Needed to add...

• Our train to Cinque Terra from Florance had a change in Pisa, so we stopped for a couple hours to check out the famous leaning tower (we = va, erti, and I...Joj wasn't interested and stayed in the train station with the bags). Well, first of all, its not that tall. But man, it leans. So it was pretty cool to see. Pisa was a neat little place too, though I don't think it would be worth much more than the 2 hours we gave it.


• We went out for a nice Italian meal our last night in Cinque Terra where Joj and I split a pasta dish and "feasted" on wild boar (chops). (Feasted was just the term we assigned to the wild boar before it arrived, because you can't just eat wild boar, you have to feast on it. In the end, it was quite a small feast, but pretty tasty?)


• We didn't get a spot in the cool cheap hostel last night, but we are moving over there tonight...

Italy, the land of birds

There are a lot of birds in Italy. And they like to chirp at 6 am. And 7 am. And all other times when it is light out (which seems to be 6 am - 10 pm).

But that is not really important. Italy is also the land of Gelato (which is just slightly different then ice cream (though Knechtel will insist otherwise) and is pretty cheap and everywhere...we seem to eat it 3-5 times a day (honestly)). Oh, and the other thing you need to know about Italy is 'Prego'. To you, it may just be a pasta sauce. To Italians, it means everything. 'Hello', 'You're welcome', 'Word', 'Go ahead', 'Goodbye', etc...

We went on an overnight train from Interlaken to Venice a few (I'm too lazy to figure out exactly when) days ago. Venice was awesome. At least I thought so. Joj wasn't as big a fan. It is amazing to walk around a city with no cars. It is all just alleys and canals. We got lost a lot. But there are signs to the major sights everywhere, so we just learned what was near us, or what was near where we were going, and follwed the signs.

In Venice, we just walked around, and took the place it. It was pretty neat. We went to another Guggenheim art museum (seems to be a theme). Other than that, we just walked around. My favorite moment in Venice was one evening, having a dinner of pasta and pizza at a small resturante, when a band came and played for about 30 minutes in the street in front of us. We were just finishing dinner, so we ordered another liter of wine and listened for a while.

After a couple days in Venice (two nights) we caught a morning train to Florance. Florance was ok. It was really hot. The first day we just walked around, and hung out. The next morning Joj, Erti and I got up early and headed over to the world famour Uffizi meseum hoping to beat the lines. Well when we got there at 8, the line was long, and we eneded up waiting til 11 before we got in. Erti actually left at 10 cause he was tired of waiting. Joj and I spent 3 hours in the meseum looking at really old art and listening to our audio tour. It was actually really awesome. Saw about 6 things I was completely familiar with (which is a lot, as my art history is weak as can be). The audio tour was key, as I had no real understanding about how things like prespective and depth had to be discovered over time. So that kinda of stuff was explained to us, which was hot. We didn't go see David (we were all kinda arted out, and I personally get to see a naked guy named David all the time, so it's no big deal...). We also found a tex-mex place that had pretty good burritos (Va and Erti liked it the most, but they were both really drunk...and the meat was terrible, but the rest of the burrito was pretty good...anyway...).

Eventually on to Cinque Terra, which is these five smaller villages on the coast. It was beautiful. We (me, Erti, Va) spent a day hiking the trails between the villages (though the hike ended early when one of the trails was closed). Other than that, we swan and hung out and chilled. It was nice to relax after lots of meseums and whatnot. The beach was small and rocky. The water was crystal clear, but dirty in spots. Overall, the beach itself was pretty average. But still, it was such a beautiful backdrop...The pictures will have to do the rest here...

We stayed in the basement of this guy, Guin Luigi, who had it divided into four rooms. The room was meant for two, but we crammed in to save money and cause there werent many open spaced. He was the nicest guy, and we went to his wine shop and he would just pour us shot after shot of liquor and wine to taste.


After three nights in the village of Monterossa This morning we got up and headed to Milan. Our flight to Barcelona is on the night of the 4th, so now we are waiting to see if we get space in the good, cheap hostel, or if we have to cross town for the other. That's all for noce. Hopefully others will fill in what I left out...

