Welcome to the Netherlands! I haven't had time to sit down and write for the last couple days, so I've got lots to say. It won't all be in this one post since I don't have a lot of time this evening, but I'll do my best to get everything out over the next few posts! This post is mainly just an overview of my trip into the country, and showing the cities I've visited over the last couple days. Here goes!

Muenster is a relatively small town, so I couldn't find a train that went direct to the Netherlands. And I'm staying with some family friends (Erika and Bas) in Dordrecht, which also isn't a very large town, so my trip required a few connections. The Eurail app is really good for this, since it will find trains from multiple rail companies to give you the easiest routes. The route I chose recommended buying a seat reservation for the second train, but I decided against it since the website claimed it wouldn't be very full.

I got to the station and got some breakfast. After waiting for about an hour for my train to arrive, I got to the platform to discover it had a delay of about 5 minutes. The route I chose had a transfer time of 10 minutes for the second train, meaning I'd only have 5 minutes to rush over. Not a problem, I thought, I've gotten good at navigating train stations in Germany!

That 5 minute delay soon became a 12 minute delay. I optimistically got on the first train anyways, just in case I could still somehow make the second train. But nope, I missed the second train by 2 minutes. Well, on the bright side, I didn't pay for the seat reservation!

Fortunately the Eurail pass makes it really easy to change your route on the fly without having to pay anything extra, so I just found a new route from that station, and off I went! Definitely happy I got the Eurail pass, otherwise that would have been a real pain to sort out!

Here's a collection of photos I got once we'd crossed into the Netherlands.

I think this is where I needed that bit of paper they offered on the last train. My guess is those had RFID tags inside that would allow me to get out of the station. I figure they didn't give me one, because they thought I would buy another ticket at the station. But nope, I had the Eurail pass with a QR code that let me go anywhere, except through these RFID turnstiles!

I watched as everyone pulled out their transit cards and waltzed right on through, while I was stuck there without one. I was staring at them for a few minutes trying to find a QR code scanner, but you can see in the photo above that there's nowhere to scan a QR code. It turns out I was looking at the wrong turnstiles! There were a couple on the end that had the RFID scanner replaced with a QR code scanner, but I hadn't noticed these since they look almost identical from a distance. Took me about 5 minutes to figure that out, but then it accepted my Eurail pass without issue.

Then I was finally in the Netherlands! Erika and Bas picked me up from just outside the station, and we drove to their house. This neighborhood has rows of connected houses, so it's very compact. Each house is 2 floors plus a basement, and a small garden outside. Definitely not like the large single family homes of the US on large plots of land, but I find those excessive anyways. These are much more space efficient, which I appreciate. Erika and Bas have also made it quite modern on the inside, so I quite like it!

Yesterday we visited both Dordrecht and the Hague. It was fairly cloudy all day and a bit rainy, so it wasn't quite as pleasant as I'd hoped for. But it was still good to get acquainted with the area, and get guided by a local. While we were in Dordrecht, I got a warm stroopwafel which was really good! That's a bit dangerous, I could get addicted to those...

Here's a few pictures I took while in Dordrecht.

And here are pictures from The Hauge. I only really took photos of the government buildings for some reason, but I think they look nice at least.

We ate lunch at an English pub while in The Hauge, and I ended up getting a burger. It was pretty good, but something about the beef seems different than what I'm used to, similar to what I found in Germany. Someone had mentioned to me that burger meat here often isn't 100% beef, there's usually some other meats mixed in for whatever reason. So it ends up tasting a bit different. Not necessarily in a bad way, just different.

That was most of what we did yesterday. It rained for the rest of the day, so we decided to stay inside for the evening again. Today we went into Amsterdam, which ended up having nicer weather. I split from Erika and Bas to meet with a friend who lives in Amsterdam. We ate at an Italian restaurant and got pasta, which was quite good! After we finished, I explored around the city on my own to get a feel for it. Here's more photos!

I really do like how pedestrianized the city centers are, especially Amsterdam. It's really easy to get around places without feeling like you're going to get hit by cars all the time. There's also lots of public transit, so going longer distances is pretty easy.

I'm going to save my comments about commuting for the next post. I've definitely got a lot to say, but I'm getting tired and want to post at least something for today. I'm not sure when that post will come, but should be within a couple days. Take care!

Surprise! I went to Muenster instead of Hannover like I said I would. The main reason is that all the cities I've visited so far, I've had at least one person say something about it, but I've not heard anyone say anything about Hannover. However I have heard one of my grandmother's neighbors mention Muenster which happened to be in the same area, so I decided to come here instead! I'm glad I did, it's a nice place here, more on that below!

My last night in the cab hostel in Hamburg was good, no issues. My only complaint is that the showers are all in the basement rather than a few on each floor, but it was otherwise a really nice place to stay at! I checked out and made my way to the train station. I got there over an hour before I needed to, and it turns out there was another train heading to Muenster, so I hopped on that one instead. Man, I really do like having the Eurail pass!

The train ride wasn't very noteworthy, all the scenery pretty much looked like everywhere else (farms, trees, suburbs). I didn't take any pictures, so you'll just have to imagine it. Or go look at the pictures from previous train rides, they're all pretty similar.

