thirty dirty days in europe I'm so pumped to take this trip and I wanted a memento/journal of stories to have when I return as well as keep all of my loved ones back home updated on my traveling!

well well well...its been one crazy trip so far. its 8am here, we had traditional german meat and cheese sandwiches for breakfast, mm mm good. yesterday, after about an hour of confusion we found heidi and dan, one backpack short. :-( we're still trying to track down dans bag! soon after, we hopped a near train in hopes of heading toward the hostel we'd reserved...and we finally got there. its super nice. we definately felt like confused tourists, really stupid. we ended up at the tourist office like five times yesterday, and we rode the bus around for a while. ended up eating lunch at some american type place because it was the only menu not in german and we were too exhausted to look any longer for sausages and saurcraut! we decided to push ourselves to stay up til at least 8, and luckily got a second wind right around then so we cleaned up and walked around the town we're in, super quaint with cobblestone streets and all. we took a chance and walked into some hole in the wall local pub, and fell in love with germany. the owner bought us a round of his homemade honey wine and served us the juiciest pork chops over saurcraut with all these breads. the owner/bartender/server/cook was very welcoming to us, and spoke a decent amount of english. his huge dog sat under the table nearby. after filling up on that a few good german beers, we found another hole in the wall bar with live music...and the band sang in english! after that we thought we were off to bed, but when we walked in the hostel we were greeted by about a dozen or more people in the rec room singing american cover songs, so we ended up meeting and singing with our new friends, swedish, german and us the only americans. germany has been pleasantly surprising, full of great people. but we regret not knowing any of this language. today, we're trying to track down dans bag and hopefully catch an early train to zurich, switzerland! we'll see!!!