Travels through Central Europe

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Finally I've arrived in France and have the time and the access to internet to write my very first of many blog posts, which should be quite a bear, to say the least. In general, I hope to update you all at least once a week, on a to-be-determined day of the week; If you so choose, you can just automate the responsibility of checking my blog here by choosing to subscribe to the blog and letting the internet inform you when I have posted any new content. Thanks for your collective interest, I'll try to keep these relatively short (excluding this one) and entertaining!

Some background on the trip: I arrived in Berlin 13 days early to join all the other study abroad students on a journey through Central Europe. We stopped at Berlin, Wroclaw (which I still can't pronounce), Brno (which I did eventually learn was pronounced as Brrr-no), the Barycz Valley, and Vienna. Unfortunately, these cities are not at all close together, so we also spent many hours riding our purple tour bus through some incredibly flat areas of Poland and some absurdly small roads in the Barycz Valley. I'm just going to go from point A when I left Denver until I get to point B, when I sat down to write this blog. I may pass out from exhaustion before I reach point B, in which case this will be a multi-part series instead!

The Flight, and the 21st in Berlin!
Leaving my parents at the gate turned out to be the hardest part of the flight. Surprisingly, I had two very enjoyable flights with British Airways, who served me a relatively delicious meal of airplane chicken, airplane rice, and airplane wine. I was next to a baby on the transatlantic flight, but it must have been a British baby too, because it was extremely polite and barely even did its job of screaming its head off at all. My arrival in Berlin also went well, but I felt like my Rosetta Stone skills were basically useless, since they included counting to 12, the primary colors, and the names of several animals. Despite that, I managed to point my way to the hotel and get settled in for the night. Little did I know that the German language was going to feel like English compared to the insane Slavic languages I was about to encounter in Czech and Poland.

As for my experiences in Berlin, I enjoyed it, but felt it had a certain American-ness that was more pervasive than I would have expected. It wasn't much of a walking city at all, and to find the best "watering holes" on my 21st birthday, my 3-day old friends and I had to take a 10 minute taxi. Surprisingly, this night ended very well, and although I sampled quite a bit of the local stock of delicious Berlin beers, I felt relatively good the next day. Unfortunately, I have no frame of reference for anything that I drank, since all German bars and restaurants insist on titling their beers "Dark" and "Light".

...Okay, this can at least be a start, and you can all join me soon when I recount my adventures throughout the rest of the trip!

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