Since my last post...I have become German. Well, almost. I ate blood sausage, sampled the German brew, and purchased some very expensive, very well-made German shoes.

Everything here is so pretty, I really don't understand why the whole world wouldn't live in Europe if they could. I guess the whole language barrier might be a reason I wouldn't move here, but that's why I'm going to London. And having the majority of my friends and family all the way across the ocean would be less than perfect, but if I could hike through vineyards and then have pastry and wine for lunch like I did two days ago everyday, I think it would make up for most of that distance. Hmm, that sentence just before this one is less than perfect; being around people who speak broken English all the time is affecting my own command of the language in a humorous but kind of disturbing way.

So, some highlights from the last few days.

There is this beautiful forest at the end of the street I'm staying on, and I've been going for runs through the trees and flowers and bushes. And eventually I run past a blackberry bush with lots of ripe berries and I have to stop to eat some.

This is the cutest town I have ever been to. I visited it the same day I went walking through beautiful hills terraced with grapes and had pastry and wine for lunch. It was a perfect day, it even rained on and off.

I think I have finally been in Germany long enough that I'm over the jet lag and am enjoying things in full consciousness. It is kind of hard to compare this trip to other trips I've taken to Europe because I'm seeing things from a different perspective than I did two years ago or two years before that. But I can definitely say that I love this country! I'm staying with Daria's grandma and aunt and cousins, and they are the most welcoming and friendly hosts I have ever stayed with. They feed me delicious German food all day long, and buy me things like souvenir pennies and tins of mints, and let me use their internet and washing machine. Actually, I'm not sure why I would ever leave...

Today I visited the beautiful Altenberg Cathedral in the neighboring village of Altenberg. We were going to bike there, but it rained so we had to drive.










Since I've been in Germany I've been wondering a lot about the WWII legacy, but it hasn't really been appropriate to bring up. Today in the car on the way to Essen I was talking to Susanna about the city, and lamenting the lack of old buildings destroyed in the war. Susanna mentioned that Germany "didn't do so well in the war. We are very, very ashamed of it," she said. I wanted to ask her more about it, to say "I would think it would be very hard to live in a country with so much historical shame for a war that you weren't even alive for. It seems incredibly unfair, because the holocaust is not something you can write off as not that big of a deal, nor is it something that you had anything to do with." Not being German, I know this is unfair but it still colors my perception of Germans; the first three things that come to my mind when I think of Germany are sausage, beer, and Nazi. But I didn't ask her more about it, for the reason that English isn't her first language. Susanna is certainly proficient in English, but it seemed a daunting task to try to communicate about something so heavy as the holocaust without full use of my vocabulary. How can you discuss genocide with adjectives like good and bad and scary?? It gives me a whole new appreciation for words with so many slightly different meanings and slightly different connotations.

And yet, what am I doing traveling if not trying to communicate and share with people who don't speak my language and don't see the world from my point of view? Conversations like this one are what I've spent so much money on a plane ticket for; I can't be afraid to have them!

Here are some of my favorites from today: 

Pictures from my first day in Germany, maybe I'll write the stories that go with them later.

My waffle with cherry sauce and whipped cream and rice

Schlossburg

I flew from Sacramento to Minneapolis, where Dillon and Daria picked my from the airport and I got to see them for about 14 wonderful hours. Then the plan was to fly from Minneapolis to Chicago, and Chicago to Frankfurt. So I arrived at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport about 5 hours before my flight (because Daria's was 2 hours earlier than mine) and waited and waited, in a terminal that looked kind of like this.

After waiting about 4 and a half hours, it was announced that my flight was delayed 2 hours. My layover in Chicago was 3 hours long, so I wasn't worried about missing my flight. I was going to have to wait for a long time anyway, what did it matter whether I waited in Chicago or Minneapolis. After waiting abou 7 and a half hours, the flight finally boarded, with an estimated landing time of 3 pm. Not too bad, because my next flight didn't leave until 4:05 pm.

The flight was pretty average. I was sitting next to a rather annoying middle-aged woman with a smile that she employed at inappropriate times in the conversation flow. This woman didn't seem to think much of sitting quietly or minding her own business on a plane, but I had the window seat so I spent a lot of time looking out it and finishing my book "Prodigal Summer."(What a nice cover! If I wrote a book, the cover would be similar to this. Also, I don't have any other pictures to go along with this story hehe.)

We finally got to Chicago at 3:15 pm and it was clear that I was going to have to make a run for it. I had forgotten that, since this was my international flight, I had to go back out to the ticket counter and check in, and then go through international security. I guess that's why they tell you to arrive 2 hours in advance for international flights. And I had 45 minutes.

So I got off the plane and ran, or maybe waddled is a better word since I had my backpack and bag, through terminal 1 of the biggest airport in the country to terminal 5, the international terminal and the farthest terminal away. I always forget how it feels to panic, and since I hadn't really been expecting to need to hurry, I was caught off guard by my own sense of urgency. I must have looked a little bit insane weaving through people, running up and down stairs, cutting off small children from their parents in lines...

This is how I arrived at the Air India ticket counter, short of breath and breaking a sweat since I hadn't taken the time to take off my sweater in this process. I told the small, nice-looking, Indian woman in a maroon suit that I was here to check in for my 4:05 flight, and she said, "I'm sorry ma'am, we're done. We stop checking people in at 3."

It slowly sunk it that the whole time I'd been running around the airport, frantically trying to get to the gate in time, it was already too late. If I'd really thought about it, I probably could have figured out that 45 minutes before the flight was supposed to leave would be too late, but I hadn't really thought about it; I had thought I could really make it. I bet there are a lot of things that we try to make, or get, or fix, without knowing that it's already too late and we're waiting our time, because usually we don't have a small, nice-looking Indian woman in a maroon suit to tell us when to give up.