I got into town and checked into my hostel. I wasn't able to find anywhere that offered single rooms for cheap, and I didn't want to pay like 100 Euros per night, so I was stuck with choosing a dorm. Although there wasn't much choice, because there was only 1 place with a bed available for 2 consecutive nights, so that's where I ended up staying. It's called H.ostel (I always mentally put a pause at the period, sort of like m'lady), and I've actually been happy with it so far.

It has a very consistent theme: plywood. But not in a bad or cheap way. Most of the furniture pieces are plywood construction, and the selected plywood all has neat patterns on it. The bunk beds are all built out of it, there are some box chairs made of plywood, the lockers are plywood, even the reception desk has a plywood front. I actually quite like it!

The rest of the building has been done in a very modern style, including white, black, and gray colors. That's another style that I quite like, very neutral colors. For some reason, it really seems to fit with the plywood furniture, though I can't explain why! Each dorm room has multiple bathrooms, so no one gets held up by anyone else in the morning. And they also provide a lot more privacy than other shared bathrooms, which I definitely appreciate.

My first night here was actually decent, no one made excessively loud noises! I pretty much slept through the entire night, probably the best sleep I've gotten in a dorm on this trip. Really the most noise came from my quilt cover, which sounds a bit like crumpling paper whenever you move around. Also anything tapping on the wood is pretty loud, but I otherwise didn't have any issues last night. Here's hoping tonight goes as well!

I've also done a good amount of exploring around town today and yesterday. Muenster is relatively small, the city center is roughly 1km in diameter, so it's easy to walk anywhere. The center is fairly well pedestrianized, but not as extremely as places like Nuremberg. It's basically another big shopping center, but there's also some old tall buildings around.

The total length is about 4.5km, and takes about an hour to get all the way around if you're just walking. The promenade does cross a few main roads leading into the city center, but the traffic density didn't seem too high. Most of these intersection had lights to control the flow of cars, bikes, and people.

Another traffic management solution I've come across are these prioritized pedestrian crossings. This isn't the first time I've seen these, but it's the first time I've seen them so frequently used in a city. My understanding is that pedestrians (and cyclists) crossing the road have right of way at all times here, so everyone else must yield to them. For low density car traffic, these work really well.

I've also found a couple of these roads that are specifically intended for bikes. The road is painted red to clearly indicate that, plus these signs stating Fahrradstrasse (literally "bicycle street"). Motor vehicles are still allowed on the road (indicated by the bottom sign), but these roads are primarily for bikes, who I assume get right of way. Interesting!

Another​ thing I came across in my explorations was this interesting fountain, which made some very nice rainbows if you stood in the right place. If the wind picked up, I could even catch a glimpse of a double rainbow! It was hard to get a nice picture of that, but this picture shows a fairly brilliant single rainbow.

I also looked a bit around the university campus here, which is just west of the city center. This has certainly been the most lively campus so far, which is probably because schools only just started, so I'll try to not let that bias my opinions. But it looked like a decent campus, there was definitely a variety of architectural styles around. I found the main physics building and nabbed a picture.

There are a few main roads going through the campus, so it's a bit difficult to get away from cars, but it at least means there's a handful of bus stops nearby if you need to go somewhere. I'll have to look more into the research programs here before making a final verdict on it.

That's all I've got from Muenster, it's a nice little town here! Definitely seems like more of a college town, I've seen lots of people my age wandering around. It did rain a fair amount while I was here (plus some lightning last night too!), which put me off a bit since I'm not a huge fan of rain. But it's otherwise a nice place, there's a decent amount of green space, and getting around is easy.

I'm off to the Netherlands tomorrow! I'm finally going into another country, should be exciting! I've heard a lot of good things about the infrastructure in the Netherlands, so I've got high hopes for that. And most Dutch people speak fluent English, so that shouldn't be an issue. I'll also be staying with a family friend who can guide me around, so it should be fun!

Sorry I haven't posted in the last couple days! Sunday was pretty laid back, and I spent most of Monday travelling, but I'm making this post now! Here's all that's happened since my last post.

Not much happened on Sunday, though I did grab a curry from a fast food Indian place, which was pretty decent. My main complaint is that my hostel wasn't very close to many food places, so I had to hop on the public transit just for a meal. I was getting pretty fed up with that hostel to be honest, it certainly wasn't the nicest place to stay for 3 days.

Monday was my travel day up to Hamburg. Because it's a relatively long trip from Munich, I was initially thinking about taking a night train to at least experience it once. But there were a couple issues that made me decide against it. I would've had to check out of my hostel in the morning and get to the station in the late evening, meaning I'd have no where to stay for the entire day if I wanted to just relax for a while. Even once I'd gotten to Hamburg in the early morning, I'd have several hours to kill before I could check in. And I probably wouldn't have gotten good sleep on a train, so I just decided to take a train over the day.

My train was another one of the fast ICE trains, but we never really got going super fast. A lot of the track seemed to go through either residential areas or windy places that limited how fast we could go. The total distance was a bit over 600km and took just over 6 hours, so we only averaged about 100kph. Regardless, it was still a fairly pleasant journey, as train rides go.

