Rhine/Berlin

Hello All,

I seem to be slipping in my postings. We checked into our hostel here and had to write the date. I thought, ´hmm, 21st or something,' but no, it was the 23rd. So... the days are going by quickly.

We took the train from Salzburg to Frankfurt, and then grabbed another train to what we thought was a town called Mainz, close to the Rhine River. It was actually Mainy-Kastel, which is different than Mainz. But we dealt with it and found another train that we could take. This train was stopping at St. Goarhaussen, our stop, according to our guide book was before St. Goar, so we thought the train would stop there. What we later realized, as we sat on the train, was that St. Goar is not an abbreviation for St. Goarhaussen. They are two very distinct towns, on two very opposite sides of the river, a river which has few bridges. So we jumped off the train at another town, walked 1.2km to a place where we could catch a boat across, found out that the boat had stopped running, walked part way back, caught a different ferry across the river, found another train station, took the train down to the town we were staying, hiked up a super steap path/steps and finally found our hostel. We were kind of tired. The hostel, though, was super cool. An old castle overlooking the Rhine River.

The next day we hopped on a boat for a river cruise down the Rhine. The river is pretty cool in that every few miles is a super old castle to see. I guess back in the day each castle would collect tarrifs from passing ships. We toured the ruins of one of the main castles which was used more for fortification, I think. We felt kind of the wrong age wherever we went on the Rhine. On the boat, we were way younger than the vast majority. In our hostel, there were some huge groups of elementary school kids that would run around almost all the time. Us and some other travellers bunkered down in our room and then in the restaurant thingy and complained to each other. But it was okay.

Yesterday we came to Berlin. The amount of recent history (nevermind older stuff)is pretty incredible. We popped into the Reichstag to go up into the big glass dome before walking down to check out where `Checkpoint Charlie'. The museum there was kind of random, but it had some pretty neat stories of escape attempts. Lots of different ideas ranging from fake documents to hiding inside various items such as two suitcases put side by side with a hole in between to a homemade hot air balloon. We also toured the Berlin Jewish Museum, which chronicled the history of German Jews.

Today ends the main tourist part of our trip. Tomorrow we´ll be staying with a friend, and then we´ll be with relatives until almost the end of the trip. It will be nice to get to know a few people on a deeper relationship than: name, nationality, where been, where going, how long. This is kind of the standard hostel talk that is sometimes hard to break out of. Anyway, it should be a good week.

See ya,

Nolan