Here’s hoping for the latter. I guess we’ll learn more over the next few weeks as we’ll likely hold a few run-offs, and then prepare for the race to November!

Last night I visited Chastain to listen to another one of my favorite bands from back in the day – Counting Crows. They played with Augustana, and by with, I don’t mean Augustana opened for them. There was actually no opener, and both bands (and some rapper guy named Notar) played together the whole night switching people out depending on what song they were performing. Great night of music. One of my favorites was actually the opener when they all played Van Morrison’s “Caravan”.

I last saw Counting Crows two summers ago, before the last presidential election. Towards the end of the set, lead singer Adam Duritz began a political rant, and I remember thinking “this isn’t going to end well for me”. Because let’s be honest – my political views don’t often match those of the entertainment world. But somewhere around the middle of the tirade he told the crowd -”I don’t give a flying fuck who you vote for, as long as you get off the couch and take part in the process”. I loved it.

Two years later, it’s again an election year, and Adam Duritz begins a similar political pep talk last night. While his speech didn’t include quite as memorable of a line, the sentiment was still there. Who knows if he and I have similar views, but I love the guy for just encouraging people to take part regardless of who they vote for.

…Selfishly though, I would be interested to hear someone with a liberal agenda start spouting off at Chastain. Because let’s face it, that would go over about as well as a fart in church.

but I digress.

One interesting thing I noticed last night was that during the show, Adam Duritz had five wardrobe changes – all to different black t-shirts. He first appeared in a Nirvana shirt, then a shirt that read “Sleep is so last night”, followed by a Ramones shirt, followed by a shirt with some design that I didn’t recognize, followed by a Beatles shirt to end the night. I guess the dude sweats a lot?

Apparently people are 2″ shorter, a 30 year old male inflates his income by 25%, and taller girls are “easier”.

Check out the link and then come back and tell me what you think!

The Big Lies People Tell in Online Dating

The last day in the Lauterbrunnen Valley was remarkable. We did end up mountain biking and visiting the top of the Shilthorn. It was amazing. Frankly, that area was far and away the highlight of the trip for me. Our paragliding pilots said that we were having “HD Days” – days so beautiful, that everything looked like it was in high-def. So, the weather was perfect, and we were able to spend a lot of time outdoors. Bern, Switzerland was my second favorite stop on the trip.

Leaving Lauterbrunnen, we had to catch four consecutive trains all with short connections before arriving in Vienna the next morning. I’ll be honest, I was a little worried. We decided to spend the last of our time in Lauterbrunnen washing clothes. I munch needed stop, but due to our tight schedule we had to take the clothes out of the dryer before they were 100% dry in order to make our first train. This was the type of train schedule that if we missed any of the four trains, we’d have been up a creek without a paddle… if you know what I mean! Luckily, we did make all of our connections, but I won’t lie… I was worried for a while.

We arrived in Vienna, and went to the hotel, AM Stephensplatz. The hotel, and our room overlooked St. Stephen’s cathedral, and was a spectacular view. (Ironically, this was the only Church we visited on our entire week and a half trip to Europe – I was shocked!) Luckily, our room was ready for us when we got there, around 7am. My first trip to Vienna was in January 2003, and after visiting again, my thoughts on the city are the exact same. It was a nice stop of the trip – but probably my least favorite. I think the reason why, was that there’s just not that much to do, unless you have an exceeding interest for the Hapsburg Dynasty. While those things are very interesting, there’s only so much of it I can do. My favorite thing about Vienna was the food. Street food is my favorite meal in any city, and Vienna had plenty. I think I ate 6 kebabs in the last 5 days of the trip. Not kidding. Also in Vienna, I loved this small sandwich shop – Buffet Trzesniewski – where I ate three small open-faced “sandwiches”: Egg Salad, Mushroom, and Tomato. While feasting on kebabs and sandwiches kept me full, the chocolate kept me happy. There is a chocolate shop called “Demel” that we ‘ate’ at. I had a hot chocolate, which was the richest hot chocolate drink I’ve ever had in my life, and it was unbelievable. I chased that with a slice of the Demel Torte. This is the same thing as the Sacher Torte, but I believe copyright laws required the name change. Regardless, according to Wikipedia: The cake consists of two layers of dense, not overly sweet chocolate cake (traditionally a sponge cake) with a thin layer of apricot jam in the middle and dark chocolate icing on the top and sides. It is traditionally served with whipped cream without any sugar in it. I don’t remember how much that ‘snack’ cost me, and I don’t want to know how many calories were in it, but it was worth every penny – on both accounts!

