There’s not much to say about the Holocaust that hasn’t been said already and honestly, I don’t have much to say about it. Thinking about genocide leaves me feeling lost. All I manage to do is let the idea sit helplessly inside of me.

From Munich, we drove to Bochum before our departure in Amsterdam. It was a long drive. The stick seemed to be getting harder to shift and suddenly the overheat warning light came on. Putting the van in neutral and coasting through the cold air got it to turn off. I played that game with the light for an hour of so and then at a gas station, I poured half a bottle of coolant into the radiator. It didn’t help, but we made it to Bochum without any smoke.

The next day, in the rain, shifting gears was even more difficult and by evening, at a red light in Bochum, the clutch totally went kaput. With a massive heave, I somehow got it into gear one more time and managed to drive a few miles in first gear to find a parking spot. On Monday my not-so-trusty VW bus was loaded onto a flatbed and Mike and I hopped a high speed train to Amsterdam.

Considering how my experiences with the van began, I figure it is sort of appropriate that it didn’t make the whole trip. The thing ended up costing me way more then I’d hoped. I can’t say I’d recommend buying a VW bus for only six months of use, but the experience was one of my fondest and I have no regrets.

All the fun stuff on the map is still there and I added some one sentence stories for each location. Go click “Where Else Have I Been” and explore around a bit. Make sure to note the controls that show up beneath the map.

My mom will surely be letting me know about all the typos, but if you find anything else amuck..please let me know!

Massive grey trunks, hundreds of years old, reach strong from a clean, soft brown earth. In the lush cover far above, there is a constant swirl from the autumn winds that came earlier this week. The large open space between all the trees gives this place such an open feeling. It’s easy to breath here.

I wear a few layers to keep warm in the new, light air. Except for when raising my sleeve to wipe small drips from my nose, my hands stay wrapped to fists in my pockets. Giant gusts come, moving my hair and filling my coat. A welcome break, my feet enjoy the padded ground while we climb one small hill after another.

A young bloodhound comes bouncing towards us, ahead of her owner, her giant ears swinging and slapping the sides of her little head. She leaps towards our waists, stretching her legs out and begging for love. I run my hand down her velvety coat, feeling her growing ribs and the energy inside her. It reminds me of autumns when I was young, running with my own dog in the cold air until our chests ached and our noses ran and then we would walk the rest of the way home.

Smells from damp acorns and pinecones and the faint scent of baked foods or burnt wood that’s been carried for miles in the long winds of fall remind me even more of the autumns growing up.

From a brisk climb over hill after hill, my body warms under the heavy layers, but the cold air still bites my face. These contrasting discomforts allow me to focus on one and then the other, making for a most pleasant and active sensation of change.

The cold winds of autumn blow through the trees and change the colors of leaves in Bochum, Germany the same way they do at home. People go for long walks here and enjoy the coming of winter here the same way they do at home. It’s been great following the warm weather all year, but no matter how much I dread the dead-cold and grey days of winter, I’m much too attached to the changing of seasons to leave them forever.

Walking in the forest today reminded me of home.

Today I learned another reason Germans take longer with their studies. University is free. That’s right; they don’t pay a nickel for tuition. Actually they pay about $100 to get their student ID card, but that gets them so many discounts, including FREE public transportation, that it’s a savings more than an expense.

And listen to this; Germans don’t even have to go to class to be considered a student! They just need to be “registered” and carry the card. They can also get better jobs as a “student” because employers don’t have to pay taxes on their wages.

All this is changing though. Someone besides me must have seen how little sense the system made, because some new laws were recently drafted.

The real students who actually study are up in arms about the $600 tuition starting next year.

$600!!! :-O

Order Prints – NEW!

View in Slide Show

http://jpmorganjr.com/2006/08/09/farfegnugen-bubbly-water/ I often wondered why companies (specifically BMW since I drove one, which reminds me to mention I’m selling my car and I need to put a link up here) make cars that drive incredible speeds when you can hardly use a third of the engine’s power without facing criminal charges. I figured Germans drove the cars fast on the Autobahn, but I always imagined that road as some long single stretch of wide highway that went from one place to another place and wasn’t driven on very often. I didn’t realize the Autobahn was actually the name for the entire Interstate highway network in Germany, including wide stretch of multilane highways as well as two lane roads with hardly enough space to pass. Having driven on the Autobahn for a couple weeks, I now know why BMW makes cars that go 200 miles per hour. Because in Germany people actually drive that fast. The Autobahn is meticulously maintained, pothole free and even sports billboards with the phrase “Fairplay on the Autobahn” printed over a grass athletic field striped to look like a highway.

