, and anywhere that Hitler spoke, stood, or sneezed. Mom is more into pretty buildings and mountains.

One big exception was Dachau’s concentration camp. Mom was interested in that and gave the place a thorough looking over.

It cost me ten euros to go to the ER and get my mysteriously sore foot x-rayed before I left Würzburg. It turns out that I’m just a baby and that there is nothing broken in my foot. Even so, I was glad to get an x-ray, because Würzburg University’s chair of physics was once held by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen–whom I’m sure you’ll all remember as the man who discovered X-rays in 1895.

I picked up the parents yesterday. Today we’re walking around Munich. We already have the Glockenspiel and Hofbrauhaus under our belts.

Mom decided to wake up at 5:30am this morning. There was some confusion in her jet-lagged mental clock, and also the clock on her cellphone, thus she thought it was appropriate to wake us all up and have breakfast at 6am. Because of this, they’re now having a nap.

I’m looking forward to Salzburg, but also to America. I crave car-driving. It’s a very American experience to drive alone in my car, listening to my music, going where I want. The opposite of European mass transportation.

Also I look forward to hearing all the Gainesville news that I missed. I’m sure Amanda will fill me in on which trees fell on which mailboxes during the last rainstorm–or whatever else made the cover of the Gainesville Daily Register this summer.

I’m on my last school-planned excursion. All twenty or so of us have been staying here in Berlin. Here’s what we’ve done.

On the first day, we met up with a historian who gave us a walking tour of some of the major sites. Some culture things, Jewish stuff, etc. The tour was three or four hours and interesting, but we were all distracted the whole time by the Christopher Street parade, which everyone had fun taking photos of.

You see, Christopher Street Day is a holiday for gay liberation. It’s mainly an excuse for costumed or practically naked men to dance together on floats in the major European cities. And they did. We all thought the coincidence of our tour being on this day was pretty funny. The Germans don’t mind the parade, but that shouldn’t be a surprise when you consider that Berlin has a gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit.

The second day we had free time to ourselves. I went with a small group to see the Jewish, German history, and Egyptian museums and then browsed around Kaufhaus des Westens, the largest department store in continental Europe. (They have to say “continental” because England actually has a bigger one). It was big, but I wasn’t blown away–it’s just a store. We also got to see Berlin’s famous painted bears. The bears and the German history museum were the best parts of the day.

The third day we took a day trip to Potsdam to look at palaces and eat outside one of their universities. This day was devoted to seeing old buildings.

Yesterday, on my birthday, we took a tour of Germany’s Bundestag (what we would call parliament or congress). It’s an amazing, modern facility with a huge glass dome on top. We all climbed to the top of that for a great view of Berlin.

In the evening, I had my birthday dinner with a dozen or so people on the trip. Afterward, about six or seven of us (I’m a bit hazy on the details) went for drinks at a quiet, trendy-looking bar and then moved on to dancing at a very loud, but very fun club. I danced with Christa and the Lizes, had the honor of playing wing-man for Barron, and Clayton bought me some drinks. A truly great twenty-first birthday in one of Europe’s coolest and largest cities, I can hardly imagine an improvement, but it would have been nice to have all my old friends there. I’ll see them soon.

No sickness, no regrets, but I did wake up with a sore left foot. Cause unknown. So, that is why I’m blowing my last minutes in Berlin blogging at an internet cafe–it’s not comfortable to walk at the moment. I’ll get it checked out back in Würzburg if it isn’t feeling better soon.

The next big event will be the picking up of my mom and dad the day after tomorrow. Mary Ann, who will be flying out of Frankfurt, is sharing a train with me to the airport, so my parents may get to meet one of my good friends. They will also meet Christa and her boyfriend when we go to Munich. Our travel arrangements remain roughly as I outlined a few days ago. I think we may get a rental-car and deviate from our plans as we please. All the hotels are reserved except the one in Füßen, but it’s not a busy town.