There was one annoyance that occurred though. The train didn't require seat reservations, so I just picked a random window seat, and someone else sat next to me. About 2/3 of the way to Hamburg, someone got on the train who had apparently reserved the seat I chose. And I couldn't see any indication whether any seats had been reserved, unlike other trains that actually had indicators. That would have been nice to know about! Especially since the train was rather full at this point, so there were only a couple seats open here and there. The guy I happened to sit next to wasn't the best neighbor, he kept leaning uncomfortably close to me. Oh well, better that on a train than a plane!

I got to Hamburg in the late afternoon and checked into my hostel. This place is actually fairly similar to the space hostel I stayed at in Berlin, except without the space theme. It's called CAB20 (not sure where the 20 comes from), where each floor of the building has several small cabs with beds in them, plus some useful trinkets. They're made with a very modern wood style, and they're actually pretty cozy.

Again, it's a lot like the capsules from the Berlin space hostel, but this is actually implemented a lot better in my opinion. There's actually a couple mains outlets in the cabs, so I can easily charge my laptop. There's a cool air vent that pushes a lot more air through than the space capsules, so it's much more effective at cooling the cab. And the shelf on the side has a wireless charging pad, so I can charge my phone without plugging in a cable. I've never had a wireless charger before, it's neat!

There's a few coat hangers if you need them, and a mirror above the bed. There is a window that looks into the hallway, but I've just had the blinds closed the entire time (plus everyone else too, the windows a bit weird). There are 2 light switches in the cab, both my the door and next to the bed. There's even a motion activated light under the foot of the bed. The WiFi here is also pretty decent, much better than the hostel in Munich where my typical upload speed was around 100kbps (if you're not aware, that's horrendously slow, only a bit better than dial-up).

Each side even has a speaker that you can connect to over Bluetooth, so you get your own stereo audio system! They seem to have tuned back the bass so it doesn't carry into the other cabs, clever. These cabs do a good job at preventing sound from getting in or out, much better than the space capsules. They also give you a wrist band with an RFID tag for unlocking your cab and accessing other secure areas. You can even use it to pay for food and drinks at the bar, which just gets added to your bill when you checkout. I've quite enjoyed it here, this is probably one of my favorite places so far!

I've also been exploring around Hamburg, the center of the city is fairly well pedestrianized. There's a variety of old buildings with tall spires that reach into the sky, which help with navigating if you can spot them. And of course, there are lots of water features all around. Hamburg is a big port city, so there's lots of waterways everywhere and bridges galore. Apparently Hamburg has the most number of bridges of all European cities!

I discovered the University of Hamburg is near the city center, and had an explore today. It's an okay campus, it's not spread out everywhere like the Munich schools. There were even some students actually roaming around, which helped me get an idea of what buildings are actually used. There are certainly some nice areas of the campus with trees and whatnot around, but there's a major road running through that kind of ruins it for me.

I found a campus map that showed some other buildings a few blocks away, which I initially thought were the physics buildings, but they seem to be more like administration buildings or something. I'm not certain, I didn't really look too close. Those buildings were also right next to a prison, which didn't make me feel super comfortable.

As I was walking around this area, I discovered a beautiful large park right next to the campus. I've noticed many of these parks have Garten in the name, but this is the first one I've found that really feels more like a garden. Everywhere I went was clearly put together by people, with all the plants and water features that made it feel very lively. This was a really nice place to walk through!

At one point, I turned around and realized the Heinrich Hertz Radio Tower was right there! It was actually a bit startling, because I hadn't even realized it was there since I'd arrived! This structure is enormous, pretty cool to see!

Later in the evening, I met with one of my dad's coworkers who lives in Hamburg. We decided to head to the river, which was a bit too far to walk, so we took bikes there instead. That was my first time riding a bike in Germany! Definitely glad I was able to do that at least once while I'm here, and I wouldn't have done it without someone else. It was definitely interesting to experience some of the bike infrastructure firsthand, and I've got some thoughts to share!

Bike lanes on the sidewalks are great. It keeps you away from cars, so there's basically no risk of getting hit by a car. It's even better when there's a line of parked cars (or other physical barrier) between the bikes and cars, it feels very safe.

Bike lanes on the roads are not so great. They exist in the US and I've used them before, they're not fun. They are a bit better here, they're wider and cars aren't zooming by at twice your speed, but they're still uncomfortable to use. Bicycle gutters, no thank you.

No bike lanes means you have to ride on the road. Like many other countries, riding bikes on the sidewalk isn't allowed (in most cases, there are some exceptions in Germany). Although the areas we came across without bike lanes tended to have very little traffic, so there wasn't really a need for dedicated bike lanes. So in a way, it was actually better than the painted bicycle gutters.

Left turns are interesting! In the US, you would have to make your way all the way over to the left turn lane before the intersection, and turn left like a car would. Not pleasant, since you're among lots of cars. However here, you stay on the right side of the road and go straight through to the corner. Then you point left and wait for your turn to go across again. This is a much safer way of doing it, even if it takes a bit longer sometimes. Some of these areas even have little bays for bikes to pull into while waiting to cross. I didn't take a picture and couldn't find a German one online, so here's an example from somewhere else. I think for medium to high density bike traffic, it would make a bit more sense for the bikes going straight to be on the right. But for low density bike traffic, this works better since bikes turning left can get better pointed to the left. These are neat!

We got to the river and had a couple drinks at a bar, which had a sandy floor with beach chairs. I didn't get a picture of that area, but it was a nice place to hang out. I did grab a picture just after sunset, showing off the port activity on the other side.

