July 10, 2009

I woke up and said goodbye to Mom and the aunties early this morning. Then, we slowly packed up and made our way to the train station. We boarded the train with about 500 German school groups, which made for quite an interesting time finding seats. See, with the Eurail pass, you can go anywhere (besides Slovakia...surprise!), but you do not get assigned seats. We had to squeeze through 2 cars with people (and their suitcases) going both directions. It was basically chaos. We finally got seats and ate our lunch. Sad day though, because my watch got lost somewhere in the chaos that was that train :'(. I began my studying for my actuarial exam in August :(. We made it to our hostel in Dresden pretty easily. The hostel is called "Kangaroo Stop" and only costs about $12 a night! Our room looks like a little girl's room. Flower decorations, bunk beds, yellow walls, etc. We headed out to have a picnic at a park. About halfway there, it began to rain. We loitered on a street corner to wait it out. When we got to the park, we realized that it is not fun to have a picnic on wet ground! So, we walked around a bit, got yelled at by a crazy old German man, and it started to rain...again. We just sat down under a tree and ate our picnic in the middle of the path. I planned our day tomorrow, and we decided to got to this 70's themed coffee bar. It was pretty cool, and the bartender makes a mean coffee with Bailey's! We also got gunny bears with it! We decided then to head back to the hostel. My three favorite things I've seen so far on the streets of Dresden have been, 1: a man smoking from a bong at a Middle Eastern coffee house/restaurant, 2: the traffic lights (fat men wearing hats...they are apparently a unique, German thing!), and 3: a guy drinking a beer while riding his bike down the street...no big deal...So far, I'm liking Dresden, even if just for the entertainment in the streets! :D