Our three big destinations are Munich, Salzburg, and Füßen. We’re keeping in the Germany-Austria region because I don’t think our week will allow for much more. Plus, I can show off my German to my parents this way. Here’s the itinerary.

July 28: Parents arrive in Frankfurt at 9:15 am. I shuffle them into a train for Munich. They feel gross and tired. We stay the night in Munich’s Hotel Monaco (confirmed reservation for two nights).

July 29: Munich. Glockenspiel, Hofbräuhaus, Dachau, Deutsches Museum, Englischer Gardens. My friend Christa and her boyfriend will be in town, so we can meet them for lunch, maybe.

July 30: Morning in Munich and sometime after lunch we head for Salzburg via train or car. We’ll stay at Bergland Hotel (confirmed reservation for two nights), walk around, and have dinner.

July 31: Salzburg all day. Sound of Music tour, Hohenfestung, Mozart’s birthplace, Brewery Monchberg.

Aug 1: We pack up in Salzburg and head for Füßen (also spelled Füssen or Fuessen) to see the castles. We stay at the Alpenhotel Meier (no reservation yet!), which has a great location.

Aug 2: Füßen all day. Neuschwanstrein and Hohenschwangau castles.

Aug 3: Take off from Füßen and go back to Frankfurt for the night. Stay at Hotel Maingau (no reservation yet!).

Aug 4: Have good breakfast and head for airport plenty early.

Aug 5: Arrive back in US.

A word about the hotels. I do not know how to plan things, so you all should be amazed I even reserved two hotels so far. These four hotels were chosen from a small list of Rick Steves recommendations in his Germany & Austria travel book. The Munich hotel is sort of ugly, but it will do for two nights. And we shouldn’t be there except to sleep anyway.

Transportation is not worked out, but won’t that be fun! The current plan is to just buy train tickets as we need them (the prices aren’t changing at this point), and rent a car in Munich, maybe. Don’t worry–stuff works out.

What you should know about Wien (German name for Vienna): It looks a hell of a lot like Germany, the accent is different, and they aren’t so keen on the recycling and Pfand thing.

The phrase “auf Wiedersehen!” (“see you again!”) seems more popular in Vienna than in Germany. Around Würzburg, we mostly get “Tschüss!” as a good-bye, though old women on the bus like to say “Tschüssie!” to each other. American girls have adopted this and think it’s cute.

I attended my first Catholic mass. It was in St. Stephen’s Cathedral. (Pictures here.) As far as church buildings go, it wasn’t that nice. On the outside, it’s got that ugly Gothic thing going on, the interior has all the overwrought guilded junk you’d expect. Of course, it still beats the metal-building-church-on-the-highway style that America invented.

I opted not to eat the cracker/flesh or drink the wine/blood. But I did do some standing, sitting, standing, sitting. Clayton, one of the Americans on the trip, met up with his Methodist church’s choir which was invited to sing at St. Stephen’s. So I got to hear them during the mass. I don’t usually care much for the church-music genre, actually. Big exceptions include the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou and that Bach mass.

So much for mass, but you know what I do like? Jews. Christa and I toured Vienna on our own, and because she’s so Jewish, we visited all the big Jew sites.

The Jewish museum had a lot of money put into it. It’s an ultra modern, bomb proof, concrete and steel building with hologram displays, movies, thousands of artifacts, and a nice cafe inside. Fun facts: Jews did not start the plague, they secretly all make fun of Christians, and while they can join me in eating a plate full of kangaroo, it would not be kosher to drink milk at the same time.

I also visited the opera house. It was fancy, shiny, big, etc. So, I guess I’m all classy and stuff now that I’ve been in an opera house. I did not watch one live, thankfully. I had a history of music class a few semesters back that required me to watch operas on DVD, and I can report that I don’t care for it. Some of the arias are memorable, but why not just listen to that on CD? Come on, be a Philistine—opera’s not good!