And now that's everything caught up! There are a couple other things that I wanted to mention, so I'll tag those on at the end here:

When I was in Munich, I learned that Germany has a very cool bottle recycling program. If you've got a bottle with a certain recycle logo on it, you can return it to any shop and they'll give you 15 cents for it. That's not a lot, so it doesn't really make it worth returning individual bottles. But if you've got a lot of bottles, that can add up quickly! It turns out that many people will leave their empty bottles on top of trash cans for homeless people to collect them, who then return them to stores to get a chunk of change in return.

I think that's a really clever system! It's a win for everyone involved, there's less plastic being wasted, you don't have to spend your time returning bottles, and homeless people have a source of income from it. I'm guessing there's some government subsidies involved with that, but I think it's a very smart solution to just return bottles for a few coins.

Speaking of coins, why are Germans so insistent on using physical money!? I hate dealing with exact change all the time! So many places don't accept cards, it's a bit ridiculous in my opinion. It would be fine with me if everything was round numbers, but there's so many times that prices are obscure values. I've ended up with collections of coins with tiny values that almost aren't even worth keeping. For anyone earning even minimum wage, it is literally not worth their time to fiddle around for a few seconds trying to get their pennies out. Cards have apparently become a bit more common since the pandemic started so people can pay without contact, but many places I've gone to still require physical money.

That picture is what I'd racked up over time. That's 4.02 euros in 14 coins. If something costs me 3.5 euros, you bet I'm gonna be spending the next 30 seconds fumbling around with all the loose coins in my pocket as I try to figure out which coins I need. I would honestly prefer to just hand over a 5 euro note and get more coins than spend time figuring that out. At least taxes are included in the sticker price, so you don't have to wait until you're told the exact amount. But still, just switch to credit cards, please!

Anyways, that's all for now! I'm not yet certain where I'm heading tomorrow, probably Hannover. I've got plenty of flexibility to change plans if I want, so I could even wait until tomorrow morning to decide. I've got a couple days before I head to the Netherlands on Friday, so that's my only constraint. We'll see where I go!

Welcome to Munich, the home of the German stereotypes! Most people here are actually pretty normal, but I have seen a number of people wearing Lederhosen and Dirndl out in the wild. I even went to a Biergarten with those 1 liter beer mugs, plus lots of meat and bread. I've got a couple days worth of insights to document, so here we go!

My last night in Nuremberg was fine, no issues there. Although one problem is that the room cleaning staff came through pretty early the last couple days, around 10:30 in the morning. But on the last morning, they knocked on my door at 9:30! Why did they come through so early? I had to checkout by 10:00, so I was in the middle of getting ready and packing up. Could they not wait until after checkout at least? Felt like I was being rushed to get out.

Anyways, I made my way to the station and grabbed some breakfast there. I got on the train to Munich, which was another high speed ICE train. At one point I looked at the screen, which showed us going at 285kph! I also took another collection of photos for those who enjoy those, here ya go!

After arriving in Munich, I made my way to my next hostel. I chose the same company as my place in Nuremberg (a&o, they seem to be everywhere in Germany), since I was satisfied with the room I got in Nuremberg, and I figured they would be fairly consistent between places. However it's not as consistent as I'd hoped for. For one thing, the a&o in Nuremberg offered single rooms, whereas the a&o here doesn't. Instead you have to just book an entire 4 bed dorm to yourself. It is cheaper than reserving all 4 beds individually, but it's still a bit silly that they don't have any single rooms that could take up half the space.

When I walked into the room, I was immediately presented with the smell of cigarettes. It's not a strong smell, but it's unpleasant when entering. It's at least easy enough to stop noticing after a couple minutes, so there's that at least. Also, there are no outlets near the beds! I can't have my phone nearby when I'm sleeping, it has to go on the other side of the room. So this one is definitely not as nice as the place in Nuremburg, but it still beats a dorm with strangers.

Anyways, enough about living accommodations. Once I'd gotten settled in to the hostel, I met up with a family friend who lives in Munich, Elise and her friend. They are both around my age, so it was nice to hang out with them few a few hours. They took me on a bit of a tour around Munich, which was a good introduction to the city. I was more focused on chatting with them than looking around, so I did some more exploring of the same places today in order to get a better feel for them.

The biggest thing I've noticed about Munich is that it's very much built around cars rather than people. That is probably at least somewhat influenced by the fact that BMW is based in Munich, so the city does its best to accommodate cars. I forgot to mention it before, but I think Nuremberg is somewhat similar with the amount of cars around. Nuremberg does have a nice large pedestrianized area in the middle, but it's basically all car territory outside that.

There is a pedestrianized area in the old town part of Munich, but it's really crowded there. It's more of a touristy area, and many of the shops there are selling stuff for tourists. Meaning it's a lot of junk I don't care for. I did try to get lunch there, but the only places selling food were sit-down restaurants that were packed with people. It didn't really make me feel comfortable during a pandemic, so I got takeout elsewhere.

Elise and her friend also gave me a bit of an explanation of the university campuses in Munich. There's 2 main universities, Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU). Both universities have buildings scattered all over the city, so there isn't a centralized campus in Munich. However just north of Munich is Garching, where a number of TUM departments have gathered to create a more unified campus location.

