Greetings from Germany

First off, let me apologize for being so slow to post this. I have been in Germany for nearly two weeks but have just now gotten around to documenting some of the experiences. Part of this I will blame on Google, which in its quest for world domination has acquired blogspot. Google has a rather annoying habit of automatically assuming you wish to speak the language of the country you are in, so enter google.com in a navigation bar and you go to google.de . That, coupled with the fact I can not seem to log in to my prior blog from here has led me to make this move. I hope there will be a link somewhere on this page to my former blog by the time I'm done formatting this page, but if not go to franciseric.blogspot.com

The majority of the fault lies with me, however, with a significant assist to jet lag the first week. But now I am up and about in the mornings as well as late afternoons and have had plenty of opportunity to explore. I will share a few pictures with this post, and I think one or two more posts will follow shortly.

The Germans are not a smiling people. Traveling extensively on the U-Bahn and to a lesser extent on above-ground trams, and even wandering through the Fasching festival (more on this next post) grins are few and far between. I think this, even more so than my few words of atrocious German, may be giving me away as a foreigner. Looking around at this beautiful city, it is hard to stop smiling.

Odeonsplatz

I have visited many of the more spectacular area of the central city, including Marienplatz (the center square) several times, the Englischer Gardens, the Residenz, Odeonsplatz and others.

The Bavaria

I also visited Theresienweise, which I can not pronounce, but for much of the year is a spectacularly large and barren open ground overseen by the Bavaria, a huge 19th century statue of a woman and lion that symbolizes the heart of the homeland. The area the statue overlooks, an oval well over a kilometer across, plays host to many attractions throughout the year, but its most famous is Oktoberfest, when the grounds are filled with hundreds of thousands of drunk Germans.



As per my usual, I've also visited and included pictures from several churches (I would include the names except it can be hard to remember which is which). Agnostic or not, beautiful architecture is beautiful architecture.

Well, I will leave it at that for now. Check back for more pictures, completely ill-informed outsider opinions and observations on the German people, and hopefully great travel adventures.