Markus and Brian's Excellent European Adventure

Achtung, Kinder!

My time here in Germany has been incredibly memorable. Living with a typical German family is an experience I won't soon forget, and I really feel like I've made some pretty strong connections.

Recap: The last week we've been swimming almost daily at a friend's nearby pool or at the town swimming park, visiting the beer gardens and massive city park in Munich, exploring the BMW museum (the more modern relics and future advanceds exhibits at the top level were the most interesting), hiking up to the castles south of Munich (which were a little bit of a letdown when you realized just how recently they were built; they had photographs of their construction), hiking around the Olympia Park (host of the 1972 Olympic Games), and having several visits with Markus' family and friends. Today I also had a great time meeting up with two friends from my time at Redknee, currently in the Munich office for the summer.

Still, I'm incredibly eager to get going and move on. Every night, I gaze longingly at the nighttime sky for hours, thinking that the very same stars I see glittering in the sky are being watched by a certain special tourist information booth out there, hundreds of miles away, waiting just for me. Being in one place in Germany has been fun, but I really need to move on.

So, tomorrow morning I'm off to the train station to work my way across to Dijon, France, in the middle of the Cote D'Or wine region. Markus will be hanging back here in Germany for a few days, and we'll likely meet up again in Switzerland.

It's time to travel again! I'm pumped. Before I head off to bed, some pictures from the past few weeks. Captions are after the pictures.

1) Starting from left: Me, Christina (Markus' aunt), Joseph, Jacob, Tina (bottom) and Sushi (top). Joseph, Jacob, and Tina are Markus' cousins, and Sushi is Tina's best friend. (It's a nickname; Germans aren't that crazy to name their kids after Japanese delicacies.)
2) Markus, with a girl on both sides, as usual.
3) Markus' cousins mimick his two most frequent looks.
4 & 5) The Glockenspiel in Munich. The little figures move around in circles at noon. Terribly boring, but since we spent so much time watching it, dammit, we weren't about to walk away without a memory of it.
6 & 7) The main street in Landshut, an old town an hour out of Munich. It looks touristy, but it was 100% locals. Very quaint.
8) Markus tries to look calm and collected while fighting his overwhelming fear of heights.
9) The local castle in Landshut. Your town just ain't worth it, they say in Germany, if it ain't got a castle.
10) Admiring the view from the castle hill.
11) A view from the castle. I like this shot a lot.
12) Our favourite vacation photo so far. The sign reads, in German, "Watch out! Children shoot hadoken fireballs!"
13) A typical German neighborhood. (This one's for you, Serge.)
14) A view of the distant Alps as we head towards the castles in southern Germany.
15) The smaller castle near the big Neuschwanstein castle.
16) The view from Neuschwanstein. It was raining at the time, but still, we like this shot.
17) A sunset taken on the long train ride back to Munich from the castles. If you're looking for a desktop background, we'll have some better sunset pictures soon...
18 & 19) Me at the bluescreen exhibit in the Broadcasting section of the Deutsches Museum. I had no idea what was on the screen when Markus took these pictures of the TV; I was trying to imitate the opening sequence of Tracy Morgan's Brian Fellows character on SNL.
20 & 21 & 22) Some random, dry photos of a residential area in the German countryside. (For you, Serge!)
23) German hop fields. These are guarded by soldiers.
24) Markus, lost in thought.
25) The 4-cylinder BMW building, the BMW Museum, and part of Munich.
26) Slightly sunburnt, me hanging out with Kaoru and Gary in downtown Munich.

Anyway, time to catch some sleep, and make up the rest on the long train ride to France tomorrow.

Posted by Brian at June 11, 2003 02:52 AM