In the end, I got a very comfortable night stay in the Crowne Plaza hotel, complete with free dinner, complements of United Airlines. When I woke up, well-rested, the next morning, I checked in at the Air India desk, and got my choice of seats. The man asked where I wanted to sit, and ended up giving me my own row because the flight wasn't full. Then, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, I took a break from the millions of movies I watched and looked out the window and saw the big dipper, right above the wing. It reminded me of that book about slaves on the Underground Railroad following the drinking gourd, so I took this, and the good fortune in seats to be good omens of the trip to come.

I babysat this cute kid Nico all summer. He is one and a half, and when his dad left for work or when a truck drove by the window, Nico would say "buh-bye baba" or "buh-bye auto." Always. We would be walking down the street and pass a dog, and I wouldn't even notice, but Nico would say good-bye to it. Or sometimes if he was having a bad day, Nico would scream and cry and cling on to his mom when she tried to leave, but then 10 minutes later he had forgotten about it and was happily cooking wooden blocks in his pots on the carpet.

Today I left California. The last few days, I tried to take in the atmosphere that is Davis, that feels like home no matter where else I go. And in a way say goodbye to the wide oak-lined streets and the route I always run through the arboretum and smell of the sanitizer in the back of KetMoRee. Now I'd like to forget that I won't be back to California for 8 months and that I won't miss all of my friends and family from Davis, and happily cook on my European carpet.

When people ask what I've done this summer, I find myself repeating the same story: I'm staying in Davis working, pretty bored, can't wait to start traveling. But that's not really fair, I've actually had a pretty great time in Davis considering that I am at home, working.



Devin and I had been talking about climbing Mt. Shasta for a few years, and so we finally decided to do it. Shasta isn't a technical climb, but it is pretty steep. We loaded up our packs at Bunny Flats around 1am and started walking. I hadn't slept on the car ride to the trail head and so I was really tired and kind of out of it at this point. Kind of like sleep walking - I didn't really think about it, I just moved.

I think it actually helped that I couldn't see the trail up the mountain in the dark. You know how it's always easier to do something if you don't know the full extent of the challenge? At least for me. It's easier to do plank if I'm not looking at the seconds tick by on my watch. Well since it was dark I couldn't see the winding trail up the mountain, traversing fields of snow and gaining 4,000 ft of elevation.

By 5:30, the sun was starting to rise. I had woken up a little bit more when we stopped to put on crampons for traction on the snow and ice. I looked up to the top of the ridge, which was highlighted by the rising sun and visible by this time, and started climbing. Climbing is easier for me when I don't stop to take breaks; that way I don't give myself a chance to get tired and it's easier to keep going. So I ended up getting ahead of Devin and her dad. This probably shouldn't have scared me since there were tons of other climbers on the mountain to help each other if anything went wrong. But I didn't really know what I was doing, I wasn't sure of the route we were taking, I wasn't sure how to use my ice axe, and I'd heard quite a few stories of climbers getting injured or killed by falling boulders. So fear, exhaustion, and cold created a dogged determination to get to the top of the ridge where I was supposed to meet the others.


I finally got to the top of the Red Rocks, the hardest climbing behind me. One more hill, an ice field, and then the final little rock formation that is the summit. I figured that Devin and her dad were about 30 min behind me, so I hunkered down behind a wind shelter made of rocks. I could see beautiful mountains for miles, and I was in a sunny warm place, so I should have been dandy. But, I was starting to realize how cold I actually was. After at least 20 min of sitting, my numbed feet still had no feeling. I was starting to shiver, and the wind kept blowing icy air through my windbreak and lightweight under armor. The night of no sleep, combined with the cold, was making me very sleepy. What would it hurt, I thought, if I just dozed off in the sun right here.

I woke up a little later, I didn't have a clock so I really have no idea how much time had passed, and thought "Wow, my lips are cold." It's one of those things you don't notice until it changes. You never wake up with cold lips, so when you do, you notice it. I just kind of sat there, behind my rocks, wondering what I should do next but not really feeling like doing anything. And shivering. I must have looked pathetic, because another climber who had stopped at the top of this ridge gave me the down jacket off of his back. This helped, and after another hour or so, I was warming up. But where was Devin? Had she walked passed me? Had I gone the wrong way?

Not knowing what to do, I decided to stay put, because surely she or her dad would have to pass by me. Sure enough, Devin's dad appeared shortly, recognizable in his mountaineering-esque khaki pants and matching shirt. He said that Devin had gotten too cold to climb, and was a couple hundred feet below us warming up. He didn't think she was going to make it to the top, but I could definitely summit by myself.

This posed a difficult dilemma for me. I'm a pretty determined person - attempting to climb a mountain means I'm intending to get to the top or I will have failed. On the other hand, my feet were still numb and it would be more fun to climb down the mountain with company. So I decided to go down with my friends, because I was doing this with them and it didn't feel right to get to the top by myself. We hiked down to where Devin was waiting, put on our waterproof pants, and prepared to slide down the mountain. That's right, we glissaded down the 4,000 feet of brutally steep trails that had taken hours to trek up. It took about 20 blissfully exhilarating minutes of sitting on my butt, feet up, ice axe in hand should I get going too fast and need to bail.

From there it was a few short miles to the trail head and the real world where words like crampon and glissade have little meaning. But I didn't make it to the summit and so I have to go back. Maybe next summer? The climb was a little difficult, and a lot of the time I was wanting to get off the mountain as soon as possible. But there's something about a real physical challenge that's completely addicting.