Hey check it out - for once, the picture with this blog is one that I actually took! I caught the moon rising over the river just at dusk. Have you heard anything about Prague? Everyone says it's great, but I never heard why until I got there. It's like one of those places that's famous just for being famous. And, to be sure, this place has more tourists per square kilometer than anywhere we've been so far, except maybe Venice. They clog the streets, fill the ca...

Leipzig! Hometown of Goethe, Wagner and the incomparable JS Bach (there must be something in the water). I wanted to come here mostly so we could see more of Germany than just the capital, and it was a fun place to spend a few days. Although half of the suburbs are colorless blocks crumbling from communist neglect, the old town has magnificent cathedrals, cobbled streets, lots of places to sip a beer on a patio, and the best (only?) potato house I've ever been...

(Sorry about the picture, which is romantic but wholly inaccurate... this website is inexplicably lacking in pictures of Germany and as usual I can't get my own pictures off of my camera). Ah, Berlin. We came by to see what the fuss was about, and left pleased, but underwhelmed. At the DDR museum, we dipped into Germany's recent history and learned about daily life under the Soviet regime... right down to a recreated 70's living room. The entire place was han...

Sorry everyone, I am getting way behind with my blogs... it's really hard to experience where you are, and plan out where you're going next, and write about where you just were all at the same time. So, apologies, but I'll do my best to catch up. Next up... Amsterdam. Let me preface this by saying that I like Amsterdam. I really, really do. But my first experience was incredibly disappointing. I think most of the reason was just that we picked the wrong place to...

It has certainly been a busy week or so in Paris... I ought not to go into meticulous detail on everything we did (for example, our tour of the Parisian sewer system is probably best left to the imagination) but I can throw out a few highlights that stand out for me. First off, an old friend from college, now teaching in France... I havent seen her in three years, and we had to go all the way to Europe to catch up with her, but we did it. So we did the classic ...