Prego.

No Sprechen Sie Deutsch

A quick story we forgot to relay!

So as we were walking around Germany, for the first few days, we would try to tell people that we did not speak German, and hopefully they would talk to us in English. So we would tell people "No Sprechen Sie Deutsch." Well, on our third day in Berlin, a kid from Florida pointed out to us that we were telling people "You don't speak German". Oops. We started using "Sprechen Sie English?".

We are in Florence now, leaving for the coast tomorrow morning (with a lunch/leaning tower stop in Pisa probably). Details on Venice and Florence at a later date...

Interlaken!!

So we took the all day train to Interlaken... It was long, but we had a table for the 4 of us on the train so we had some hot cards action goin' down!!! Anyways, we got into Interlaken mid afternoon and called a few hostels.

We chose Heidi's Hostel because it was cheap and close, but it ended up being really nice. Furhtermore, the old lady that worked there (we assumed her to be Heidi?) was ridiculously nice - she kept giving us chocolate! We got a 5 bed room to ourselves with the coolest shower in the world!!! We originally mistook it for a closet/dresser. It was about 2 feet by 2 feet, but the water pressure was AWESOME!

Let me interject (this iis actually VA). There has been some contention as to whether the shower water pressure was actually awesome...David says it was average (and that he wants nothing to do with this post...)(DAVID)

Alas... back to interlaken. Interlaken is sandwiched between 2 laken (hence inter for between and laken for lakes!!!) but the other 2 sides shoot straight up into the alps. Needless to say it is gorgeous! There's tons of outdoorsy stuff to do there and more watch and swiss army shops than you can shake a stick at!

We went to grab some groceries and got caught in the rain which was actually kind of nice. Once we got back to the hostel we were cooking our less than awesome food and we met some other travelers who were cooking their more than awesome Thai which they had way too much of and we consequently ate. It was delicious. We went out with said group for beers later that night and got pysched to skydive the next day....

The next morning we got up earlyish to go SKYDIVING. Our instructor, Stefan could have been confused for the Governator based on his accent which was great and he made some reference to Cant Touch This or somethign which is apparently somehow related to Eurotrip (the movie) which I dont understand because amazingly I have never seen it.

Skydiving was incredible! Words cannot describe it-we will just have to show you our pictures.

We spent the afternoon wandering around Interlaken, losing the Bee, and chilling out playing cards at Heidis before we caught the night train to Venice.

Erti and I appologize collectively for rambling over unimportant details. But you love it. Look for updates on Italy and the first Joj post sometime soon!
AWESOME.

Munich

In trying to catch up, here's Munich:

We stayed in this place called "The Tent". It's a big tent, with a wood floor, and for €8 you get a mat, as many blankets as you want, and breakfast in the morning. This is an uber good deal compared to the €22 they wanted everywhere else to stay in
10 and 12 person bunk rooms. And they have a really nice shower facility, and a big camp fire every night. It was, however, freezing. You should have seen Joj shivering under his 13 blankets the second night.

We took a Mike's Bike tour which was pretty awesome. It covered some quick history stuff and then went through the English Garden, which was absolutely beautiful. We road to a Beir Garden, where we had huge liters of beer and Brats (well, not Knechtel). We also rode past the nudist section of the park. Our guy told us to keep an eye out for the guy they've nicknamed "Tripod". We also got to check out the Deuchess (I'm sure I destroyed that spelling, but, whatever...) Meseum. It was really cool science meseum where you could play with pretty much every exhibit. We got there when it was only 1.5 hours until closing, so we didn't even get a chance to see 1/2 of it (it had some thousands of exhibits), but it was awesome.

That night we went to the Hofbrau House, the oldest Beir Garden in Munich. We ended up talking to these two German guys, one who was an actor, and the other worked with the EU. Talking politics and history with these two was absolutely fascinating.

The next day we went to Dachau, which was pretty intense. The meseum was very well done.

The next morning we were off to Interlaken...