3 Cities- 1 Day

Dec 31st is more commonly referred to as New Years Eve, the last day of the old year where friends and family celebrate and bring in the new. For Mariko and I its usually more of a night of relaxing and one of the few times that we go to bed before midnight.... not sure why, we just usually do. This year was different for us. We had just finished our Christmas trip to Sweden plus the extension to Baden-Baden and we we now on our way to bring in the new year with some of our Fulbright friends.

Germany in a week!

Fun Berlin Graffiti

As most of you know my dad was able to visit Mariko and I while we are here in Germany. And since it was his first visit to Europe he wanted to see as much as possible. Sadly our trips were all situated in Germany, as we only had one week and were coming and going from Braunschweig. But of course there is plenty to see in Germany, so I had planned as much as I could for him.... this is how our week went:

GamesCom 2011

Being in Germany is a cool enough experience in its own right, but being in Germany during GamesCom (the biggest gaming convention in Europe) makes it so much more epic. I was super excited to hear that we would be able to make it there, and doubly so that Mariko was going to put up with me for that long! There really aren't many gamers in the Fulbright group here with us, but we had one other person join us for our excursion!

We opted to use the Schönswochende (Happy weekend) ticket, which is an awesome deal if you have plenty of time to get where you are going. Our train from Marburg left at 7:26 and we were right on time! The next stop, Gießen, we had about an hour to wait for our next connection. So we decided to grab some breakfast. We grabbed some food from the only place open at that time, a small bakery, but before I could start eating my pretzel we saw McDonalds open up. Now I'm not one to usually crave McD's, but the I suddenly really wanted some. Fun little fact about train station McD's in Germany.... no breakfast menu. So at 9 in the morning I had a Double Cheeseburger for breakfast!! And it tasted amazing!