Photos from the land of the Bratwurst

Thank goodness for my Italian cinema class, or I would never have had enough time to upload all of these pictures on the school's extraordinarily slow server. Here is a (more or less) chronological presentation of my German adventure.

This is me in front of the smallest airport in the world, a.k.a. Rome Ciampino airport, at about 6:30 a.m. Friday morning. It was quite a trek to get there, but when you only get about two hours of sleep, everything is far more exciting than it should be.

We flew on a ryanair flight, which was my first small european airline. It was a little sketchy, because for some reason, people weren't allowed to sit in rows three or four ... they said it was for safety reasons, which was a tad disconcerting

But we made it to Germany, and immediately embarked on our search for David Hasselhoff. If he's not in Germany, where would he be??

A cool church we found on our hunt ...

A delicious bratwurst lunch for just 1,50 euro on the side of the street. YUM.

When we got lost that night trying to find a restaurant for dinner, we stumbled upon this giant, brightly-lit EU sign in the middle of a park. Apparently Germany is very happy to be a part of the union.

Me and my buddy, Frankfurt.

This was the most amazing place I've ever been -- a gummy bear store, with more gummies than you could possibly imagine. I bought a bag of sours and a bag of regular gummy bears, and now, three days later, they're all gone. I almost bought this gargantuan red gummy bear (I swear it weighed a pound) for Liam, but I was afraid it would go stale by the time he would get it. I also would have mailed it to him if it hadn't weighed a pound ... seriously, it was amazing

We took a train to Mainz (pronounced mines), a small town outside of Frankfurt, because someone said it was cool. They were wrong. But we thought David Hasselhoff might be there, so we walked around a while, anyway. Turns out he wasn't there. We left immediately.

This is the mall in Frankfurt. It's so weird, because it's all built up. It's about 100 feet across, but seven stories tall, with a million escalators in the middle. Strange!

In a train station on our five-hour trek back to the Hahn airport. It was very easy to get to Frankfurt, but very difficult to get back!

The only American flag I've seen anywhere in Europe ... on a giant dancing hotdog ... in the airport ... in Hahn, Germany. You can tell that Europeans (especially Germans) respect Americans enormously...

That's all there is for now. This week I am just going to school and still recovering from all the weekend's Apfelwein. Friday, I'm off to France for Versailles, Paris and who knows what else?

Arrivederci!