Hello all, I am actually still alive. I haven't posted anything here in a long while because I've taken to writing letters and postcards instead, and I'm pretty sure those have been reaching most of the people who read this blog anyway, so I don't feel too terrible about my delinquency.

I've got about three more weeks before I head back to the US, so I have to figure out what sort of traveling I'm going to do in that time. I have a friend here who is interested in going to Serbia, but I mentioned this to a Romanian friend of mine, and she said that she'd never been there, but that she heard there wasn't much to see. I think Kurt (not my housemate from Flint) is keen on going just because the US bombed the place in the not too distant past. Maybe I'll go, maybe I won't.

Since the last time I posted, I've been to a couple of places. First to Prague, then to Egypt, and most recently to Berlin. I suppose I probably should write something about Prague, but I think I'll come back to Egypt and Berlin later, since I wrote a couple of letters that really cover those quite well, so I think I'll go about attempting to requisition those back from the people to whom I sent them and perhaps post adapted versions of those letters after I get back to the US.

It's been about a month already since I was in Prague, so some of the details are starting to get a bit sketchy, but there were a few things that still really stand out in my mind. Kurt (this time it's my housemate from Flint), Steve (aka Loud Harold) and I went to Prague together and had a couple rather interesting experiences. The first one that comes to mind is going to "Central Europe's Biggest Nightclub," where we met a large group of Swedish high school kids on a school field trip. I think they were all 15 and 16 years old, which was extremely odd to me, although I guess is more then norm around here. In the same club, we also met a couple German guys who were very excited to hear our thoughts on Germany, and some Canadians who did nothing but talk about politics (which the Germans thought to be an absolutely ridiculous thing at a nightclub).

The other things I remember were Steve getting accosted by a couple of Czech prostitutes who ended up trying to steal his cell phone, Kurt and I getting accosted by a very angry, very ugly woman wanting cigarettes (I think), and talking to a very nice Czech woman and an old German man on our train from Prague back to Germany. We had had a salon compartment on the train, and at first the woman had been talking to the old man in German. After a while, he left to go find his wife, and I began talking to the woman, at first in terrible German, and then switching to English. She told me all sorts of stories about how she used to work in Nigeria and lived in South Africa, and then about all the progress the Czech Republic has made since the end of communism. Then the old man came back, and she asked him if he spoke English so we could all talk together. He said he spoke a little, and then proceeded to converse with us in the most eloquent English I'd ever heard from someone not reading lines in a play. He imparted upon us the wisdom he'd accrued over his years of living, one of which was to learn as many foreign languages as possible. He asked Kurt and I how our German was coming and we admitted that it was progressing very slowly. He asked if we had German girlfriends, and when we said no, he said, Oh, once you get a German girlfriend, you'll be speaking it in six months. (No, since that time I've ended up with a Romanian girlfriend, but unfortunately, my Romanian is no better for it. I guess her English is just too good.) The Czech woman told us that we should enjoy life early on and to not put it off until later. She said that she and her husband planned to work hard and save until they were 55 years old and then they would retire and do all the things they wanted to do in life, but that her husband died when he was 54. Since then, she said, she's been doing nothing but traveling and living life to the fullest, but she regrets that she didn't do it earlier. She also gave me hope that it's never too late to learn another language. She said that she spoke Portuguese (fluently I assumed) and she didn't start learning it until she was 60, and that she was 64 now (or there abouts).

Somehow, between Prague and Nuremberg, our train ended up becoming about an hour late, which makes no sense to me, since we left right on time. Anyway, due to the delay, we missed the connection we were supposed to catch to get back to Konstanz, and this nice Czech woman was so friendly and helpful that she stopped at the information desk in the Nuremberg train station to find out if there was a way for us to make it back to Konstanz that night (since the train we were supposed to be on was one of the last coming into Konstanz that evening). We could have easily gotten this information ourselves, but I was just so stunned by how nice this woman was in having honest concern that we safely make it to our destination. Fortunately, we were able to make the very last train back home and didn't have to spend the nights wandering the streets of Ulm.

I'm sure I've got plenty more to talk about, but I have to go work on a project for school. What?! School work?! Yes, I should have known it was going to come sooner or later. I was fortunate and it came later, but now I have to actually get to it. Hopefully I'll find some more time to write after I'm done with my finals.