There are some holes, but here's the rest of it.

November 27
We had a short class this morning because we are taking a trip to Vienna for the weekend. We left the Schloss around 11:30 and took the train to Zell. From Zell we went to Salzburg but the train there was full and for some reason we couldn’t just stand on it. We tried to get to the next train for Vienna but we just missed it. We only had to wait a half hour for the next train. I watched the movie Ink on the train. Very weird.
The group split up because we are staying at 3 different hotels. We had to hustle to get to ours and then hustle to our meeting point for dinner. Dinner was an all-you-can-eat buffet. This is only the second buffet we’ve had on this trip. The food was really good but we had to hurry because it was closing not too long after we got there.
That night we tried to get out to the Christmas market but they were just closing up as we got there. We will have time to go tomorrow.

November 28
Breakfast at the hotel was good. We had eggs and bacon and nectarines. That’s a weird combination. We spent most of the day at the Christmas markets and shopping. So it wasn’t the most fun day for me. I did get to see a lot of the city and eat at a really good Japanese restaurant. We did a lot of walking and I’m really tired right now. I called home and talked to the family because I didn’t talk to them on Thanksgiving. At night we went back out to the Christmas markets again and got some hot drinks.

November 29
It was a long train ride back to the Schloss. Fortunately our longest train had electricity and I just watched heroes for about 4 hours. I was really glad that I decided to bring my computer on this trip. We got back just in time for dinner.

November 30
We only have a few days of class left. We got our review sheet for our international business final today. The end of the semester is almost here. We have finals on Thursday and Friday. I don’t actually have to have all of my homework done by then but it would feel nice.
Today was a day to work on our group projects. They are so confusing because there are 4-5 of them and with only 26 people I’m in so many different groups with so many different people. Right now everybody is freaking out about homework and finals.

December 1


December 2
Today we gave our presentations for international business. Mine was about bringing mountain dew to Austria. We also gave presentations for Studying for final, flag factory

December 3
Couldn’t sleep, final int business

December 4
Krampus, sledding, Final consumer b. Snowball fight. Goodbye laura, snowboard bindngs

December 5
I think 13 of us are going snowboarding today. We left the Schloss by 6:30, carrying all of our snowboarding gear down the hill. I wore my snowboarding boots and it was so much easier to get down the hill.
We took the bus to a second bus that took us to Kaprun.

December 6
What a strange day. Really the day started at 3 AM when I got up to start packing. My alarm went off and I couldn’t find it so it beeped for a couple minutes. My bag is the fullest it’s ever been. Until now I’ve had extra space and didn’t ever have much trouble packing. Our bus leaves at 4:30 but we’re supposed to go down to the lower parking lot at 4:15.
The bus ride was nice. We talked for about 15 minutes and then everybody fell asleep. We got to the airport in Munich by 7. Saying goodbye was sad. We’ve been traveling together for over three months now. Today is our 96th day in Europe. In that time we’ve all been together except for our separate Goethe institute stays, a week of free travel, and a couple weekend trips where a few people stayed behind. Only 5 people from the trip are not flying home today. We already said goodbye to Laura Sharer, Christine’s parents are traveling with her for a week, Amy is going to Norway and central Europe for some snowboarding, and Jake and I are going to Germany and Greece.
Amy took the subway with us to the Munchen Hauptbahnhof. She was traveling on to Frankfurt that day for her flight. We said our last goodbyes and left for our hotel in Munich.
It’s now around 9 AM and we’re very tired. Jake didn’t get any sleep at all last night and didn’t sleep on the bus either. I hadn’t gotten a full nights’ sleep in 3 days. At this point I figured out that I’d slept 15 of the past 72 hours. We got to the hotel but our rooms weren’t going to be ready until 4 PM. So now we have 7 hours to kill before we can get in a bed.
We stowed our luggage at the hotel’s luggage room and went out to look for some food. Since it’s Sunday morning most things are closed. As we walked I eyed every bench and dry spot thinking that I could take a little nap there. We found a little Turkish pizza place and tried to eat as slowly as possible. We managed to drag that out until around 11. We were too tired to keep walking around the city so we went back to the hotel.
Down by the luggage room there’s a couple pinball machines and other games. It looked like as good a place as any so I took a nap. At first I was using my jacket as a pillow but I was sleeping on some very cold tile next to a very cold concrete wall. It was too cold so I had to put my jacket on. It was very uncomfortable but I slept about three hours total. Jake couldn’t sleep so he did some homework and watched a movie or two. During this time we took turns checking to see if our room was done yet. The door was wide open but it hadn’t been cleaned yet. Thinking back I should have just gone in the room and slept even if it was dirty.
Though they said we might be able to get in our room by 1 or 2 it ended up being 4 before we finally got in. I was starting to wake up by now because I took a good nap but Jake was about ready to collapse. I was still cold from sleeping on the tile so I turned up the heat and hopped in bed. We both took hot baths and then finally got some rest.
I slept for another 4 hours until around 9 PM. We both tried to get up for dinner around 7 but we were both too lazy and tired. By 9 I was fairly awake and I did a little homework and watched stuff on my computer until 1 AM. I set my alarm for 7 and went to sleep.

