Day 31-Thai massage and beer with seniors

Today we woke up to our first morning in Prague and caught the metro, which is very easy to figure out here, down to old town. We noticed some festivities near the river and decided to join in, and discovered that it was some kind of Senior festival. There were 80 year olds drinking beer at 11am and we figured, if they can do it, so can we, so we had beer and cornish game hens around noon/1 for about 100kc, or crown. We headed into old town square, where we sat and wrote/painted for awhile and then stumbled upon a Thai massage parlor and figured, what the heck. We are exactly halfway through our trip at this point and our packs are heavy, so we looked at the prices and ended up getting AMAZING half hour massages for about 15 dollars each. not bad at all. They kicked our butts, though and we walked out of there feeling lighter and rejuvinated for the next 30 days. We left old town sq to meet my cousin, James, who is an English teacher here and has been for a year. He took us across the famous Charles Bridge and then we had dinner and beers, and now we are taking a pit stop in the evening before continuing our evening.
Prague is a beautiful 1000 year old city and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in visiting.
More later ...i cant find the exclaimation point..

Day 29- Feeling more cultured by the minute

We just got back from a day shopping and wandering around the Stephensplatz area of Vienna, going to two museums (Schiele-one of my favorites, Durer, Klimt, and an amazing illustration show), then spent our evening at the opera house. Not a bad day. Tomorrow we will see a few more places in the morning, then catch a train to Prague.
I just got word that Asli will finally be meeting us in Berlin afterwards. Finally!
Also, I'm getting over my illness which thankfully only lasted a few days. A minor cold, but I'm glad its overwith.

Day 28-No one likes us, we dont care

This is part of an English football team's chant, but that's pretty much the sentiment in the part of Bavaria that we experienced.
We stayed for 4 days with a nice family, but even they seemed to deem it necessary to tell us how awful the US is, in regards to our president, our foreign affairs, our environmental concerns, and our "lacking" education system. We appreciate differing opinions, but after being force fed with this opinion for the umpteenth time, its hard to swallow-especially when none of the people saying this have ever visited the US.
Rant complete, as far as my blog goes. I have much more to say about this if you're interested another time.

Today the Pinakothek der Moderne (modern art museum) in Munich was spectacular. We didnt make it to the old or new art museums, but this one was enough to whet my appetite for more modern art. Beuys, Magritte, Dali, Kandinsky, and Boccioni are some of my favorites (google them!) but it I have to admit it was pretty pride-inspiring to see an entire room full of Andy Warhols, being from Pittsburgh and all.

Besides that, we arrived in Vienna (Wien) tonight and are having a good first hour. The hostel is decent and cheap (15 Euro a night) and the people have been friendly. We plan on going to an opera tomorrow night (standing room only) if we can get tickets at the Staatsoper (Vienna state opera house). This came highly recommended to me and I am really looking forward to it.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

For example:

Hole-in-the-ground toilets in Turkey and Italy.

Toilets that you have to pay for the privledge of using.

Keyboards that have 2 or 5 keys in different places- just enough to throw you off.

The handicap that you feel when not knowing the native language of a place, especially when trying to figure out signage (Greece is the hardest so far because they don't have a Latin script) when trying to get somewhere in a hurry. The best advice is to just ask someone. They are usually quite helpful and friendly. But we are definitely inspired to learn a second language.

A TV in your hotel room with only the native language channels. CNN or BBC, please! We only know about current news like hurricanes through other American tourists that we run into at places like the Temple of Olympian Zeus.

Venice is an issue in itself-to get around, you either must walk or swim. If you can walk, next comes the issue of figuring out the less-than-planned "streets" or "Via"s.

If you happen to be wheelchair-bound, forget getting around in most of Europe. I never realized how handicap concious and considerate the US is before this.

A lot of Europe is kind of "at your own risk," with low or no railings and other treacherous situations, there seems to be a "survival of the fittest" mentality.

More as they come to me....

Day 26- Munchen on some bier

We left sunny Venice on Friday morning after spending a second night in our luxury accommodations. I am now officially spoiled. We took the boat to the train station and spent some time waiting for our 1:30 p.m. train to Munich (Munchen), which arrived about 7.5 hours later. We took the tube to our friend Florian's house (Florian from the Patras to Ancona ferry ride). He met us at the train station and we got back to his house and chatted over tons of Kinder chocolate until midnight.
At 5:30 in the morning, we woke up and showered and headed out into the still-dark morning around 6 a.m. We caught the tube into downtown and by 7, we were queuing up at the tent in Oktoberfest. This may sound crazy to you, but this is how the Germans do it. We waited for 2 hours for the very best tent, the Haacker Pschorr, and it paid off. We got a great table near the center and stayed there till the festival closed around 10 p.m. I didnt know I had it in me.
We ate white sausages (weisswurst) and "water with gas" for breakfast and began the beer drinking around 11 a.m. We split a couple litres, then I decided I wanted my own huge 1L beer stein. I had a total of 2.6L throughout the course of the day, which I would consider a respectable number (since I didn't end up under the table like some people literally did). For lunch we had a grilled cornish hen—amazing—for about 10 bucks and also munched on a pretzel the size of my rib cage. When the tent was about to close, we walked around the carnival-like atmosphere outside the tent and ate chocolate-covered bananas and candy-roasted cashews. It was raining, and by the end of the night, we were soaked. We headed back by the tube, reviewed the hilarious pictures and videos that Florian took (he will burn a copy for us), and hit the sack.
We slept in this morning, which felt so good since we haven't done that properly in weeks. Luckily, we were able to do our laundry at Florian's because everything from last night was soaked and filthy-I even got to wash my shoes. Hannah and I decided to trade some clothes for today since at this point, the same 4 t-shirts in a month have become quite boring.
The three of us headed out and were going to see a modern art museum with everything from Picasso to Johns and two neighboring museums which have work from Van Gogh to Manet (new museum), and Rembrandt to daVinci (old museum). By the time we found it, it was near closing. Since tomorrow (Monday) is a national holiday celebrating the reunification of East and West Germany, everything will be closed. We plan to go back early Tuesday morning (when we were supposed to leave). Instead, we walked around and saw some famous sites (the Hofgarten and Residenz, and the place where Hitler's party declared their candidacy) then found a little coffee shop and I had hot chocolate, which was like actual chocolate, just melted and with a tiny bit of milk mixed in. Thats the way it ought to be! It rained all day, so soon after we had our hot drinks to warm us up, we went to another one of Florian's spots; a little Italian place with a real pizza hearth and great food, though I must admit that it was sad that I was eating Italian pizza in Germany, and it was better than the pizza we found in Italy. C'est la vie.
I'm not sure what tomorrow holds, but we will be leaving Munich at 3:30pm on Wednesday for a 4.5 hr train ride to Vienna, Austria.