Leaving Vienna, we hopped a plane to Berlin. I was really proud of myself that we were able to score the airline tickets on Air Berlin for $70 each! Talk about cost effective. We arrived in Berlin very late, and had to check into our hotel through a neighboring bar. We stayed at Pension Peters in old West Berlin, which was the same place I stayed during my trip in 2003. They had done some remodeling, including taking over a first floor shop as their reception / breakfast area, but the room and décor looked strikingly familiar.

While in Berlin we spent a lot of time walking around the Reichstag, Brandenburg Gate, and Unter den Linden (formerly East Berlin). While West Berlin was the nicer side during the cold war, since the wall came down, East Berlin is now the place to be. This was my third trip (95, 03, 10), and it was very interesting to see that in 1995 cranes were everywhere in east berlin building anything and everything. In 2003, quite a few cranes were still up, but not as many. In 2010, I only saw one or two. Berlin has a fantastic museum complex called “Museum Island” that we really enjoyed. The highlight was the bust of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. While that piece was spectacular, the rest of the Egyptian collection was a bit rough for me. But in all fairness, I was comparing it to the real thing from my trip to Egypt last year. We finished our time in Berlin with a tour of Third Reich sites from a walking tour company – Original Berlin Walks. I’ve actually taken this exact tour three times now, but I love it, and my partner is a huge WWI history buff. As always, the tour ends above the site of Hitler’s bunker. It’s now a parking lot for a high rise condo building, but what I did find interesting is that now there is a sign in front of the parking lot. During my previous two trips, no such sign existed due to the fear of what people might try and do to the site. At least that’s what I was told!

One last overnight train back to Munich

For our last full day, we spent most of it touring the Dachau Concentration Camp. It was easily the most important thing we saw during the entire trip. I don’t typically get emotional about too many things, but it’s hard not to be affected by this place. Shortly after we entered the gate, a lady behind us just burst out into tears. I was able to take many pictures, but I could not bring myself to take pictures inside the cremation building. It’s not that pictures weren’t allowed… I just couldn’t bear to take any.

After getting back into town, we stumbled upon a street festival that must have encompassed two miles of this main street in town. Impromptu outdoor beer halls, music, games, booths, it was all fantastic to stroll through. We ended the day by meeting up with a grad school classmate of ours who was from Munich, and who now again lives there. It’s always wonderful to have friends all over the world! Our final night was spent at Hotel Royal, and I really liked that hotel. Probably the quietest room we had all trip, outside of in Vienna.

It was sad to have to leave and come back home, but after a week and a half, I was ready. I’ve been back for about a month now, and I’m already ready to leave again and go somewhere new!

I’ll leave you with the advice we received from a very beautiful German rail customer service representative: “When in doubt, just follow the Chinese!”

After we got back, we checked into Paragliding, and they had spots available for us to fly today – so we did! That was awesome!! pictures are on facebook. I bought the SD card that the guy used to take pictures, and the netbook I’m using has an SD slot. Check those out.

We’re in Lauterbrunnen tomorrow again and we plan on doing some mountain biking, and going to the top of the Shilthorn. Big day ahead! At the end of it though we’ll be jumping on a couple trains on our way to Vienna on an overnight train from Zurich.

We visited the Paul Klee museum. His work was very modern, and I loved it!!

Also visited the Albert Einstein museum. Einstein developed his theory of relativity while living in Bern in the early 1900′s.