December 7
Somehow I slept through most of last night. I was worried that I would be up all night but that wasn’t the case. I was very surprised when my alarm went off because I was expecting to wake up earlier than the time I’d set it for.
We were too lazy to unpack all of our stuff last night so we didn’t have much packing to do in the morning. I left Mickey’s slippers behind because my bag is a little over weight and completely full. The train station was a 20 minute walk away and we went to subway for breakfast.
Our train went through Nuremburg on our way to Leipzig. Ludwig met us at the train station in Leipzig. We took the street car to his apartment. We put our stuff down and then went out to lunch. Ludwig bought us lunch at the kebap place. He had to go to class so he gave us a map of Leipzig and we wandered around for a while. It was really cold so we spent most of the time in the Thomaskirche and a café.
Ludwig bought some pizzas for us and we ate at his place. He only asked that we help him with the dishes afterwards. He’s been too generous so we wanted to give him something back. We had some extra EUrail passes from the guys in our group so we gave them to him. They’re worth about 40 euros for each day of travel so if he went on a trip he could save a lot of money by using them.
That night we went out to a bar with Ludwig and his roommates Christina and Peter. We watched a soccer game on the TV and played some foosball, which Ludwig is pretty good at.
Ludwig let me sleep on his bed and he slept on his couch. They had an extra mattress for Jake to use.

December 8
We ate breakfast and talked for over an hour this morning. Christina asked us a lot of questions about the US and about our travels through Europe. It was good preparation for all of the questions people are going to ask when we get home.
We didn’t want to come back to Ludwig’s apartment for our luggage so we took it with us and dropped it off at Ludwig’s friend’s apartment in town. It was raining pretty hard and a car driving by went through a puddle and got Jake really wet.
Ludwig showed us the college campus and some of the old buildings in the city. He showed us the other main church and we sat down and had some Gluhwein in a teepee in the town square.
Since it was raining we left Leipzig a little earlier than we planned. An earlier train was running late so we got on right away and got to Berlin a couple hours earlier than we planned.
This was my first time really staying in a youth hostel with a bunch of random people. When I opened the door to our room there was a girl with multicolored dreadlocks spreading her clothes all over the room. She was from Israel but was traveling around Europe looking for work. There were two other people who slept there that night but I didn’t really talk to the other ones.
We took the street car out to Freidreichsplatz where there was another big Christmas market. We walked back through Berlin and saw the Brandenburger Tor and the Reichsstag building. It was a long walk back to our hotel but we made it eventually.

December 9
The hostel had a luggage room so we stored our stuff in there and went out for the day. We took the very confusing subway system to the Reichsstag building, which is the German capital building. We stopped at another Christmas market on the way there to get some food. There was a really long line to get inside the Reichsstag. The last time I was in Berlin the line was about the same and we didn’t wait that time. I didn’t know what else we would do in Berlin so we decided to just wait in line. The view from the top of the Reichsstag was really good and there was a free audio tour so we got to learn some about the city. We followed the path of the Berlin Wall past the Brandenburg Gate and found this very strange monument to the Jews who died in the Holocaust. It was a full city block of stone blocks about 4 feet wide by 8 feet long. They varied in height from a few inches to about 15 feet tall. The middle of the memorial was where all the really tall ones were and the ground around the blocks wasn’t level at all. I took a video that would explain it a lot better.
We followed the wall through Potzdammer Platz where they had a big snow tubing hill. The markings where the wall was don’t stand out too much. It’s really just a foot wide path through the street where the stones are sunk down about an inch. We went to checkpoint Charlie and thought about going in the museum there but we didn’t want to spend 10 Euros on it.
We decided to get back to the hostel, pick up our stuff, and find the next train to Dortmund. We found our hostel, which was pretty expensive. There was another Christmas market here but it was closing up.

December 10
Our flight left around 9:45 so we tried to get to the airport early. We caught a bus and made it there in plenty of time. We’re flying easyjet again. At least it isn’t Ryanair. It’s not the nicest way to fly but it’s still pretty cheap. The flight was around 3 hours.
After getting our luggage and a bus ticket, we got on the crowded bus for the next 45 minutes. I was standing the whole time, which was no fun. The ticket was only 50 cents though. The guy at the tickets office jokingly said it you would be 2000 euros.
Our hotel was called the Atlantis and it was on the busiest street in Thessaloniki. That made it easier to find and it wasn’t noisy in the rooms or anything. We rested up for a little while and then went and walked along the bayside.

December 11
Since we had already been down by the sea we decided to look around the hilltop side of the city. We saw a couple churches on the way there. We ended up going to the highest part of the old city wall and looking down over the city. We still had to figure out where we are going for the next week. So after visiting the old agora and some orthodox churches we decided to just go to Athens since that would be easiest.

