I read through Michael's blog posts. They are really cool and I asked him if I could do one too. So here it is :-) It is very sad that the trip is (almost) over! We sure got to see a lot and I enjoyed the trip very much!I remember when Michael wrote me on Facebook. He mentioned in his first blog entry that he "jokingly Facebook messaged" me. To be honest, when he wrote me, I wasn't sure if he was serious or not. But I was totally up for the trip! During the Oktoberfest Michael got to learn a [View Full Entry]

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Friday we got up and took the train to Salerno from Rome. There was a really nice couple from Northern California in our compartment and they were nice. They had just flown into Rome and weren't too impressed yet, though. We got off the train and had lunch in Salerno, a nice little town on the water. The weather was ok, a little cloudy, but it is a really nice town on the coast. We caught the bus to Amalfi, where we had to get off for an hour or so to wait for the bus to Sorrento. The ride there [View Full Entry]

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I didn't really know what to expect with Rome. It's huge and a little intimidating, but I really liked it, actually. The only thing is that their public transportation system is awful and the street vendors are really obnoxious. Even when you are trying to eat dinner they will walk up trying to sell you crap. I still can't figure out how you could possibly make enough money to survive by selling the junk that they do. Who buys it, really? I've never been sitting outside of a quiet restuarant enjoying a pizza and thought to myself, "if I could just [View Full Entry]

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Venice was great! We were only there for about 24 hours but it really felt like enough time to appreciate and enjoy it. Our hotel was on this quiet canal and our room was awesome. I'm not sure how old the building was but it was definitely hundreds of years. It had these really high beamed ceilings. We spent most of our time exploring the streets and looking in all of the cool shops. Even I enjoyed the window shopping, which is really saying something. We went into the San Marco Basillica and up in the bell tower, too. It really [View Full Entry]

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So we are on the train to Venice now. I'll post this whenever I get internet again but it is Monday at 11 AM or so as I write. We are getting to Venice around noon and just spending today, tonight, and early tomorrow there. As beautiful as I'm sure it will be, it is pretty expensive and there isn't really all that much to see other than the St. Mark's Basillica/square, and maybe the Rialto area. We are taking the Vaporetto (basically boat buses) to our hotel near St. Mark's first thing when we get there to drop our things [View Full Entry]

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It has been an intersting and busy couple of days. Friday we got up and checked out of our hotel in Luzern, then we went to the train station and dropped off our bags. We took a boat ride around Lake Luzern to a little town called Weggis. It was really nice but the fog cut down on the views for sure. We could barely see the mountains at all. Weggis was pretty cool but there wasn't much going on. It's sort of a resort town so very quiet. There was a cable car to the top of a mountain but [View Full Entry]

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Church bells ring for 5 minutes straight at 7AM in Switzerland, apparently...hahah. We got up pretty early and had a great breakfast at the place where we are staying. It is a really cool old house and the woman who runs it, Evelyn, has been very helpful. The breakfast was good. Swiss cheese is better in Switzerland, I think; I hate it at home. We took a cable car up to Mt. Pilatus in the morning. You have to change cars near the top because it is so steep it takes a special one. At the station where you switch there [View Full Entry]

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Sorry I haven't been able to update this thing. The place that we stayed in Munich didn't have internet. On Sunday we went to Rothenburg, which was great. It is a medieval walled town that is one of the best preserved anywhere. It is only about an hour and a half drive from Veronika's hometown. We spent a lot of time on the Autobahn and here's what I have observed about German driving: (1)If people knew how to drive, speed limits would be unnecessary (2)Stop signs are a waste, Germans have yield signs 90% of the time and it works for [View Full Entry]

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I made it! I can't get internet on my computer so I'm on Veronika's and German keyboards are really weird. If I mess something up, that's why. I landed on time zestrerdaz. It was a little rough, a few of the overhead compatments popped open if that tells zou anzthing. Bz the waz, the z and y are backward, sorrz. We took the Autobahn to Veronika's house. We were doing 100 mph and getting passed like we were standing still. Tons of cool cars here. It makes me laugh that Detriot's European cars look better than a lot of the American [View Full Entry]

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So the countdown continues. In 48 hours I will be somewhere over the Atlantic. I was going to just send emails to my friends but I figured more people would be able to follow my trip with a blog and posting pictures will be easier. Background on the trip + our itinerary I am traveling with a friend I met while at East Carolina named Veronika. She was on exchange at ECU for a year from her university in Germany, close to Stuttgart. After graduating in May and moving back home for the time being, I jokingly Facebook messaged her one [View Full Entry]

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