Jumped the train to Interlaken, walked around a bit and kept going to Lauterbrunnen. Possibly one of the most beautiful places in the world!

Stayed at Bern Backpacker’s hostel. We met some other travelers in the common room that night who were from the south (all attended Clemson, and looked like they had recently graduated). In fact, one of them graduated high school with a buddy of mine’s brother! Unfortunately, non of the guidebooks mentioned the rave that happened in the bar just underneath the hostel.. we were on the 3rd floor, and could hear it quite well! It was Saturday night, but wow.

When we arrived in Hohenschwangau we saw our Tour guide from the bike tour on the previous day leading a different group. She gave us a restaurant recommendation, and I had bratwurst and potato salad – very good!

When we got to Fussen, the weather was decent, but gradually improved the rest of the day.

Touring Neuschwanstein, I thought that maybe the people had paid off a doctor to declare Mad King Ludwig mentally unstable, thus ending his rule. Going through the castle my faith in that theory shrank… First was the theme of Swans. He loved swams… had them everywhere. A little eccentric I thought, but I decided to give him a pass. Then we entered the “Grotto Room”. Yes, that’s right – the Grotto Room. The man had one of the rooms/hallways look like a cave just to re-enact a scene from a book. After leaving that room, I quickly decided that the man was full on nuts-o.

After the tour, we wanted to go to the luge track nearby, but a guy said it closed at 5p (it was 4:50-ish then). The next bus back to Fussen wasn’t for another 40 minutes, and the luge track was only 2km away, so we decided to walk it and check it out anyways. Maybe it would still be open? Well, it wasn’t 2km away. We walked for probablly 45 minutes through the bavarian countryside to find out that the luge track did in fact close at 5pm. Also, right when we got there, the bus going back to Fussen was just leaving. An hour later, we caught the last bus of the day back to Fussen. We get to Fussen, and the train station is empty.. and there are no more trains running. We start to panic a little… There were busses running, so we started talking to one of the bus drivers. He told us that we had to buy tickets at the train station, but we couldn’t figure out how to do that before that bus left. When the next bus came 30 minutes later, the bus driver didn’t care who got on, and let everybody in without checking any tickets.. That’s when we learned that they were beginning three months of work that afternoon on the train line, so the busses were stand-ins for the trains. Our Eurail pass would have gotten us on the first bus, but we didn’t know that at the time!

We got back to Munich around 10pm. Had dinner at the Augustiner – another beer hall that was much more authentic, and filled with locals. Great food.

I promise that I haven’t forgotten to write about my trip. Had a tough time getting the netbook on the internet in Munich, and hadn’t fooled with it since. But anyways – here we go!

When we got to the airport on Wednesday, the security lines were stopped due to a fire on concourse A. Made for a chaotic way to start the trip, but we made it to the airport early, so it wasn’t a big deal at all.

Our flight to Munich was uneventful – the best kind of flight!

The first day in Munich, we took a biking tour of the city. It was a great way to see the city, but the downside was the the weather was in the mid 40′s and, it was misting the whole time. Thankfully we never got drenched though!

Afterwards we took a tour of the BMW plant. I’m not a huge car guy, but went along for the ride (sorry). I must say, I was really impressed with how they put the cars together. Unfortunately, just before the tour I had my first european meal – the equivalent of a gas station ham sandwich, served slightly warmer than chilled. Dissapointing, but sometimes you gotta eat, and that’s just the best you can do!

We ended the day with a trip to the Hoffbrauhouse. It was a great atmosphere, but ultimately a huge tourtist trap. I tried one of the lighter (wheat) beers, and one of the dark beers, but after about two sips, that was the end of that. I’m almost convinced now that it’s the alcohol that makes me want to throw up… doesn’t matter how you flavor it. I ended up eating a bavarian pot roast of sorts, and was quite surprised after I ate a large bite of horseraddish… opened my sinuses right up! Food at the Hoffbrauhouse was ‘ok’ at best.

Hotel in Munich was Litty’s Hotel. Standard European room. I really liked it, but it was a bit noisy, since we faced the street.