Tuscany photos

Hello everybody,
We just returned from Italy today and I just wanted to post a link to the new photo album. There are some very nice shots, I believe so just have a look.
See you later,
Dan

Toskana '09

Cycalssics photos

Hey there,
The photos from the Cyclassics are online now.
I only have a few but it'll do.
Have fun,
Dan

Cycalssics '09

Hittin' the boot

Hey there,
It's me again!
As promised I'm writing another blog tonight.
And this will be about my just ended school trip to southern Italy. We went to Sorrento which is placed at the gulf of Naples. To be exact we went to Piano di Sorrento which is sort of an outskirt of Sorrento.
The trip itself was pretty cool actually and the 22 hour bus drive wasn't too bad either.
We started on Friday a week ago so that must have been the 28th. Since the drive was long ass (close to what it takes to go to Australia apparently) we arrived on the late Saturday. So this day we didn't do anything scheduled. We just got our stuff sorted. I lived in a bungalow with four other guys and it went quite well the whole trip although we had to wash the dishes and cook ourselves. Due to the cooking ourselves thing, I was on a strict past with pesto and pizza diet for the whole week. I dealt with it. ;)
On Sunday we went to Pompeii. I don't know how good your history knowledge of the ancient times is so I will just quickly tell. Pompeii was a town buried by ashes and rocks and lava in the year 79 AD. Nowadays the town is a massive exhibit where you can look at all the houses and stuff from back then. Because of the ashes and lava, most buildings and even paintings are still in pretty good shape since they couldn't rot.
At Sunday night we went to the actual town Sorrento and took part in the local night life. Well that wasn't a lot different from what we are used to. First we walked around the town a little, and then some of us including our bus driver went to a pub. I went with some other guys to the harbor and had a look there and after that we met the other guys and another cocktail bar where we all had a drink. Our bus driver didn't really have one drink. He rather had a lot including two liters of Mojito (which was pretty delicious). I left at like 11 pm with most of the guys while one of us stayed half an hour longer with the driver who was called Mirko by the way. The night went on in front of our bungalow.
The day after that we visited some other ancient stones at a town called Paestum where you can see three well-preserved temples from the Greeks. Some of us even went to the museum in Paestum where you can have a look at all sorts of ancient paintings and graves and all that kind of stuff. It was really impressive.
On Tuesday we went to an actual volcano. Not the Vesuvius, but the Sofatara. It's not really high so you can easily go in and you see hot smoke coming out of the ground everywhere and there was a place with really hot mud so all in all you pretty much got the impression of a volcano there.
On Tuesday afternoon we went to Naples. Naples is surely one of the biggest cities in Italy and basically ruled by the Mafia. That wasn't any bad for us though, because they don't mess with Tourists. So we had a good time in Naples and even got to taste the local pizza which is supposed to be one of the best in the world.
On Wednesday, which was our last day with a scheduled program, we visited Capri, which is basically the island of the rich. There were horribly expensive shops and kick ass yachts and all that stuff, but also a beach and some nice countryside. We even went up to the remains of a mansion of the former roman emperor Tiberius.
So a nice day again. At the last day I just went to Sorrento with the guys from my hut and we walked around a little and had a giant pizza.
On the late Thursday we had to get in the bus again to go back home.
And on Friday evening we arrived back in Aachen.

That was it for tonight. I hope my laziness won't be that bad in the future so I can provide you guys with some posts more frequently. And hey there is another Italy trip coming up just about five weeks from now. But that time we are flying.
Talk to youse soon.
Cheers

Daniel

Check the photos. There might be some more in some time since I didn't get the ones from my roommates yet.

Sorrento '09

The end of Summer

Hello people,
I am truly sorry that I was too busy (actually I was just too lazy) to write a blog although a lot of stuff was going on the last couple of weeks.
But I'll tell from the start.
Although the title of this blog post isn't entirely correct, I am going to tell about the end of summer as in the end of my summer break. As there was, of course, the two weeks’ vacation to La Palma, which is one of the Canary Islands belonging to Spain.
The trip was really awesome. And although I am not going to explain everything in detail I can tell you that we did a lot of exciting stuff.
First of all the weather on La Palma was awesome ass. We had sun all day (which is indeed a big deal for Germans) and temperatures in the 30s and even up to 40°C. The downside of this was that it didn't cool down at night so we had problems to sleep since it was still over 30°C in the middle of night. But anyway we handled it and the really hot weather did go away eventually so we had lots of time to do stuff like scuba diving, which I found awesome (my mum not so much. she couldn't do it because of some lung thing she apparently has). Apart from that we did a lot of hiking what, as some of you might already have noticed, is sort of our thing.
In the last week I went biking with my dad two times. We went on a guided biking tour which was really good since you see a lot of places you normally wouldn't and on top of that it was a real challenge for both of us because there was a lot of biking up. Like 1000 height meters a tour so that was kind of tough.
Apart from those special things the days were pretty similar.
So what shall I tell you? You look at the photos and the rest is self explanatory. Since the holiday is now about 5 weeks past us, I can't remember every detail anyway. ;D.

