Hello, hallo, gude, moin, servus, morsche, was geht,

I’m here again with one final blog post from Deutschland. The last couple weeks have been pretty eventful, I’ve been to Romania, Madrid twice, and exploring around this area of Germany (Hessen). I also celebrated Thanksgiving with improvised but delicious pumpkin pie, drank several varieties of delicious Eastern European moonshine, stuffed my face with waffles at the Christmas market, and became unemployed.

Yesterday was my last day at work, which conveniently happened to coincide perfectly with the office Christmas party. My whole department went to a nice restaurant nearby for fancy steak and unlimited beer on the company’s bill. It was the only time that I had ever seen my boss outside of work and it was really cool to get to know more about his life, over a beer or four. It even made me a little bit sad that I no longer have to be somewhere at 7:30am every morning, when I realized how awesome my boss was and how lucky I was to work in a lab with 8 other brilliant interns and a research budget each year of more than I’ll ever make in my entire lifetime.

Now that I’m (f)unemployed, I’m planning on doing a fair amount of travelling over the next month or so. Tomorrow I take off for my first stop in Istanbul where I’ll couchsurf for 2 nights, then on to Israel with my family and girlfriend for a couple weeks, including scuba diving in the Red Sea on Christmas and a day trip to the ancient ruins in Petra, Jordan. After that I have tickets to Budapest for New Years Eve to meet up with several good friends, and after New Years we’ll go to Croatia together. From Croatia I don’t have a plan yet, but I’m hoping to couchsurf, bus, and hitchhike my way through several of the Balkan counties during the next few weeks and ski in Montenegro or Kosovo where snow is plentiful and lift tickets cost under 10 Euros per day.

Anyways, the rest of this post will be about my last few weekends, and I want to conclude with some thoughts that I’ve had about beer while being in Germany.

Madrid
My first Madrid trip in the last month started out on a good note, with the best flying experience I’ve ever had. I flew on LAN airlines, on a flight from Frankfurt to Santiago, Chile, which had a quick stop in Madrid on the way. This meant it wasn’t a little tweety bird domestic flight, it was a jumbo jet complete with TV screens in each seat and great customer service. And it wasn’t just any jumbo jet, it was the newest, nicest, Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Somehow the Boeing engineers have managed to find a way to make airplane seats comfortable, and though compact they still have ample amounts of legroom. After flying Ryanair for my last few trips, I was very excited when the flight attendant handed me a full meal and offered me beer or wine, and when I asked for the price, she laughed and said “you look hungry, have a second sandwich, it’s free”. But the best part was the windows. They’re much bigger than a normal airplane so even the person in the middle or aisle seat can get a bit of a view, and instead of having a window cover, they just have a button that makes it darker or lighter. At the click of a button, you can put on sunglasses without even having sunglasses. The flight was so nice, in fact, that I was sad to get off the plane when I landed. Of course that sadness ended immediately when I saw Ev, waiting at the airport to greet me.

Here’s some photos from the trip (I forgot my camera, but I stole some photos from facebook):

At the beginning of a hike up to El Yelmo, the highest mountain in La Pedriza park outside of Madrid

 

 

We made it to the top!

Timisoara, Romania: 


The next weekend, I went to Romania with a few friends who are also doing the same internship program in Germany. I had wanted to go to Romania for a while after talking to a Romanian friend about it, and then we found a flight for 15 Euros, which was just too good to turn down. It was a quick trip, just Friday night to Sunday morning, but it was awesome. We couchsurfed with Iosif, who was an incredibly generous and awesome dude, and gave us a place to stay and showed us around the city. We spent the majority of our time drinking, eating, walking around, and talking about life in Romania. The exchange rate really benefited us too–German beer was about 1/3 of the price in Romania as it is in Germany, and restaurants served the most delicious food for a fraction of the prices we were used to. The short trip really made me want to spend more time exploring the rest of Romania.

The cathedral in Timisoara

 

Dank Soup

 

selfie in a club

Ev visits Germany


Ev came to visit for a weekend and we spent some time at Christmas markets around Germany, and also did a hike through the hills along the majestic Rhein River. Here are some phtos:

Castle
Ev tries to camouflage with the tree

 

a colorful village

 

Add caption

Madrid #2


I went to Madrid again last weekend to see Ev and to meet up with my friends Riggins and Matt, both of whom are spending the year in other parts of Spain. It was really awesome to see them and it was a great time to be in Madrid because the whole city was lit up with an amazing display of Christmas lights, and it was a holiday weekend so the streets were more crowded than anywhere I’ve ever seen before, which was a cool atmosphere.

christmas lights

 

Lawry C2 takes over Madrid

And that brings us up to date. I don’t really have time now to write the section about beer that I mentioned earlier, so that’ll have to wait until another time. I gotta go clean my apartment for a going away party tonight and finish packing, so I can make my flight to Istanbul tomorrow!

Bye, ciao, tschüss, auf wiedersehen, bis später!!!