December 12
The train ride from Thessaloniki to Athens is about 6 hours long. It would have been nice if we had had electricity like the German trains do. I slept some of the way and got a lot of homework done. I still have a few assignments left to finish.
Our hotel was really close to the train station but we didn’t really remember the name. We knew it started with neo. We found it without any trouble. They had free internet there so we tried to figure out our trip to Delphi

December 13
We were planning to leave the hotel around 6 in the morning but we decided to sleep in a bit and take the 10:30 bus instead of the 7:00. The bus station was about a half hour walk away, and it’s off the map that we have of Athens.
We made it to the bus in time to grab a few sandwiches and find our seats. We were confused at first because there were some girls in our seats. They didn’t know that there were assigned seat numbers on the tickets.
The bus ride took around 3 hours. When we arrived at Delphi we started walking in the direction of the ruins. Unfortunately we had to do a little off road hiking through long wet grass and down some pretty steep hills. We actually came down the hill behind the museum. The museum there was ok but I was more interested in the ruins outside.
As we were walking from the museum to the ruins we came across several cats. Most of the cats we’ve seen have run away whenever we got close to them but these ones were very friendly. I was petting one and a kitten jumped up onto my leg. Jake got some pictures. As we kept on walking we kept on seeing cats everywhere. There were probably around 30 cats living there.
Going up through the ruins was quite a hike. We climbed up the hill and saw the altar of Apollo and the amphitheater and the stadium all the way at the top. We then went all the way down the hill to see the temple of Athena and the gymnasium.
We had some really bad pizza for dinner. It probably was microwaved frozen pizza and it wasn’t even warm. We didn’t want to be hungry on the bus back so we ate as much as we could.
After getting back to the hotel we booked our hotels through the rest of our stay. We’re going to Corinth tomorrow and then to Nafplion for the two days after that, and then we’re coming back to Athens for a couple days. It’s finally sinking in that the trip is almost over. These last few days have been really tough because traveling in Greece is harder than traveling in any of the other countries we’ve been in. Part of it is that the alphabet isn’t even the same. They also don’t have many trains and use buses instead. It doesn’t have the nice train schedules that Germany, Austria, and France had.

December 14
We left our big bags at the hotel in Athens and just took our small backpacks with us for the next few days. We took the 10:30 bus to Korinthos (Corinth). We got lost on the way there because it’s at a different bus station from last time and it’s also off the map. We got there just in time. We got stuck in traffic for a while and an ambulance had to squeeze past the traffic. It wasn’t going anywhere fast though.
Our hotel is right next to the bus station in Louraki, which is close to Corinth. It’s actually really nice here, especially compared to Athens. We are only a block away from the beach. Once we put our backpacks in the hotel we went into Corinth. The bus system is really confusing here so we had to get a taxi to the ruins of old Corinth. We also stopped at the big canal that links the Aegean and Adriatic seas.
There was a nice pathway along the beach so we walked along that for a while. Then we saw a man-made waterfall and some paths leading up to it. It was under construction and I stepped in a really big puddle. We went back to the water and there was a outdoor gym there. It had a lot of the equipment that a normal gym would have but it was outside in a park.

December 15
The trip to Nafplio was nice and short. Nafplio has three castles, and we explored the one closest to our hotel first. This castle was on the peninsula right next to the town. Most of the castle had been destroyed by the Ottomans but the walls were still there. It took us a while to walk through the maze of cacti and old walls.
We went for a swim in the bay. The waves were higher than I expected. It wasn’t nearly as cold as when we went swimming at Normandy but I was still numb and tired by then end. We didn’t have any energy left after that so we went to sleep

December 16
It was nice to be in the same place for a few days. The hotel people brought us breakfast in bed. We didn’t know what time they were coming besides that it would be between 8 and 10. After our breakfast we climbed up to the biggest of the three castles. It took us about 20 minutes to get up the stairs and then we explored it for about 3 hours. It was a really big castle, and the part we could see before was mostly the stairs going up. I think there were over 1000 steps to get to the highest part of the castle. We meandered our way through so we probably climbed more steps than that.
We grabbed a gyro for a late lunch and went back to the hotel to rest. We watched a movie in the hotel until dinner time. After dinner we walked by the sea for a while and went out to the long tide break that went out into the bay. The third castle of Nafplio is actually on a small island in the bay. It was used to protect the bay from pirates. We didn’t go out to it but going out on the tide break was as close as we could get on land.
I tried to do some homework that night, and I did get a little done. I’m really hoping that I can get it all finished before I get home.

December 17
After another nice breakfast in bed we packed up and got on the bus to Athens. We had to go through Corinth, and we saw the big canal again. Once we got back into Athens the traffic was horrible so we added another half hour to our trip.
We stayed at the same hotel that we were at before because it was really cheap (12 euro a night each). We walked to the nearest subway station and bought a 24 hour pass. So far the subway is the nicest part of Athens. We’d seen a lot of the Athenian ghetto, which looks like Mexico. We went to the Acropolis station and were able to see the Parthenon at a distance. It was closed by the time we got up to it, so we’ll have to go in tomorrow. We tried to find some places that would still be open, so we went to the Olympic stadium and some gardens by the capital building.
I finished most of my homework once we got back to the hotel. It feels great to actually be done. I just have one more little thing to fix on my resume and then I’ll be completely done.