With that vacation my summer break wasn't over though. My obligatory and always fun trip to Hamburg was still ahead of me. But this year should be different.
At the bike trips on La Palma I met to people from Hamburg who are quite passionate bikers themselves and they had a spare starting place for Europe's biggest cycling event in Hamburg, which they offered me. Funny as it is, this event called Cyclassics was happening at the exact weekend I was going to Hamburg anyway so it wasn't hard for me to decide whether I wanted to go. So in Hamburg I participated in a bike race with more than 20000 people cycling over the distances of either 55, 100 or 155 kilometers. I took the 100 k distances which was more than enough. The feeling you get at such an event is beyond words though. With all the people cheering and thousands of others taking the same challenge as you do. That is just awesome. No it's more than that. Let's say it's beyond awesome. Anyways I think you get my point. Apart from the race, which took my about 3 hours by the way which leads to an average speed of 33kph, I had a lot of fun in Hamburg with my uncle's family.

So that was the end of summer as in the end of my summer break. But stay tuned, because in just a sec (literally, 'cause that is already happened as well; damn my laziness) I am going to tell about the probably the real end of summer since it is kind of cold outside now which it wasn't for the last weeks.

Cya guys I hope you all have a good life. From what I heard it shouldn't be too bad (I think of that cheap ass year pass to wet'n'wild, Sea World and Movie World some lady I'm not mentioning at this point told me about)

Well check out my photos as usual
Your‘s DAN

La Palma '09

Who's a Berliner??

