Bremen is an interesting city. We spent the day walking around the city center, the altstadt. We looked in a lot of shops, but neither of us found anything that we really wanted. There was a nice pair of shoes, with a rainforest motif, but they had quite a bit of a heel and so it was unlikely that I would wear them on this trip. We are still too early in our trip to be buying a lot of things that we will just have to drag around with us. We also stopped at St. Peter's Cathedral. It is a beautiful church with a lot of vibrant colors and beautiful roofs, at least on the main level. We went down to the basement and it is much darker and there is no color down there, ... read more

For our one and only real day in Berlin we decided to get up early. After a quick breakfast in our hotel room we were off. We walked down Kurfürstendamm Straße, a large shopping street. When we reached near the end we got onto the U-bahn (underground) and went to Potsdamer Platz. We walked to the Jewish memorial and went down into the exhibit. It was gruesome and horrible but also quite interesting. I didn't realize that the Nazi's originally put Jews in the back of sealed trucks and vented the carbon monoxide into the back to kill them. After that morbid display it was nice to get back into the sunshine and we walked to the Brandenburg Tor. We then started walking towards Alexanderplatz but we didn't realize how far it was so we stopped ... read more

Today we took a day trip to the island Lovön. We were going to catch the 10am ferry but we got a little turned around on the way there and we finally arrived at the dock around 11:00. Luckily the ferry left every half hour. It takes an hour to get to the island. On the island is one of the official Royal residences, Drottningholm. It is the Queen's Palace, Drottning actually translates to Queen. For those of you who have been to Versailles it is basically a smaller version. Interestingly Drottningholm was rebuilt in 1662 following a fire the previous December and Versailles was not started until 1664. We walked through the Baroque style garden to the Chinese Pavillion. It was an interesting building, inside each room was a different color red, white, green, yellow. ... read more

So our first full day in Sweden. There is a boat race here in Stockholm, right on our little island of Skeppsholmen. It is the ÅF Offshore Race. I don't know much about it because the newspaper that talks all about it is in Swedish. I did however learn that the starting point was moved to be here in central Stockholm. This race does mean that there are a lot of people here! We spent today walking around, a bit up in main Stockholm and then we walked around the island beside ours, Gamla Stan. Gamla Stan is the old town and while being very touristy now it is a lovely area of charming cobblestone roads and narrow streets. We got an ice cream to have while we wandered up and down looking into shops. We ... read more

Today we managed to get up ontime and we had another lovely english breakfast here at the hotel. Our first stop was Buckingham Palace. We arrived there shortly before the Changing of the Guard. We decided to stay and watch the changing of the guard. It was actually very underwhelming! Mostly it was just men in bear hats standing around. Every once in a while a small group would break off and march a few steps. They also played Pirates of the Carribean which was interesting, I loved it but it seemed to be an odd choice of music. The most exciting part was that the Queen's car drove by. There were SO many people there though, it was hard to see what was going on most of the time. We were outside for over an ... read more