Landed in Germany: June 7...

We arrived in Frankfurt and Max, the classic-rock loving doctor and brother of our friend Rike picked us up and took us to his apt. in Mainz. First (and lasting) impressions of Germany: a clean, peaceful, orderly, very pretty fairytale land. Mainz proved to be a beautiful town, and thereafter every single town has continued to impress us. With 83 million people, wilderness is surely scarse, and everywhere feels very settled. In most of our travels we have always sought out nature and wilderness, but here it is the small towns and villages, the manmade structures and remnants of civilization which have proved fascinating. We`ve loved the architecture, the winding cobblestone streets, open air cafes and beer gardens, churches and castles.

Language has been fun. English is usually sufficient but the older generations are not so comfortable with it and many conversations have taken place with us speaking English and being spoken to in German, guesswork and communication thriving in the midst of this.

Our first German word was spargel, asparagus (usually white asaparagus) which was at the peak of its short season when we arrived. Germany is spargel crazy, and most of the German expressions we`ve learned thereafter can be neatly demonstrated with a bit of spargel. Where is the spargel? How much is the spargel? Do you have spargel? My name is spargel...

The next major word to enter our limited vocabulary was surely schloss, or castle. The schlosses have been such a huge highlight and most trips have been accompanied with a schloss hunt as each town has at least some ruins if not some awe inspiring turrets or towers of stone.

We spent some time in the first few days on the famed Autobahn, cars flying past at 200 km/hr, and on our 6 hour drive North we also spent one hour in traffic. Everyone got out of their cars and Zoe did some tai chi in the midst of it all. For a while, we wondered about the gigantic town we kept seeing highway exits for everywhere, a seemingly huge city we`d never heard of hilariously named Ausfahrt. Later we realized that this meant "exit" in German.

Thanks Max and Angelika for hosting us so graciously!