Hello guys,
This is my post from my recent Berlin trip and I bet you can’t wait to read it.
So Berlin…
We took off from Aachen by train at about 7:30 on Wednesday a week ago. Since we were going with the ICE (it’s not ice as many Americans thought. It’s “Inter City Express”) train, it only took us about five hours though to get to the east of the nation. The ride was pretty boring and I had a little bit of a sleep.
As we got to Berlin, we directly headed to the hotel, which was more like a youth hostel, and got our rooms. I went in a room with all the other German guys. There were six of us. After putting our stuff in the rooms and getting our sheets on the beds, which was a little hard for some of us, we met with the group, to take a guided bus tour around the city. The guide was totally gay, what made listening to him pretty funny (He really sounded like a fag), but the tour was actually really informative and we even got out of the bus three times. For the Hackische Höfe, a place where there are houses built around little places, with a lot of little shops and cafes. The next stop was at the very famous holocaust memorial in Berlin. It consists of a lot of concrete blocks lined up in rows and it’s very impressive. The last place we stopped at was a weird museum kind of place but I don’t remember exactly what it was for.
In the evening we gathered at a nearby restaurant and had dinner with the whole group. After that we went to the river Spree in a little group (well there were about 10 of us) and just hung around there.
The next day was the best I think. We didn’t have to get up that early and then walked across the Tiergarten, which is sort of Berlin’s Central Park, to the government district, which looks really nice. After that we had lunch at the Paul Löbe Haus, a house where all the advisers of the government work and where people from the parliament can go to gather information. Just after lunch we had a little tour around the Reichstag, which is the main building of German politics hosting the main chamber. To see where politics of the highest level is made, was really exciting. After the tour inside the Reichstag, we went on top of the cupola, from where you have a wonderful view all across Berlin. The last event in the Reichstag was a discussion with a member of the Green Party, which was very interesting although I didn’t quite share most of her ideas. Who the hell supports a speed limit? At least no one in Germany, the land of the free (at least for driving legally at a ridiculous speed). But anyways, after that we shortly went to the Kurfüstendamm, a boulevard mainly for shopping. One of the guys called Jonas and I didn’t stay there very long though, because we had an appointment with a delicious kangaroo stake. Yeah, you got that right. There is an awesome Aussie restaurant inside the Sony Center at the Potsdamer Platz, where they serve Kangaroo and Croc Stake, and VB, Fosters, Crown and some Newcastle beer as drinks. It was just heaven and I think I haven’t felt that much at home in a restaurant for quite some time. They had like paintings and pictures from Australia on the walls. For an hour or so I really felt like back in the day…2007! And take that as a promise: I’ll be back to the red continent someday, hopefully someday soon.
Well at night we went to a youth club which was kind of absurd, because all of us normally go to proper clubs and this one was full of like 12 year old. Nevertheless, Johannes, Immo and I stayed there with the three good German girls of the group and watched them doing crazy stuff like dancing in cages with little guys and stuff. We had a good laugh anyways. Apart from that this night was pretty messy though. Two of the American guys were caught smoking weed in their room the night before and the chaperones were really worried, that they’d do it again, since they’d have to go home the next morning. On top of that some German boys got in fights with the chaperones because having to be at the hotel at midnight really pissed them off. I was sort of relaxed about that since it was only four days. But anyways this fighting continued like the whole night and basically kept me from sleeping. So in the end I had like four to five hours of sleep, which wasn’t quite enough.
The next morning it all cooled down a little (The two guys who had to go home did smoke weed at night again :D ) and we went to Charlottenburg Castle. It is a very old castle and shows quite well how European nobility used to live in the 18th and 19th century. For me it wasn’t that impressive, because there are bigger castles I already saw, but for the Americans, who have never seen something like that, it was quite a good idea, I guess. So in the afternoon, we went to Alexander Platz, where one of Berlin’s main sights, the big TV tower, stands. After lunch we parked the girls at a shopping mall and walked down the big boulevard, Unter den Linden. It is Berlin’s biggest boulevard and hosts a lot of important buildings, like the Berlin dome, the Humbold University or the former palace of the republic, which is a large green at the moment. Since three of the six German guys were sick of walking, we left them at the green, because I wanted to see the Gendarmenmarkt, a place in Berlin with two similar looking domes facing each other. That was quite a cool spot. Later, after we met with the girls again, two of us went home and the others, including me, went to the Hackische Höfe again, to grab a coffee. In the evening we went back to the hotel to had dinner and at night, after some pregame at the room, we went to a bar in town. Unfortunately, we confused the Oranienburgerstaße with the Oranienstraße. So in the end, we didn’t end up in the street with all the awesome music lounges, but in a street with some bars (not bad ones actually) and some hookers, which was kind of funny actually, because one of them was complaining about the fact that there were too many young guys and she was more of an older model. At 12 we were back at the hotel and basically went straight to bed (at like 2 in the morning).
The last day we went to Checkpoint Charlie, a place where there was a gate in the Berlin Wall and nowadays there is a museum for the wall. After a self-guided tour around the museum we had a little talk with a guy who helped people to escape from the DDR and that was very interesting, I thought.
After having lunch, it was time for us to go take our bags and head to the train station to go home.

After having explained what I did, I want to talk about Berlin in general and I want to compare it to New York in parts. Berlin is of course not as huge as Berlin, what relates to the amount of people living there as well as to the heights of the buildings. In Berlin most buildings are about 10 stories high and those are like the huge ones already. In general Berlin seems to be much more spread. Places are larger, streets wider and what you directly recognize is that Berlin feels a lot slower. It’s more like the relaxed metropolis unlike the busy, in rush metropolis, NYC is. I think Berlin is very cool, especially for Germans because you find German history everywhere you go. Whether it is street names or houses. In the end it is hard to compare both Berlin and NYC. New York had a larger impact on me though. It was more overwhelming, more fascinating. Berlin is more of a quiet beauty, although it wasn’t quiet at all, at least not at our place, because we had a train just going past our front window every five minutes during the night.

So that was it from Berlin. I’m working now until we go to La Palma in about a week and I’m already very excited about that. I hope you are all doing well. I am apparently and yeah I think I forgot to mention, that I have new glasses since yesterday. Black is the color now and I think they look pretty awesome. You’ll be able to have a look at them in a week, when the first photos from the Canary Islands hit the net.
See ya later folks

Your Dan

That's the link you all waited for...Photos from the capital:

Berlin

What a Summer?!

