Arrival in Munich

I wrote the following blog entry on a train from Paris to Stuttgart earlier today.

Today is day 12 of my travels, and it seems that socks will be the limiting factor to my ability to live out of one suitcase without doing laundry. I thought it would be underwear until I found a stash of clean ones at the bottom of my backpack. Believe you me, I have never been so happy to come across underwear before!

The past three dazs have been nuts. In general, travling for so long is a bit crazy, but especially these past days. In 3 days we saw the capitals of 3 different countries: Madrid, Spain; Paris, France; and Brussels, Belgium. (Yes, I know Brussels wasn't on our original itinerary. If thereäs one thing I´ve learned from this trip, it's that you can never trust an original itinerary. Even now Iäm hesistant to say exactly where we're headed because things may still change.) Now we're en route to Munich, our fourth country in four days and fifth city in five. I cannot vouch for our sanity. If you want to keep playing the number game, then there's a period of 22 days (that is 22x24 hours) during which I will have touched the ground in 9 countries. Granted, that onlz has about half an hour each in England and the USA, but you get the idea. Lots of places, short amount of time. I feel vaguely like I'm playing a video game, collecting a star every time I visit a new place. Ding! Ding! Ding!

I can't remember if I had time to write about Madrid when I was in Paris... We spent most of the day in museums and part of the afternoon in a rowboat.

In Paris, I spent the morning running errands - dropping off luggage, checking my e-mail, closing my bank account, buying train tickets (a never-ending task). We grabbed baguettes for lunch and ate in the freeying Jardins de Luxembourg. Our whirlwind half-day tour of Paris also included the Pantheon, Notre Dame, les Galeries Lafazette (a big, fancz department store with a huge Christmas tree in the middle), the top of the tour Montparnasse, and a thwarted attempt to tour the opera house. That makes twice now that the opera has been exceptionally closed when I wanted to visit. The people we're staying with in Paris are extremely and unbelievably nice. I'm very grateful.

Yesterday was another cold, cold day, but in Brussels, quite a contrast from sunny Spain. It was wonderful, though. The town was all decked out for Christmas with lights over all the streets and on all the buildings, Christmas trees, tons of nativity scenes, and hundreds of stands selling gifts and food. In the evening, they played opera music in the Grand Place and had a light show projected onto the already amazingly beautiful Town Hall. I took a video of part of it that I will post assuming I eventually get mz camera attached to a computer.

How am I doing? I'm hanging in there. I'm not sick which iws great. I'm walking a lot and eating a lot without really reflecting on the consequences to my nutrient intake or monetary expenses. Muscles that I didn't know I had are now sore. In sum, it's nice to be sitting down right now.