Beginning of Munich

I forgot to add that in Rijeka, we sat and visited with some of Jasna's friends. We told her we wanetd to hang out with them but the majority of them made other plans becasue we were in town...and they were afraid and embarrased to speak English. It is really weird to me that everyone here speaks English and that people are usually kind of embarassed if they dont speak it, I did not realize how mcuh of an international language it really is and that everyone is taught it in school. It makes me feel stupid. Anyway JAsna is freinds with this girl from work and her husband and they have two kids, the husband spoke fluent english so we could converse, the wife didn't know what we were saying. It was nice though, we sat and had turkish coffee and soem dessert and hung out with her friends, everyone over there smokes like a FIEND and drinks coffee like it is their job...i think jasna smokes 5 cigs while we were there for an hour and when we eat in rijeka sofia serves us white coffee then black coffee, it is just a lot of coffee. I told Jasna about my impression of Europeans and I made her do it for a picture, soemoen sitting at a cafe with a cigarrette saying "You stupid American tourists!" but it is with an accent anyway it is funny, like the "You people make my ass twitch" from French Kiss. You really have to keep a sense of humor while traveling, unless you have backpacked I think most of you reading this may have a slight misconception of what it is like, I would like to clarify that it is not glamorous, fun or romantic, it is a crazy adventure and exciting and the most insane and cool and challenging thing I have ever done, but believe me sometimes it sucks and sometimes all I want is to quit moving around and have a shower, but it is totally worth it. And people are assholes to you to, but sometimes really really nice. Anyway THE BEST THING ABOUT RIJEKA: family, seeing all the family THE WORST THING ABOUT RIJEKA: It is really industrial looking, with lots of oil rigs Anyway I shall write about our first day in Munich and sign off because we have to go eat soem Czech goulash, dumplings! and climb a castle. Anyway when we first got to Munich I was incredibly tired and crabby we had only had about 5 hours of sleep. We wre lost in the S-Bahn and U-Bahn train station, but at least it is incredibly clean. The weirdest thing about the subways around europe is that they dont even check to see that you have paid. Not like in NYC or Chicago where you have to slide something into a slot, no they just trust that you have paid! So weird. So we finally found our stuipd way to the Studeenstaadt station, way up in Northern munich. We were going here for our first couchsurfing experience. Oh no! Couchsurfing! It was great. Well not at first, becasue we couldn't fine the girl and we only had one picture to go by, we had made arrangments online but had no phone numbers exchangd, so we waited for half an hour and it was FREEZING it is much colder over here tha in the states, we can see our breath. So we are dying and finally we are about to get back on the train to go to my friend Kate's in Nurenberg when a little voice says "Matt?" we see it is Fabiola!! She takes us right to her room, we stayed in her student dorm, all she has is a bathroom, a stove and one room with her bed, we slept on air mattress on her floor. It is the student dorms for the university, she is incredibly smart and stuying law in German, even though she is from Brasil! She is fluent in Portugese, German and English. It was insane. She was very generous to us and just let us have the key to come and go whenever we pleased since she was stuying and writing some paper on penal law in German all week. We ate some breakfast at her little student breakfast area for really cheap, ran some errands and took a nap on her floor while she wrote her paper. My friend Kate came into town and we went downtown to meet her, we saw teh Glokenspiel (google it, very cool) it is enormous and really neat...Kate came into town and we all had some lunch together before making plans to head to Oktoberfest...ok I will prob blog more tom night because we have free internet in oru hostel in Vienna! Ciao for now!