The Goings-On

It's unfortunate how fast June is passing. With the start of the World Cup a lot of time is spent watching soccer and will definitely make time pass a lot faster. Not too many trips have been planned lately. We did go to Konstanz to visit one of our friends from the Winter University. It was nice to catch up with him again and watch the US-England game. He also had some British friends so it was more interesting. Not much else is new. Classes seem to have resumed their cadence after my 10 day vacation at the end of May. I have to write a report on my stay in Stuttgart for the scholarship they've been giving me. Pretty soon I'm probably going to actually have to start taking care of stuff for my return to the US which is crazy.

June

Wow, looks like I went all of May without updating my blog. The start of May was not anything special, simply getting into the rhythm of things at the University. After figuring everything out, I was finally able to do some travelling again. In the middle of May I actually got to take my first trip since the start of April. We went to Amsterdam, Brussels, and then just decided to swing by Luxembourg since we were driving a car. It was a very interesting trip. Amsterdam was quite nice, it was a city that seemed to be based almost entirely around the canals and most of the city streets appeared very similar. While we were there, me and the other guy from KU decided to take a tour of the Heineken factory and managed to get a few beers during the tour. While we were there, the garbage people were on strike, so trash was literally littered throughout the street.

The next stop for us was Brussels. It was also a nice city, the weather being a little better than it was in Amsterdam. Unlike Amsterdam, there was something of a language barrier to overcome with most people speaking French or Dutch, however we were able to get by just speaking English. We went to a bar that had 50 beers on tap. They were a bit pricey, but they tasted quite good. One beer was labelled "the best beer in the world," but I was not terribly impressed by it. We also managed to make our way to the Atomium, which is a monument associated with Brussels after it was unveiled at Brussels World Fair.

Then, as we were leaving Brussels, we just decided to go to Luxembourg and check it out. It was a quaint city and we didn't really know what the main attractions were for us to see, so we just kind of wandered around and looked that things that were interesting for us. The landscape was what I thought looked the best, but again, we didn't know where to go to see whatever is regarded as "Must see" in Luxembourg.

After going to class for 3 days, I then took another trip. This one to Croatia. I spent 10 days there, first arriving in Zagreb, then travelling to Split, Brac, Hvar, and finally Debrovnik. The weather there was just perfect (except for Zagreb, which is in the mainland). Mid-70s with no humidity and a nice ocean breeze. It was definitely a great way to recharge my batteries after spending a lot of time in cloudy, rainy Germany, which at this moment remains cloudy and rainy. That's just a brief overview of the past several weeks. Hopefully I'll remember to update this a bit more often, even though my time here is ticking down pretty fast.