May 9, 2012

Well I have finally arrived in Germany today!!! I can’t believe that after dreaming about traveling to Europe for years I am finally here, in the country that my great-grandfather was born in! Excited would probably not even begin to explain how happy I am to be here. However, that isn’t exactly how I felt getting off the plane after being cramped on an aisle seat for nine hours and not having gotten any sleep for about 24 hours. The words to describe me when I stepped off the plane would probably be something along the lines of tired, exhausted, grouchy, and definitely not looking my best. We finally made it through customs after being crowded in a small waiting area and practically being shut into a sliding glass door, not exactly what I felt like dealing with at the time. Luckily everyone’s baggage was easily collected and we were rushed onto the bus that was taking us from the airport in Munich to our hotel in Regensburg. I was finally able to get a little bit of sleep on the bus and missed seeing any of Germany, but at that point I didn’t care as long as I was able to close my eyes for a bit.

Finally we arrived at the hotel and I would’ve loved nothing better than to sleep, but once again we were whisked away to go on a walking tour of downtown Regensburg. The Old City of Regensburg was very pretty. It had an Italian feel to it has you were walking down the streets and there were a lot of plazas each one with a fountain or some kind of statue in the middle of it with little shops, cafes, bakeries, and ice cream places surrounding it. We decided to eat a quick lunch at a small bakery that served sandwiches. The bakery was called Müllers and the Panini sandwich I had was quite delicious for the small price of three euros. I also tried a Beze which tasted like a soft pretzel, but was shaped more like a Kaiser roll, also very delicious and at less than a euro I was fairly certain I would be eating that more than once over the next few days.

After settling the grumbling in our stomachs all of us decided the next thing to do was to get our bodies some sleep! We headed back to the hotel and after nearly 36 hours of being awake I was finally able to sleep. Five hours later my body felt that it was satisfied and I wanted to explore the city a little more, plus we had to have dinner at a burger bar, so American, with the professor who would be teaching us tomorrow. The burger bar was delicious and actually had a choice of veggie burgers so I decided to go with the Italian flavored one. Extremely tasty and when I mentioned how rare it was to find a veggie burger in burger bars in the U.S. the professor was shocked! In fact his precise words were “Surely you can get a veggie burger at McDonalds?!” I just about fell off my seat laughing.

After the very American dinner off we went to downtown to see what the night life consisted of in Regensburg. We soon discovered that Germans tend not to interact a whole lot with each other, unless you get very much in their face. In order to get any sort of directions we had to literally yell at people and wave our hands in their faces. Once you got their attention they were quite friendly and helpful, as long as you didn’t attempt miming what you wanted, which one member of our party quickly discovered. We found this amazing eis place that served frozen yogurt and it was DELICIOUS! Regensburg had these little eis shops all over the place and everyone you saw was eating a cone of eis, it was definitely the desert of choice in that town. Needless to say I’m pretty sure I ate my weight in eis during the three days that we were there.

Night life in Regensburg pretty much consisted of sitting around a café or platza eating and drinking with your group of friends. The Bismark Platza was a very popular place and had a lot of people sitting around enjoying their drinks and laughing with their friends. After wondering around for a few hours we all decided that we were just too tired to keep going and went back to the hotel to catch up on some more z’s. I officially know what jet lag feels like now and never again will I consider a one hour difference to be jet lag. J