Are the best in the world. Period.
Germany: “Goodbye”
Hanging out in Frankfurt airport I was reminded how all the announcements in English end with "Goodbye." Very funny.
Being Mistaken as German
I’ve been mistaken as German two times on this trip.
1. In Barcelona I asked a person in English whether they could take a picture of me. Afterwards, I asked where he was from, he asked me. He said, “Oh, I thought you were German from your accent.” I asked if he could hold on for a minute, went and threw up in the bay, and came back: “Accent? You thought I had a German accent?” I think it’s because I spoke extra slowly…you never know how well someone knows English so I try not to burst out talking at normal speed.
2. In Madrid a guy asked me how to get to the 3rd floor of this building. We were speaking in Spanish to each other. At the end he asked if I was from Germany. Oh fantastic, I guess my Spanish has a German twang to it, too.
In actuality, I attribute these to looking somewhat German and, in the case of #1, wearing a World Cup Germany hat. But the question is: Should I be proud of being quasi-German?
One Picture is in Berlin. The Other in San Sebastian. Can You Tell Which is Which?
One city embraces the ball and hoop with gusto, the other leaves the net in shambles.
Last Stop in Germany: Munich
I spent one day and one night in Munich. It’s a good city, though I liked Berlin and Dresden better.
Check out their Science and Technology museum, the largest of its sort in the world. Also don’t miss McFit, a gym in Munich which offers guests their first visit free. I had a headache going into the workout, and it all melted away two hours later. One interesting observation in the gym: I was the only person listening to an iPod in the entire gym (which was huge!). In America every person has some personal audio device. There, no one was listening to anything (well, I guess the main gym music, which was on pretty loud and playing good songs, but still).
Munich, like Zurich and Paris and probably other European cities, has a tourist gig with different kinds of animals donated by patrons (and ultimately sold for charity) that you can pose with. For Munich, it is lions. When I first started seeing them on every street corner I had a weird sense of deja vu. A minute of thought and I knew why I thought I’d "been here" before — I had seen the beautiful Amy Batchelor pose in a moment captured by The Lion of blogging. Amy — I may not be wearing lion-colored mittens, but at least I didn’t need an umbrella!