to begin with, i've posted all of our pictures in this web gallery collection, so that you can have a more um whole & rounded view of our complete experience. i'll keep posting a few pictures here on this page, but it takes forever and i can only do a few on each post.
the last thing i wrote about was going to Köln, i think. the next weekend julie & johannes came to visit, which was very neat: they went on the norway trip several years ago and i really like them. johannes brought his very large dog over, which was awesome: i wanted a very large dog, but phil says i don't walk fast enough. apparently this is important if you want to have a very large dog. anna came home for the weekend again, which was very cool. she doesn't live very far away, so she comes back often, and regine is helping her with her master's thesis, which she has finally finished & turned in to be printed (!!!).
saturday we went to schlossburg, which is the local castle. (local castle!). there were lots of people dressed up like it was the middle ages doing some kinds of demonstrations, which was neat. the castle has a museum and it is also used for events (dinners, luncheons, charity stuff, business stuff). because it has practically always been in use, it has a lot of renovations and modern adaptations, but it has a really interesting collection of old stuff from all around solingen. the awesomest part is that it has a skilift (seilbahn!) that you can take up to the top (it is on a hill). this is also the scary part.
that tuesday we left for zurich. we decided to get eurorail passes after we started looking online at train tickets (because passes are actually cheaper if you plan to do a lot of traveling & you don't want to book tickets weeks in advance), and therefore had to wait til the fedex man delivered them. the city is beautiful! phil was super excited about sarah's school, which is all hightech and has lots of cuttingedge research. sarah and rene have a very cute apartment. they're only a few tram stops from downtown zurich, and it was super easy to get around the city.
zurich is very clean. we mostly took only the trams, which are like streetcars, i suppose (i'm not sure what the english word for it is, but they run on tracks in the road and they are connected via a ladder-looking thing to electric cables suspended above the streets).
the first day we were there, these girls stopped me on the street and talked to me in some weird language, so i asked them if they spoke german, which seemed to puzzle them. they were actually speaking swiss german, which i cannot understand at all. (i thought it was czech; i told rene and sarah this and they laughed so incredibly hard: apparently the swiss really dislike when you ask them to speak german, because they think they are speaking german). anyway, they turned out to be from a local free daily publication and they wanted to take my picture to put in their style section! it was really funny; they asked me all these weird questions about what stores i got my clothes in (thrift stores? katie's closet? i don't really remember?) and how much they cost. i'm not really sure when i will be in the paper. unforunately, that means rene has to read blick, which is not exactly top-notch literature. i'll keep everyone posted, if i ever show up.
we went to some really interesting museums in zurich, including the swiss national museum and the kunsthalle, which has a lot of very fantastic and international art. we got a 72 hour pass for all transportation & museums, so we took this really beautiful (although cold) boat tour on lake zurich, which was stunning. this nice but crazy old guy kept talking to us in the swiss dialect (switzerdeutsch?!) i think he was trying to tell us what to take pictures of. or what we were looking at. it was hard to tell.
altogether, it was buena! i have a lot more to write but i think i'll put that in a different post, for convience. xoxo!
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