Epic day today. after breakfast, me, Björn, his mom, and Lukas took their third car (apparently parked in a garage they rented from a family up the street...?) to the train station, from where we took the 2.5 hour long train ride to Frankfurt. tried to take some pictures from on the train, didn't work too well. got some pretty crappy pictures of a moving landscape, or a blurry picture of a sudden tree, or a bad reflection of Björn's face. cool. but then on the layover between two trains, we went for a walk, where i took a couple pictures and Björn ate breakfast at Mcdonalds, where the Big Macs are still Big Macs. got pictures of some cool old buildings, some statues, and a cool church (of which Germany has no short supply!) Went back to the train station, and slept on the train for 2 hours (I can't help it, i always fall asleep in moving vehicles...FML) Get to Frankfurt, and take the subway, which was awesome because Frankfurt has not one, but 9 different subway lines. It was very cool. Massive train stations too...also 'sehr geil.' We then went to a massive museum, where we say the internal structure of many animals, as well as dissected bodies and misc. parts of animals, of course recreated in plastic. Their feature was a recreation of the muscular structure of a fully grown elephant, which apparently took them 64,000 hours to build! It was awesome. regrettably though due to the incredible amount of work put into this, no pictures allowed :( The other side of the museum allowed pictures though. They had everything there. Dinosaurs, fish, plants, birds, fossils, ancient rocks...all soon to be visible through my picture slideshow, if i can every get it working on here...took exactly 102 pictures in there. After that, we took to the streets, where we visited the Frankfurt 'Rathaus', or city hall. (yes, it literally translates to Rat House :p) outside, however, was one of the day's highlights. A Syrian protest, with flags and music and a Syrian man with a child on his shoulders singing and yelling into a megaphone in both German and Syrian. Music was all in Syrian though...still sounded pretty cool. exotic even, wonder why. (eating German gummy bears right now, at 1 am, they are made with real fruit juice and taste much better than our crappy gummy bears...) after the protest, i saw a giant sign on the wall, with some Syrian writing on top and then in English: The people want: then a giant list of (i guess) all the verbs they could think of - to love, to eat, to speak, to peek, to pay...and then they got a little weird. 'to haunt, hurt, invade, assassinate, waste, damage, offend, traumatize, wound, mutilate, prostitute...among any other colorful words. it was pretty awesome, to see a real protest, and there were 8-10 police there. on the other side of the square, however, were a bunch of photographers taking pictures...of watches, through the glass in shops. <rant> WHAT THE HELL? PROTEST GOING ON 10 FEET AWAY FROM YOU, AND YOU'RE WINDOW SHOPPING? WITH A CAMERA? </rant>. we then went to see 'Der Dom', a massive, magnificent church. I took many pictures , and had a debate with Björn over if the graffiti on the wall was actually 'graffiti' or 'art'. i think it's art, i'll let you decide. We went into 'Der Dom'. it was, again, magnificent. just imagining the work that went into this building of faith, that many could worship in splendor...amazing. my pictures were mostly blurry while on the inside, the lights were fire candles and as such was wavering and flickering. We then ran to catch our train back home missing it by literally, seconds. we watched it drive away, to a chorus of 'Shiesse!!'. was pretty great. so we went for a walk down 'Kaiser Strasse', Frankfurt's Whyte Ave. apparently the prostitutes only come out late at night, so we were fine on our walk, but there were some...*cough* interesting... *cough* shops along the way. at the end, however, was an amazing sight: tent city. from some movie coming out in New York that i hadn't heard about, many people ran home and got their tents, setting them up outside the major German banks in protest of their bad cash management skills. There were probably several hundred people there, but only a guess. There were campfires (only one lit at the time but several around) and protest signs, and other cool stuff. It was outstanding, 2 protests in one day! After that, we went back to the train station, caught the train, went home, and me and Björn then watched 6 episodes of 'How I Met Your Mother', which is more interesting that i would have thought. And now, here i am, 1:30 in the morning, nearly out of gummy bears. and 189 pictures later. i also killed the batteries in my camera. in one day. a fact i'm rather proud of.

but alas, i am tired.
(Ich bin müde)
bis morgen!