These split up campuses are very strange to me, I'm very much used to schools having all their buildings in a single area. I'm definitely biased, but a unified campus just makes more sense to me. The work I like to do requires expertise from multiple fields, such as physics, engineering, computer science, etc. So having all those departments and their resources located in one area makes it easy to get what I need. These split campuses seem to make that a lot more difficult, plus it sounds like you could have some classes in a completely different town. I'm sure there's reasons for having split campuses, but I've not heard any of them yet.

After we'd finished exploring around yesterday, we spent the evening by the river running through town, which was quite pleasant. The only downside is that the air got chilly really quickly, pretty much as soon as the sun went down. But it was otherwise a nice way to spend the evening with a couple friends!

That's all I've got about Munich for now. I have to admit that I'm not really a fan so far. The fact that it's built around car transit means that places I want to go are often further than walking distance. For example, there aren't a lot of restaurants near my hostel, I have to take the public transit to better food areas. And the public transit here has been decent, but I've noticed trams and busses can really get held up by traffic. Once you do get on a tram or bus, it's nowhere near as fast as it could be since there's cars always holding them up, it seems.

A really great example of that actually happened to me today. I was heading back to my hostel, which required me to get on a bus and then a tram. The bus needed to make a weird turn, but someone parked their car in a way that completely blocked the bus. So we just sat there for a few minutes, blocking even more traffic. Excellent!

I visited a gorgeous campus today, more information about that in the second half of this post! The surrounding town, Erlangen, is also quite nice from what I've seen, this is one of my favorite places so far. And of course I've been exploring Nuremburg too, so I've definitely got some things to share in this post!

But first, the ever topical accommodations. I'm really glad I chose a private room, it's been so nice to have my own sleep schedule again. I don't have to worry about keeping others up with my own noise, I don't get woken up by other people making noise (except people running through the hallway), and I've got my own bathroom that actually stays clean. For me, it's so much better than shared dorms, I'll definitely be booking more single rooms in the future.

I know I've talked a lot about my accommodation gripes recently, sorry if it's gotten repetitive! But now that I know what I like and dislike, I won't keep droning on about it. And for those who are curious to see it, here's a panorama of my room. It's really just a tiny hotel room with 2 beds pushed together and a small bathroom. Not as spacious as a typical hotel room, but it's plenty for me and a bit cheaper too.

I've gone through Nuremburg a few times to explore around, mainly just the center of the city with the large pedestrianized area. I know I comment about them in every other post, but they're really nice areas compared with the car filled cities in the US. Nuremburg feels pretty similar to Leipzig and Dresden, except with older buildings and more slopes. There's also a river that runs through the middle with some bridges crossing it (which is mostly what I took pictures of). I also visited the Nuremberg castle, which is built on top of a hill and has a great view of the surrounding area.

There's also a plaza area full of vendors selling things, all with their red and white striped tents. I've noticed a lot of places are selling Mediterranean and Middle Eastern foods, which I haven't noticed in the previous places I've visited. There's also a regional type of bratwurst called Nürnberger Rostbratwürste, which are usually 3 small sausages served in a bread roll with mustard. Apparently the EU has protected this name, so they're not allowed to be made anywhere other than Nuremberg. Interesting! 

I haven't experienced too much of the public transit around here, but it seems to be a mix of bus, tram, and U-Bahn. I don't know what's the most popular, but I've seen lots of busses an only 1 tram (and I haven't gone underground at all).

Also, the bike infrastructure here looks pretty good. There's lots of bike lanes on the sidewalks, usually indicated with red or some dark gray. These work really well, since people tend to stay off them unless there's a crowded area, at which point the cyclists just slow down to get through safely. Here's an example from an intersection near where I'm staying, it's really easy to tell where bikes are meant to go (as well as cars and public transit). This does a great job of separating each mode of transit, no one is held up by any other mode of transit (for example, cars getting stuck behind slower cyclists, or public transit getting held up by car traffic).

The bike infrastructure isn't perfect though. There are plenty of places that either don't accommodate cyclists well, or even at all. Here's another example nearby, where cyclists have to ride in a painted bicycle gutter next to cars moving faster than them. Why not put the bike lane on the other side of the parked cars? Physical separation from moving traffic is much better when it can be done. Plus then you wouldn't have to worry about a parked car suddenly pulling out in front of you. Also, there's only a bike lane going west on this road, where do you ride when heading east?

Another interesting trick I've seen is this type of road in the next picture, where there are bike lanes going in both directions, and a single car lane in the middle. Cars can still drive in both directions, but they're not constrained to stay in a lane like a normal road. If two cars come across each other with no cyclists around, they just move into the bike lanes to avoid each other. If bikes are around, then I'm guessing the cars just slow down to wait for the best time to pass by (haven't actually seen that happen). I think these roads are interesting and fine for low density traffic, but probably become dangerous with medium and high density traffic.

Ok, enough about bikes, let's talk about Erlangen! The reason I visited is because there's a university here called Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, usually written as FAU. It's split into multiple campuses, which is still a bit of a confusing point for me. But I believe there's 1 (2?) in Erlangen and 1 in Nuremberg. The PhD I'm thinking of doing is based on lasers, and the Erlangen campus is home to their optics programs.

