In Dortmund

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I'm in Dortmund at the moment. Fabian met me at the train station and told me he had a small car so he wasn't sure if we could fit the bags in...I was thinking a Lada or something. I wait at the entrace and he pulls up in a Mazda MX5!

Today I'll be going to class with Fabian and then a few friends will be coming over for some beer later on tonight. He has a dog named 'Easy' that hasn't had a bath in probably a month so hopefully we can sneak him a bath sometime in between.

Zürich was lots of fun, Ashleigh is doing well with an assortment of several douzen yougarts in the fridge. The family has towel heaters in the bathrooms...fancy art all over the place, a priceless view of Zürich etc. It's incredibly modern and the host Mom is a great cook. The family is very nice although the kids do have lots of energy, I can tell Ashleigh has her hands full.

About two days into my stay her host Dad (Jakob) slipped us 50 franks before walking out the door to see the bars downtown! We jumped from bar to bar trying to find somewhere nice and ran into some pretty Finnish girls who accompanied us here and there. After a few beer I took a seat next to a random girl on the road and decided to chat, she ended up being a tri-lingual and spoke better English than me (raised in Australia with a German family at a French school I believe?). In the end she ended up giving Ashleigh her phone number and asked her to phone her anytime she wanted to be a on guest list at one of Zurich's douzen or so upscale clubs. One day later Ashleigh is invited to one of the fanciest clubs in the city with room for one more (we decided not to go since we had had too much to drink the previous night). Suffice to say, we did end up meeting new people while I was there.

For my last day in Zürich we decided to climb a mountain in the centre of the city and had a spectacular view of valley (I made sure to take some photos but I'll upload those later). The next day I found myself sitting on a Germany EC train for 8 hours to Dortmund....oh what fun....but it was worth it.

I'll see about going south sometime around March or April since those are the coldest months in Europe (weird, eh?) but for now I'll be going to Hannover in about 5 days to visit Christoph, then Christoph and I will be going to Berlin to visit Charlie. Then up to Denmark and Norway as planned.

Finances are doing just fine but I'd definitely like to work in Scandinavia for a little bit.

Hope everything back home is going well, keep sending those messages.

All the best,
Nicholas

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