greetings from freiburg, germany!

i keep calling this place "free-burg", but it's definitely "fry-burg". oops.

i know you're all dying of dianne-deprivation (and yes, i'm a fan of alliteration), so after 5 days of silence, here i am!

so i'm here visiting charlie. he's studying german at the goethe institut before heading elsewhere in germany for 2 semesters of study abroad. we were friends at ou, and man, is it good to hang out with someone i already know, and we can trade stories about our many mutual friends. good times, indeed!

i've also had a quieter few days which has been good for the budget and the rest. and the laundry, and email catching-up. i wanted to post from belgium, but they have the stinkin french keyboard at my hostel, which is ridiculously hard for an american english speaker to use. all the keys are in the wrong place! ok, not all, but at least the a w z m n ... and you have to "shift" to use the numbers, instead of shifting to use the symbols. grrr. at any rate, it wasn't worth it to me to pay to spend 3 times as long as i normally would to write a post. so instead, you get the "quick" update now. ha. like any update with me is quick!!

ok, so mary was asking about the corrie ten boom house, which was great. the guided tour was excellent, telling many of the stories from "the hiding place" (corrie's book), as well as other cultural and political happenings at the time of ww2. the tourguide was excellent, a great storyteller, amusing, and honest about what was going on and the ten boom's religious convictions. again, it was just awesome to be there. i walked around the markt (town square) afterwards, remembering most, if not all, the buildings i was looking at were there when corrie lived there in ww2. most are even several hundred years old! it is so hard to think of that, coming from a city less than 100 years old.

so i was glad to leave amsterdam the next morning, and i so i headed for brussels. i met a group of grandparents from ohio that were very entertaining and funny. i could see them all trying to get up the stairs to the train platform (we were on the same train to belgium) with their large suitcases, so i helped one lady by picking up the end of her bag, so it didn't drag on the stairs. i continued in conversation with them, and a few mins later, she came back and handed me a 2 euro coin! i was so surprised! she said to buy myself a coffee with it, and the guy i was talking to was like, "even better, a glass of wine!"

well, i don't care for brussels at all. it was a lot rougher around the edges than i was expecting. it was just a big, dirty city with the train station in the working class/immigrant neighborhood. so as i walked up to the main markt area, where all the touristy stuff was that i wanted to see, i had to walk down a big road with hundreds of muslim men drinking tea, watching me walk down the sidewalk. not fun. so i took a pic of "mannekin pis", the little boy peeing out water fountain, and then looked for one of the 5 waffle stands/shops listed in my guidebook, which is less than a year old. no luck. one of the 5 was still there, but it served ice cream now, not waffles. so i was 1 for 2. then i went in search of the chocolate museum. i couldn't find it and was 1 for 3, ready to call it a day, when i spotted it the next block up. so i went in, and they said the chocolate master was at lunch, come back later. so i was still 1 for 3, and went in search of some other waffle. i did find one, and man, was it sweet!!! there was also a market set up that i walked thru and just enjoyed that few blocks of the city, before going back to tour the disappointing chocolate museum. i did get a free sample, which was good, and saw a demonstration of how pralines are made (the filled ones), which was cool, but i'm not sure it was worth the entry price. some of the signs and info pages were in 3 of 5 languages all over the museum, but not all 5 languages. frustrating. so i was happy to walk back to the train station, collect my bag and head on to bruges...

and bruges was great! i absolutely loved it. the hostel i stayed in had a funky character, but nice and friendly. my room was on the 2nd floor, and you had to go thru another bunk room to get to it. to get to the shower, i had to go thru the other room, downstairs, thru the bar, thru the kitchen, thru the courtyard, up the stairs, down the hall, and into the shower room. my ukranian roommate loved it so much she took a video of it with her camera! good times. so i got in in the afternoon and found an australian family chillin in the courtyard, making dinner, so i hung out with them and cooked my own pasta. then, i decided to walk around the town in the dark. i saw mostly american tourists in their 40s and 50s, with a few locals out for a night on the town themselves. it was a small city with canals and beautiful gabled roofs on houses and old, big churches lit up in the night. so i played with the long exposure function on my camera and just enjoyed the perfect weather and gorgeous surroundings.

saturday, i headed out around town to see how different was in daylight. i headed straight for the church of our lady to see the only michelangelo sculpture to leave italy while he was alive - the madonna with child. then i headed for the belfry tower over the markt and climbed the steep spiral staircase to the top, and i was rewarded with some incredible views! it was really neat to see the bells and all, too. then i met up with a group for a countryside bike tour. we headed northeast, toward holland, along the canals, saw some windmills, ate lunch at a quaint garden/restaurant, and headed back thru town. it was a great way to spend 3 hours, and it exhausted me enough for a nap... mmm...

the next day i headed for freiburg (not freeburg) germany, to see charlie. i would not have come here, except that i wanted to hang out with charlie, and he gave me a free place to stay. not to mention i am using his lovely american mac to type this while he's at class. good combo. at any rate, i'm having a great time here and am enjoying myself. i think switzerland is next, but possibly shorter than i wish. we'll see.

ta ta for now!