To catch up....

The last time I wrote a post was when we were still in Munich so I have alot to catch up on. First of all, the weekend after our week in Southern Germany was amazing. I spent the entire weekend in Salzburg, half of the time by myself. It was so relaxing and exactly what I needed after the physically and emotionally exhausting week we just had. The city itself is extremely beautiful since it is completely surrounded by the mountains. The hostel we stayed at had the most amazing view of the old town. We found this small place that is really more of a restaurant but they had some rooms upstairs for cheap and with free breakfast. It was up on one of the mountains so we had to take an elevator ride just to get up to it. It was just amazing to be there. Walking around the city was so cool because they have so many churches and old buildings and cool looking things that I just spent the two days I was there walking around. There was some great shopping though so the city of Salzburg definitely got some of my money. What was really awesome at night though was that the Salzburg music festival was still going on so I could hang out in my room with the window open or sit out at one of the tables outside and drink a beer while listening to some of the music that was going on. Like I said, the whole weekend was really relaxing. I got to meet some fun people too. The second night I was there, I shared my room with a group of girls who were all interns in Bonn but spending the weekend in Austria. One of the girls was alot of fun to talk to though because she was a foreign exchange student in Texas for a year. She is originally from Ukraine but she just kept telling me how much she missed Texas, which I found really interesting. Anyway, so I got back to Dusseldorf after a ridiculously long train ride but was still relaxed from my time in the mountains. That next day was our trip to Bonn and the federal ministry. I'm pretty sure that none of us really could say we enjoyed our time there. I felt like some of the information that was presented was interesting. I'm actually going to hang on to a couple of the brochures we were given with the statistics of land use and agriculture in Germany, but once we started discussing legislation and other bureaucratic issues I could not follow anymore. This is probably because I don't have any idea how our legislation is passed between federal ministries and other authorities in the United States, so trying to figure it out with the German government was just too much. The museum on anaesthesiology was a good way to end the day though. I thought our tour guide was so cute because he was just so excited to talk about his museum and his collection. I felt bad that we were trying to rush him but unfortunately thats the way it went. He really did have some cool stuff in there, more than I would have ever thought about. I'm glad we got to see it, I guess we just need to plan it for a different time or something next time.
The rhine tour was pretty nice as well. I love the water so I stayed up top and felt the wind blowing and enjoyed the whole thing. We also got some cool shots of a bunch of the small towns along the river which were fun to see. The castle was really cool. The fact that they keep it so well preserved and even make people where the slippers to help with the preservation was really neat. Our tour guide was very knowledgeable so I'm glad we had her. She was also very proud of what she was presenting so it helped make the experience more enjoyable.