Erlangen is about 20km north of Nuremberg, so I took a train over. I had searched for FAU on Google Maps, which brought me to a building near the train station with a really nice park behind it with this large fountain.

But all the buildings I could see around were just shops, not school buildings. This is where I started getting really confused about where the actual campus is (hadn't yet realized it was split), and did some frantic Google searches. I discovered the main campus is actually in the south corner of Erlangen, so I'm really not sure what this area was. That's also why I think there's 2 campuses in Erlangen, even though Wikipedia says there's only 1. Oh well, I took a bus to the main campus area, since that was a few km away.

I hadn't realized this at the time, but there's 2 main areas of the campus. From what I've gathered, the physics and chemistry departments are on the north side in more of a forested area, and the engineering departments are on the south side. That may not be a complete explanation, but that's what I'd figured out when I was there. There's also a suburban housing area west of the campus, the east and south sides are forested.

I only explored the north half since I wanted to see the physics buildings. In hindsight I really should have explored through the south side too, but it's a bit late for that unfortunately. Regardless, I really enjoyed walking through that part of campus! Pretty much all the areas between the buildings are forested, so it was a really pleasant area to walk through! Many of the paths between buildings are gravel rather than being paved over, so it really felt more like walking on a trail than going between university buildings. I really enjoyed this!

I've never seen a place quite like this before, it very much feels like buildings have just been placed in the middle of a forest, rather than the area being built from the ground up. And it was incredibly quiet too, all the foliage does a decent job of absorbing sound waves. Even though there was a decent amount of construction happening to the physics buildings, I could barely hear it.

I even passed by a machine shop with lots of fun tools, including lathes, bandsaws, milling machines, drill presses, etc. I do a lot of projects that require tools like these, so this got me excited. Someone left the door open, so I nabbed a picture (it came out a bit blurry, whoops!).

A lot of the buildings in this area seemed older, but there were some newer ones too. For example, the northernmost building on campus has a much more modern design to it. This is the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, which I imagine is where some laser labs are located. If I were to do a PhD here, there's a good chance I'd work in this building.

That's the extent of what I explored at FAU. This is the first campus I've visited in Germany that actually got me excited, I really enjoyed exploring around it! This one is definitely at the top of the list for now in terms of physical campuses. I don't know a lot about this school's research reputation, but I'll definitely be looking into it now. From my preliminary searching, it sounds like a good institute, the tricky part is finding an advisor for my project.​ But I'll have to save that for later.

That's all I've got for now, I do quite like Erlangen from what I've seen (which isn't a lot, admittedly). I'm glad I visited here, but I can't stay any longer, I'm off to Munich tomorrow! That's apparently where all the German stereotypes come from, we'll see how much I actually come across. Take care!

I've arrived in Nuremburg! I've written about today's adventures below, but realized I forgot to mention a couple things in the previous post. So I'm including those here before the main story for today.

I experienced my first Sunday in Germany a couple days ago. What's special about that? Well, it's what Germans call the Ruhetag, or literally "rest day." Almost all stores are closed, only a few places selling food stay open. But even those have reduced hours, so you'd better make sure you have what you need if you're cooking! Also, the public transit was running at reduced capacity, so trams and busses came less frequently to each stop. Better not miss the one you need!

Most of the streets around the center of Leipzig had been closed off. They usually have medium density traffic in them, but on Sunday the roads were completely devoid of cars. People had set up various activities on the roads, such as this place for kids to practice riding bikes.

There were still plenty of people in the center of the city, but definitely a lot fewer than normal. It wasn't eerily quiet or anything, but it was very obviously a more quiet day than normal. Germans do really seem to value their days off!

Unrelated, but I've also noticed a road sign here that I've not seen in the US. It's a yellow and white diamond, which indicates to drivers that their road has priority over intersecting roads. All the intersecting roads will have yield signs (standard red and white upside-down triangle), so there's no confusion about who has right of way. This is a lot like 2-way stop signs in the US, except drivers giving right of way aren't required to come to a full stop if they don't need to (which no one does anyways, so this makes fewer criminals).

It was fun to see stuff go by at that speed. Any poles placed next to the rail line passed by incredibly fast, definitely keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times! I decided to get a picture of a pole with a really fast shutter speed (1/8000s), which gave this super neat image demonstrating the rolling shutter effect.

Obviously the pole is actually vertical, but the camera captures the pixels row-by-row. So the pixels near the top were captured slightly later than the bottom ones, at which point we'd moved a bit, causing the pole to appear to be leaning.

Even more interestingly, the shadow behind it is at a different angle! In reality, the shadow of the pole must be parallel to the pole, but the parallax effect means the shadow didn't move as far in the view of the camera. Neat!

There were also several tunnels we passed through on the way, at which point it did get quite a bit louder do to the sound getting reflected by the walls. Something I observed is that each time we entered or exited a tunnel, my ears needed to pop. That means there must have been a significant pressure change going into the tunnels, cool!

And here's a collection of scenery photos I took along the ride. This is the first time I've tried the gallery feature in a post, you can click on each image to make them bigger

Once the train arrived in Nuremberg, I made my way to the hostel. I booked a single room rather than a dorm, since I just can't handle any more of that. It may have a higher price, but it's a lot more nice! (yay rhyming) It's basically just a small hotel room, perfect for me! And it may be more expensive that a hostel dorm, but I prefer to think of it as a cheap hotel, since that's really more what it feels like.