Oh, and the stop lights! I love this little feature. About two seconds before the light turns green, the yellow and the red light both glow at the same time. This gives you a chance to get in gear and really gas it, so you can explode through the intersection dodging cars that just made the light, trams that have their own rules, buses longer than the intersection and cyclists and pedestrians ignoring the blinking red picture of a human being.

Germans love to drive. No doubt.

They have some strange rules here though. Well they seem strange at first anyway. In the city you can get a ticket for honking your horn without a reason. Now I have no idea how someone might be able to prove you had no justifiable reason to beep the horn, but in any case it’s true and people do get fined. I went on in a conversation about how ridiculous a law this is and proceeded to beep my horn and wave to people in a friendly manner.Then when I was in Berlin I realized it was pretty quiet compared to cities at home. Why is this, I wondered? Ahh…it’s because nobody is beeping their horn. Genius!

I was noticing how although the differences from home to here are mild compared to those I faced in the East; they still knock me off kilter a bit. Maybe because things are relatively similar, I’m letting my guard down. Take for example a hard boiled egg. Maybe it’s just my mom’s cooking, but I’m use to a hard boiled egg actually being hard. Three separate times now I’ve carefully broken the light brown shell off my tasty little breakfast treat and then been sadly disappointed when cutting into the egg, it started to bleed white and yellow slosh all over itself. Add to this the incredible shock of taking a big swig of apple juice only to find it has been laced with a carbonation that somehow makes its way into every single bottled liquid that you can buy anywhere in Germany, ever, no matter how bad you want a normal drink.

So my van doesn’t break 65 mph, but its fun watching everyone drive fast. And I’m not quite sure why, but I think I’m starting to like bubbly water.

I met my German friend Desiree in Berlin on Tuesday. She insisted on showing me the city if I was to go and I’m glad she did. We stayed at one of her friend’s houses, a boy named Eka (Eye-kuh), who is studying for his final exams and is not fully awake in the morning until a few cups of coffee and his sixth or seventh cigarette. His roommate Michele was as friendly and accommodating as a southern Baptist housewife. He fed me, did my laundry and then left town and lent me his bed. The third roommate was a girl named, um…I don’t remember her name. We didn’t talk very much. She is French, a philosophy student and quite uncomfortable to talk to. But not as uncomfortable as her skinny, thin black haired boyfriend from Moscow whose name I also can not remember. The couple of times I did talk to him, he squinted his eyes so tightly that I imagined the social interaction was causing him physical pain. He reminded me of the cartoon character Mr. McGee; only taller, thinner and Russian.

On day-one Desiree and I attempted her hand written list of things to see. By late afternoon we had passed up going inside four or five museums and skipped a few sights on account of the lines being too long. I told her I just enjoyed walking around and didn’t really need to go in anywhere, which she was glad to hear. We scrapped the list and did the locals thing for the rest of the week. I got a feel for the different areas in Berlin and to liken it to NYC I especially enjoyed Kreuzberg with is’ trendy but classy upper east side feel and Friedrichsberg which had more of a punk rock SoHo vibe.

One night we hung out an open bar on the river and I drank gasey juice. Most young Germans, especially in Berlin, speak fluent English. However I often found myself fiddling with my cards and imagining what the heck everyone was saying. Not that I mind it. I actually prefer it that way, because I’m starting to pick up some of the language. I can even make that German throat clearing sound now. I’ve got a really good pronunciation of the phrase “Entschuldigung aber ich spreche leider noch kein Deustch” (“Sorry, but I don’t speak German yet.”) The positive attitude has been helpful.

Another night we went to meet some other people at a music festival near the river. We entered through a large door cut into the remains of the Berlin Wall, now a legal canvas for graffiti. The place was a collection of kegs, coolers, strung lighting, tiki torches and booming sound systems, set up in and around abandoned buildings looming between the old wall and the dark river. It’s a very Mohawk and black denim scene. Punk and Goth seem to be a pretty big deal in Berlin. The entrance fee was $25, so we actually ended up skipping the show and went to sit on a bridge where we watched the Berlin skyline glitter and trains grow in size as they left the station and slithered underneath us.

In the mornings I jogged along the Elbe and in the afternoons it rained. I ate Thai, Indian and a couple nights had veggie burgers and fries at the cleverly named Kurtzburger.

This past spring a girl named Katharina stumbled onto my website and sent me a note recommending a book, so while I was in Berlin I met with her and her friend for some falafel. They told me how their fathers were American, but they have both lived their whole lives in Germany and met at an American school there. After lunch we went to Storytime Books where Katharina works so we could watch the four year olds learn English in a sing-along. Most of them sucked their thumbs in a daze and one kid lay on his back and kicked the spinning postcard round and round, while a tall English bloke waving his middle finger in the air and then hiding it behind his lower back, sang “Where is tall man? Where is tall man?” to the ferishaka…ferishaka.. tune.