Wandering to Germany

Hello from Germany, part of my heritage, half of my dad's and all of our close friend, Jeanne. We arrived in Frankfurt on time despite a slight departure delay in Houston. The flight was nearly 10 hours but not bad except none of the movies were any good so we mostly dozed. Then we took a train to Trier, a three hour trip with two changes, one which required running through the station, and up some stairs - hence Rick Steves' advice to travel light. We shared our first bratwurst while waiting for the train.

Our train ride was surprisingly comfortable - fast and very quiet. It hugged the Rhine River most of the way so we got our fill of that...no need to take a Rhine River cruise. The area is very pretty with lots of old castles on top of mountains, small villages, and grape vines/trees in fields on steep cliffs.

Upon leaving the Trier train station, we followed Rick Steves' directions to our hotel...which was a 15-20 minute walk through the outdoor market area in the old part of Trier, on cobblestone streets with really long names (again, a good reason to travel light). We are learning how to navigate despite the fact that neither of us knows much German, and not many of the people we've encountered speak English, but everyone is really nice.

The most interesting thing about our hotel is that it is also a residenz for the elderly, who are all over the facility, so our room is essentially a small apartment with a bedroom, living room and kitchen. We think since the population here might be diminishing, the home decided to get revenue from the empty rooms. We will be here three nights, and meet our tour group here tomorrow. http://www.residenz-trier.de/

I took a two hour nap once we got to our room, Tom watched German TV with no English stations. We found a cute cafe and had a delicious dinner of pork with mushroom sauce, and Karlsberg beer.

Trier is a very old city, part of the Roman empire and very historical religiously. There is a huge bishop's cathedral nearby which we are touring on Sunday, and priests everywhere...we passed a seminary earlier.

All is well except I'm having a hard time typing on this German keyboard...the z and y keys are switched, the apostrophe is with the # key, where our colon is, and the number keys have three characters on them but I can't figure out how to use some of them, to name a few differences.

We are seven hours ahead of Texas time - so it is bedtime for me. YOLO!!