The hostel I booked at actually didn't have great reviews, but many of the complaints were about not having good ways to meet people. I'm not actively trying to meet people on this trip, especially during a pandemic, so I don't really view that as a downside. I'm also beginning to think that people reviewing hostels are more into nightlife culture (parties, clubs, etc.), since all the highly rated places I've stayed at seem to be around the more hip nightlife areas. This place had a bit of a lower rating (8/10, compared with over 9/10 for the ones I've stayed at), and I'm actually liking it more since it's less focused on nightlife culture. So I'll probably look for hostels with slightly lower ratings, since that may actually be better for me.

Plus this hostel has laundry facilities, which I was really in need of! It wasn't cheap, 3.5 euros for the washer and 2.5 for the dryer. But I've got clean clothes finally! I also took a nice long shower now that I've got a private bathroom again, it's so nice not having other people around in the same bathroom. Having your own bathroom also means it'll be cleaner, since there's no one else to make a mess.

After getting all that sorted, I had a stroll through town. Again, the center is a big pedestrianized area with lots of shops. I really like these areas, they're so much nicer than streets full of cars everywhere. There were also lots of merchants with red and white tents selling various things, including fruits/vegetables/meats, meals, clothes, jewelry, trinkets, etc. And there was a big church that had construction crews working on it, so I assume they're working on restoring it.

That's all I've got for now. I haven't explored enough through the city to remark on it yet, so I'll save that for next time. Take care!

Yesterday was pretty busy for me and I didn't get back to the hostel until midnight, so I decided to postpone the blog post until today. I also realize there weren't many pictures in the last post, so hopefully that's remedied in this one. I've got a lot to talk about, so let's jump in!

Both nights at the hostel have been a mixed bag, mostly dependent on who else is in the same room with me. The first night I slept reasonably well, the second night was pretty bad. Someone had an aggressive snore that sounded like he was plowing bubbles in a cup. Loudly. For hours. I decided to sleep with my headphones on, because uncomfortable sleep beat no sleep.

I also figured I'd show a picture of the room I'm sleeping in. The decorations on the walls are definitely nice, but that's about the only thing I like here. There's not much else in this room besides the beds, which makes it feel like a jail cell to me. And the bed frames are steel pipes, which is about as cheap as it gets. The ladder up to the top bunk is painful without shoes on, and there aren't any hard barriers preventing you and your stuff from falling off the top bed.

Compare that to this example from Leipzig. The wall facing the street is almost entire glass, and there's plenty of lights on inside so you can actually see in. This just feels a lot more inviting to me, since it's clear what's actually being sold, and whether they're popular by how many people are inside.

Now, I'm sure a lot of my opinions on this are influenced by what I'm familiar with from the US, everyone has their biases. But for me, I just prefer when stores have large windows, and it's made me feel more comfortable when looking for a place to buy something.

Another aspect that stood out to me is the scale of buildings. Berlin just felt like a completely inhuman scale, everything was way larger than it needed to be. I've actually seen doors that were 3-4m tall, which is ridiculous. Dresden and Leipzig have felt much more normal, and designed for humans.

I also think there's a bit of a difference in the colors of buildings. Berlin and Leipzig felt a bit dull mostly using light gray and shades of brown. Some of the buildings in Leipzig use stronger colors like white and black (or dark grays), or red from brick buildings. It's definitely not every building, but it feels a bit less dull here.

Leipzig also has a really good pedestrianized area in the middle of the city like Dresden, it's nice to walk around in. This is something that's sorely missing in Berlin, pretty much every street was designed for cars rather than people. Removing cars makes these places feel way safer, they're much quieter, and can fit a lot more people. There's even an entire block here in Leipzig that has no buildings in it, making for a nice big open plaza.

Speaking of city centers, I really like how the train stations are very often located right near the center of the cities. It makes travelling so much easier than airports, since you don't need to spend an extra hour or more at each end of your trip. The central station in Leipzig acts like the main hub area for all the public transit here. Pretty much all the tram lines pass through it, and extend outwards. Which means if you're trying to go around the center of the city by tram, it's not really possible. There are some bus lines that go around, but they don't seem to be as abundant as the trams here.

For example, I looked for the best route between the end of 2 adjacent tram lines. These places are about 4km apart in a straight line, yet the best public transit time I found was just under 1 hour. Driving is definitely a better option, at around 15 minutes. Even cycling is better, at around 20-25 minutes. So the public transit in Leipzig is great for getting to and from the center of the city, not great for getting around other places.

The trams here also seem a bit older than the ones in Dresden. Panels rattle, the seats are hard, and they can be pretty loud. Interestingly, the S-Bahns here are substantially nicer to ride on, they seem very new. I've only ridden them once, but they're a lot nicer than the trams. Which is a bit of a shame, because the trams definitely seem like the most common mode of public transit around here.

Most of my time yesterday was actually spent out in the suburbs with Josh. This is something I haven't been able to do in Berlin and Dresden, so it was nice to experience it here at least. I imagine suburbs in Germany are fairly similar to one another, like they are in the US. There also seems to be a bit more variety in housing options here, rather than just cookie cutter single family houses. While there's certainly a consistent style between all the houses, they don't all look exactly the same as each other. There's also larger apartment buildings as a common housing option.