Hello everybody,
I thought it was time again to write a little post. Especially because there was and is a lot going on here at the moment.
Last Wednesday the Americans arrived for their visit to Germany and we already did quite a lot with them. Well mostly going out at night but we also visited Cologne and Bonn on Tuesday. That was quite exciting even for me. The only downside of that day was the missing air con in the trains. You must know that the weather is basically going nuts at the moment here. It's nearly as an Australian early summer. We have nearly 30°C every day and that is really unusual for us as you might know. But I guess sweating is always better than freezing right?
And since the summer did officially start yesterday with our last day of school (leaving me one year to go until graduation) the weather is exactly what we need.
But as this summer has just started here there is still a lot more to come. The Americans will stay here until the end of next week and we have a pretty tight schedule. Today they are in Maastricht, a little town in Holland and I guess tonight we'll be drinking (and maybe playing pool) again. Tomorrow we leave for the north sea visiting my grandparents for the weekend and showing Tom, my American host student a little more of Germany (and of course giving him the unique Autobahn-experience). We will even visit a beer brewery on Saturday so I hope this will turn out fun.
Next week we are in Berlin from Wednesday to Saturday so there will be a lot going on then and I guess you will hear from me a lot more frequent then.
After the Americans have left I'll probably work for two weeks or so earning a little money (actually a lot) and then we will go on vacation to La Palma which is one of the canary islands in the Atlantic Ocean.
I think it'll be weird just having four people living in the house since my Brazilian dude Vinicius left just four days before the Americans arrived.
So yeah that's about it for the moment, I guess.
You'll hear from me soon (probably after the weekend).
Yours Dan

Oh wait. One thing which I'm kinda proud of is that some of the Americans recognized that I've been to Australia just from talking to me.

Home sweet Home

And still - America was awesome as!!!

With these words I want to begin the last post from my little America adventure.
The last week in the States was just great.
On the weekend we had beautiful weather which led to us having heaps of fun. On Sunday I was basically playing Xbox with some friends all day and in the evening I went playing tennis with some others of the group.
Monday was a horrible day. At least the weather was. We first went to the White House, but couldn't get in so we went to the Visitors Center. There we watched a film about the White House and its history and all that kind of stuff. After that we had the possibility to go to a museum, but since I already saw most of them and I was told that this particular museum was basically crap, I decided not to go and went to some mall with my friends instead. Some of them ate at the food court but I was pretty much sick of all the food court crappy sort of food so I went having lunch with Immo at a Mexican Restaurant. This was pretty neat and the food was awesome.
On Tuesday we first visited the Pentagon which was very impressive. They showed us a couple of hallways and the inner plaza. Moreover we had a look on the 9/11 memorial of the Pentagon. As you would expect there were a lot of military people in there either wearing camouflage or dress uniforms. That looked very cool. The only bad thing about the Pentagon was that I wasn't allowed to take photos so I don't have any from that day. Later we went to Georgetown and had lunch there. After lunch we visited the German Embassy in D.C. which is a quite cool looking place. And all people spoke German which was nice as well. At the Embassy they showed us a movie about what they and all other German Embassies around the world do.
In the evening I had dinner with my family at a Japanese restaurant. That was awesome. They cooked the food right in front of you. So all people were basically sitting around a huge barbecue where they cooked the food. After dinner I got picked up by Johannes' host mum, who took us to Immo and Jonas' place where we watched a couple of movies.
Wednesday was a rather quiet day. We met for lunch at a mall and then hung around a little. In the evening there was a farewell party for us Germans with all host families and all the official people.
Thursday was basically the day of departure, but since my family wasn't at home all morning I had Johannes come over to my place and we played some basketball on the Xbox, what was lots of fun.
At three o'clock we arrived at the airport and our flight was going at 5:45pm.
The flight went pretty well, although I didn't get as much sleep as I hoped to. From Frankfurt, were we arrived at about 8am on Friday morning we went to Aachen by train which was a huge pain in the ass.
So at about 12 we arrived back home in Aachen where my mum picked me up.

As a conclusion to my America trip I have to say that it was just lots of fun and I really enjoyed it. The group I was doing stuff with was very cool as well.
The one thing I have to say though is that the title "land of opportunity" (Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten) does not fit to the United States. At least not anymore. Since 9/11 Americans are paranoid a lot. You have those metal detector screenings everywhere. You can't go somewhere without having you checked. To go into the Pentagon they even had to know all my middle names. And of course for teens: Drinking with 21? What idiot invented this rule? It’s working well in Germany.
So after all America is a great country and the Americans I got to know where all very nice and welcoming people. But they seriously have to get over 9/11!

That's pretty much what I'm leaving you with for the moment. I guess I'll write again as soon as something happened worth writing about. So stay tuned :D:D
Catch you later
Yours Daniel

This is basically the same album as the last one but I added a few pictures:

Washington D.C.