Schneeflocken

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Today I woke up to make the journey back to the Rhineland. Although this time not by train. Instead we found a thing online, previously unknown to me, called Mitfahrgelegenheit. Basically translates to opportunity to carpool. So with this system people post when and where they are leaving from and give a rough estimate price of what they want to charge for each carpooler. Beautiful system that allows you to travel cheaply and meet completely new people. So we found a guy who was leaving for Dusseldorf at 12 today. We met him at the main train station in Berlin. From his accent I couldn't tell if was polish or what but he had a weird german dialect. Kind of an accentric guy all the way round. Wore a bluetooth headset and kept a notebook like this thing was a business of some kind. Anyways threw my stuff in the back jumped in and waited for the rest of the people. There were 4 of us passengers total. Girl, guy from somewhere in Afrika (based on his phone conversations) and then a normal looking german guy. During this trip I began to talk to with the german guy and we became fast friends. He spoke good english although I spoke mostly german with him. He also spoke Polish. This is what I mean. Its hard to find anyone in Europe that doesn't at least speak 3 languages and he was somewhat of an average joe, not really outstanding intelligent or anything. He worked as cook at the Ritz Carlton in Berlin but was originally from Dusseldorf. He was traveling back to celebrate Karneval. (Side track for a second but Karneval is really big here. Its the Halloween of winter as far as costumes go plus blackout type drinking in the old town of dusseldorf and on the main King's Allee.) We began to talk about different stuff, parties, how america is, differences in america and germany, beer, etc... Mostly our conversation stayed in the realm of good times though. haha. Then he told me that he had lived in Canada for a year where he learned english. Long story short we became friends during the car ride back and now I have a man date for Karneval. At least someone to hang out with maybe and meet new people.

As far as scenery. It was snowing the whole day. Huge snowflakes in Berling and most of the way to Dusseldorf until right at the end. German countryside was already beautiful but in white it was winter wonderland like. I really enjoyed the snow for the trip back. Regrettably captured no pictures though.

Also forget to mention the other night on the way back from the movie theatre I saw guy who was drunker than 10 indians on the bus. He was pushing random people around him apparently looking for a fight. Everyone was just pushing him back as he walked through pushing people. It was funny. He was like a pinball person. When he got to the end though he pushed a turkish guy at the back of the bus when we were stopped and I really thought I was gonna get to see a fight. I didn't. But goes to show theres the same kind of drunks everywhere you go.

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