My mother would be so proud.

To Renee: I apologize in advance for using the English spellings of these cities but I'm not really feeling like looking for an umlaut version of the characters online right now and my keyboard is in English mode.

This past weekend I split off from the group and traveled alone (eek!) to Salzburg and Nuremburg. The defining element of the weekend really wasn't what I did on my journeys but rather who I met as I traveled.

In Salzburg as I got off the train I was first worried because it's not really a pretty part of town, I remember thinking to myself "Okay, why did I need to come here again?" But as I took the bus to my hostel, A family got on the bus and the young girl who sat down in front of me was wearing a Minnesota Zoo shirt. It turned out that the entire family was from St. Paul and in Europe on vacation. I was so happy to meet them that I missed my stop, but when I did eventually make my way to my hostel, I met two wonderful girls who were staying in my room. One of them was from Argentina, and the other an Australian who's lived the last two years in London, England. They were both really fun to hang out with and sort of took me under their wings for the evening, not to mention the fact that they recommended a few things for me to do the next morning.

On Saturday as I took the train to Munich (where I would switch to a different train) I met an Austrian/German woman with this beautiful and very sweet Golden Retriever, the conductor who checked my ticket was alto very kind and we chatted for a little bit. In Nuremburg right after I ate alone (which is second only to going to a movie or the theatre alone in my mind as far as levels of loneliness and should only be done when absolutely necessary) I met a really great group of people at my hostel who were for the most part all travelling alone as well and had just met each other. They really took me under their wings for the next few days and I was able to experience everything from going out on the town, to the documentation center, to Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz auf Deutsch thanks to them.

Monday, my luck seemed to be running out when my train was late, switched platforms, and once again the DB messed up my reservation, making it non existent. But I was able to find about about the switched platform from a kind group on the platform, and even more amazingly a very kind German woman who got off the train at it's first stop picked me of the four people sitting without seats to give hers to and led me to it (because I didn't 100% understand where it was when she described it to me in German.) Thanks to her I was able to spend 4 hours of my 4+ hour train ride sitting in a real seat instead of on the ground.

All in all it was an amazing testament to how helpful and kind people can really be, whether they're taking a much younger lone American girl under their wing when travelling around a foreign city, or offering a foreigner who doesn't even understand German their seat on a train. People basically win at life.

-Caitlin