Uff Da! Lots to catch up on!

Howdy children and non-children! Looks like I've got a lot of updating to do for you since it's been a while since my last post and I bet you all thought I fell off the face of the earth! Well, since my last update Colin and I left for Dubrovnik Thursday. We had the luxury of riding a crowded bus for just over 6 hours. The trip from Dubrovnik to Split only days earlier was 3.5 hours....kind of a BIG difference! The reason it was longer was because we didn't know that the bus was going to go through every single small town along the coast and be the shuttle between towns. It was bad enough that the bus was already crowded w/people sitting, then we had people in the aisles for about 3 or 4 hours of the trip.

We ended up driving through Bosnia and we had a 20 minute break to stretch out, which was VERY nice! Since we were traveling through a small section of Bosnia we were only in it for a little bit, BUT.....that's one more country to add to my list of places I've been! 4 Countries in 8 days, that's pretty good! Anyway, We finally arrived in Dubrovnik around 5 ish and took a taxi to our hostel. We had our own room (which was not pink), bathroom and, the best part, our own BALCONY that looked at the mountains!


If you look at the bottom right side you can see a fenced in soccer area. This provided some good entertainment for both of us when we wanted to relax. The kids who would play were hilarious to watch!


We decided to wander around some of the streets near our hostel since it was only 7. While exploring, we found a small food stand on the sidewalk called "Fast Food Heidi's". We decided to try one of their cheeseburgers and see how they compared to McD's. When the guy brought our burgers to us we were surprised. The burgers were much bigger than we expected! They had tomatoes, shredded lettuce, red peppers, some kind of red sauce and some kind of mayo. DELICIOUS!

That's how big the burger was. I wear a size 10.5 sandal.

The next two days we went to the city center to look at Dubrovnik Castle. The lady who ran our hostel said we were only 10 minutes away. Turns out 10 minutes in Croatia = 32 minutes real time. Quite a bit longer than we thought! Even though it was a hot walk, the breeze from the sea was very nice. Thank you Adriatic Sea!

Colin and I both enjoyed seeing the castle and walking around the castle walls. The walk maybe took over an hour to do, but it was so nice and there was so much to see from up there. Walking along the streets of the castle was also very nice.
I'm having some trouble uploading more photos of the castle and everything else I wanted to show you so this on will have to do for now. I'll put some up very soon if I can get online again. Tonight Colin and I are going to an Irish pub with some of his friends for 2 for 1 burgers. I'm excited about that. I hope life is going well for everyone, see you all soon!

Croatia

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First off, the z & y keys are in opposite places and Ill probably mix them up so do your best to try and figure it out and Ill do my best to catch the mistakes!

Colin and I left Augsburg at 8:10 and finally arrived in Split around 7:30 that night. When we landed in Dubrovnik around 1:00 we had an hour and half bus ride into the main station. Then we had to catch another bus to Split, which lasted about 4 hours. We made it to our hostle and got checked in. Then we were taken out of the building and led around for about 5 minutes through all these alley ways. We found out we were staying in sombodys house that worked for the hostle company. Here are the pix of our room

Very pink!

We were pretty shocked by the color of the room and how nice it was! There is a light in the middle with a pink cover which gives it the pink aura.

Im sitting in a free internet cafe with Colin in Split, Croatia. Today we walked around the city and palace for about 6 hours and covered some pretty good ground and got lots of pictures! We walked around a palace from around 400 AD. It is really awesome!

Just a couple of views from the palace.

We were told the internet is free but now we are probably going to be charged so ill upload a few of the city and head out.

Me about to fall into the Adriadic Sea!

Time to go. I hope the States is treating everyone well! Miss you all!

Planes, trains and........beer

So I'm FINALLY in Germany!!! I was up for about 31 hours, not my record but still close, one point for me! The trip over was very good, everything went well, my flights were on time except for the one from Chicago to Frankfurt was almost 2 hours late because we had to wait for another flight from LA to get in because other people needed to be on my flight since that was the only one of the day going to some places. It didn't matter because I had a 3 hour lay over in Frankfurt already and that knocked some waiting time off!

When I landed in Zurich Colin met me at the airport and we went around Zurich. It is a very nice town and the weather was wonderful. The sun was shining and it was nice and warm. We walked around for about 3 hours and covered lots of ground.
This is a view of Zurich from the bell tower of a church we looked at, the way up consisted of 170 stairs.



We went back to the train station around 1:00 and were told to get on a different train that what we needed. An hour later we were at the end of the line and NOT in Konstanz!!!!!! After getting things sorted out with one of the workers and a few transfers later we arrived in Konstanz. Check out Colin's blog for some pix of the stop, the link is in the first post.

When we got back to Colin's house we had dinner......slightly burned pizza and wine. Colin had to go to dinner with his Arabic class and pawned me off to two of his friends. They told me we were going to a beer garden......SWEET! The beer was great, the atmosphere of the garden was great and it was fun to hang out w/them and see some of Konstanz.

The next day (Sunday) we went on a four hour train ride to Augsburg to stay with his relatives, Anita, Herman and Rolf. They are very nice and have treated us very well. After we arrived, Herman and Rolf took us to a beer tent. The tent was so fun and pretty big. Herman ordered us a mass of beer. I wasn't sure what that was at first but when they brought it out I knew. A mass is 2 Liters of beer! Along with the beer I had a brautwurst and sauerkraut, it was sooooo good! We went to two more bars after that and had some more beer.

Today we walked around Augsburg and went sight seeing. Augsburg is a very beautiful city. We went to the city hall, some churches and the oldest social home in the world. We just got done eating dinner. Anita prepared some sauerkraut just for me! I don't think I've had this much kraut in my life! It was so good.

Tomorrow we leave for Dubrovnik, Croatia at 11:30 for 5 days. Sorry for the lack of pictures, Colin's computer is low on power and he still needs to update his blog tonight possibly. I promise I will have more pictures in my next few blogs! Make sure you check his blog out too, he's got a good picture of us at the beer tent!

I hope everyone is doing well back in the States!

Almost there!

Hey everyone, I'm just getting this set up right now. I'm still in the good ol' US of A. I leave for Germany tomorrow morning. I am catching a shuttle bus to Minneapolis at 8 am and leave for Chicago at 12:30. After that I leave for Frankfurt at 2:27 and arrive at 5:45 am their time. After that I leave for Zurich at 8:40 and land at 9:30 where I'll meet up with Colin. We are planning to walk around the city for a few hours then take a train back to Konstanz so he can be back in time for a dinner with one of classes. He's planning on taking his computer with when we go on our travels so I will hopefully be able to post some more and upload pics! We are going to Augsburg on Sunday then we fly to Croatia on Tuesday for five days. Then we will be back in Konstanz for the last few days of the trip. I hope you all enjoy reading this! If you want another perspective of the trip you can read Colin's blog (http://uni-konstanz.blogspot.com/).