Travelling Tales, super-abridged

Finally a hotel with free internet! I nearly died when I realized that our hotel in Köln, where I was sure I would post my next blog entry, charged 8 euro for 1 hour (!?!) of internet access. No way I was going to pay that, so it had to wait. But let me start from day 1, which was one very eventful week ago (because yes, I have already been in Europe for 7 days!!).

We arrived in Frankfurt bright and early on the 17th after having accumulated a total of pretty much no sleep on the flight, and looked forward to a packed day of driving and communicating solely in German with my landlady and soon-to-be housemates (and of course, translating for the fam). I was TERRIFIED! To make matters worse, when we finally made it to my flat, the landlady wasn't there as I was sure she had agreed to be. At this point I'm FREAKING OUT - what if I misunderstood? What if I said something wrong? What if she was actually some 12-year-old boy pretending to be a landlady on the internet so that he could play some foreigner (like me) and steal their (ie MY) rent money? AHH!

But it was actually all fine. Turned out that a) my landlady's English is wonderful, and b) she had a busy morning and was running late. But I phoned her, and she came over and gave me a tour of the place right away. I realize that speaking English for that particular hurdle was sort of cheating...but I was nervous enough as it was, and eliminating one challenge was really helpful, especially since my fam was around and wanting answers to questions. Plus, it was easier for my landlady too since she didn't have to try and understand my butchered German!

In any case, I have the key to my flat, I have bedding and a gigantic pillow (seriously!), and my landlady is extremely nice. Unfortunately I didn't get to meet my housemates since I had to get to Heidelberg that evening, and they were all at school or work until later in the day. My flat is an old doctor's office, but once I'm permanently moved in and have taken pictures, I'll talk more about that!

As I said, we headed to Heidelberg that night. Since then, we have been travelling around (specifically, we change cities every other day). We started off in cities that I have already been to, but that the rest of my fam hadn't seen yet - Heidelberg and Rudesheim. Since I have to cover a whole week in this post and I need to go to bed, I won't go into details yet, but it was a great couple of days, and it brought back a lot of great memories (eci band trip '06!) :)

Next we spent some time (not enough...) in Köln, which was loads of fun. I was totally blown away by the Cathedral - extremely impressive and definitely top 3 of all cathedrals I have visited to date! I could have spent an entire day just at the Cathedral...but we had to move on!

That brings me to our current location - Amsterdam! It was our little side trip outside of Germany, and it is already over - tomorrow morning, after taking full advantage of the last hour of our 24 hour, hop on/off cruise tickets, we head back to Deutschland for the rest of the trip. Unfortunately we really didn't have enough time to even scratch the surface here. While we did hit a lot of the main attractions (including churches, the Van Gogh Museum, Anne Frank's House, Iamsterdam, the Heineken Experience, canal cruises, the red light district and shopping), there is sooo much more I would like to do here! Luckily I will be back for a weekend in July to meet up with Kathryn!!

It really is time for bed, and the internet is being really slow so I can't seem to upload pictures. But don't worry, there are many to come!

Prost, or cheers, from across the pond!