All the buildings have older architectural styles, but the insides seem to be done in a more modern style (at least, the one I've been in). Another thing I've noticed is that it's very green around here. That's probably because I'm coming from Colorado where it's really dry and brown for most of the year. But still, I think more of the space is reserved for open spaces like parks rather than houses everywhere. On that note, here's something else found in the suburbs that is very German:

​Kleingärten!

These are collections of small garden plots that people can rent to grow their own crops and plants. That's actually the direct translation, "small gardens." The buildings are not houses since you're not allowed to live in them, but they're a lot like tiny houses that can be used to relax while working on the gardens. The plots are roughly 10x20 meters or so, and there's restrictions on how much of the plot can be occupied by crops, buildings, etc.

For those who are into gardening, these are lovely areas to walk through, since there's so much variety on what crops have been planted. It's a great compromise for those who are living in places without any kind of yard, such as apartment complexes. And Germans really seem to like having nature around, so these are actually pretty common around the suburbs. Neat!

I've spent most of today just relaxing and compiling this post, so there's not much else that's happened. Like I said, I've got one more night in this hostel in Leipzig, then I'm off the Nuremburg tomorrow! I've booked a single room in a hostel for the duration of my stay, so that should help me feel a bit more comfortable. Until then, auf wiedersehen!

I slept much better last night. The snoring person had left, and I closed all the windows to keep out the street noise. Definitely way more quiet than the previous night! I hadn't realized it before, but there's a bar on the opposite side of the hostel that only seemed to open up at night. That probably explains why people were making so much noise last night!

Yesterday, I was planning on taking the train that left around 11am, but I instead decided to take the train that left at noon just in case I wanted to sleep in a bit longer. This hostel allowed guests to checkout by noon, so which helped me make that decision. I didn't end up really needing the extra time, but it's nice not having to rush in the morning.

I got to the station almost an hour early, but right after the 11am train left. So that left me with an hour to kill. I hadn't had breakfast, so I decided to grab food at the station. The only choices were either a sandwich place or a Burger King. I wasn't really in the mood for a sandwich, and I was curious whether the fast food chains I'm familiar with are any different here. So I popped into the Burger King.

Fortunately for my food anxiety, there were screens to order from that even allowed changing the language to English. And there were very few people around, so I didn't feel like I was holding up anyone. That made me way more confident about actually getting what I wanted! I decided on the bacon cheeseburger meal, since that's usually a favorite of mine.

When the food came, it looked pretty typical: drink, burger, and fries. Interestingly, the drink came with a paper straw, which is much better than single-use plastic straws found all over the US! The fries tasted pretty much like I remember, nothing too different there. However, the burger itself was a bit different. The meat didn't quite taste the same. I'm not sure what it was, it's a pretty subtle difference, but the flavor didn't seem to pop like I'm used to with US burgers. Just felt a bit bland.

The bacon is what really threw me off. I'm used to getting a few long and thin strips that usually have a bit of crunch to them. But this bacon was something else. Each piece was much shorter and wider, and had no crunch whatsoever. In fact they were actually a bit on the chewy side, certainly not what I was expecting. And there was a lot more than just 4 pieces, there were probably a dozen or so. At one point, several pieces got dragged out of the burger when I took a bit, after which the burger became pretty messy with all the sauces.

It definitely wasn't a bad meal by any means, it tasted very close to normal Burger King food. I think it shows that chains like this make the effort to ensure their foods are very similar regardless of where they're located. The biggest difference was definitely the bacon, and it makes me wonder if Germans prefer their bacon done differently.

Anyways, I hopped on the train to Leipzig after finishing my food. The route I selected had a transfer at one station, where the first train ride was about 30 minutes, and the other was about an hour.

This first train was absolutely packed with people. I got in a coach at one end, and people were sitting in the entrance area because it was so full. I walked through a couple coaches, and every seat was taken. I decided to join the people sitting at one of the entrances, because there was no way I'd find a seat anywhere else. It also happened to be a double-decker train, so there were some stairs I could sit on at least.

I hopped off at the transfer station, and quickly realized I was out in the middle of nowhere. This wasn't a big station with stores and everything, this place was dead. I counted a total of about 3 other people waiting for their trains, that was it. There was a road running by that some cars were using, but the station itself was practically empty. I got a pretty spooky vibe from this station.

I looked to see when my next train was coming. 1 hour and 8 minutes. I have to spend an hour at this spooky place out in the boonies with nothing to do!? Agh!

It was a bit cold and lightly raining, and there was no indoor seating from what I could tell. Once I'd figured out which platform my train was coming to, I found a seat that was at least sheltered so I wasn't getting wet. And it was a pretty boring hour of waiting around. I just listened to music on my headphones, not much else I could do really. A couple trains came through, which were the most exciting things that happened during the whole hour. I should have nabbed a picture, but didn't think about it, sorry!

My second train eventually did come on time, and it was nowhere near as packed as the last one, so I found a seat easily. Once I got to the main Leipzig station, I found a tram that had a stop fairly close to my hostel. I tried buying a ticket from the machine on the tram, but it wasn't accepting my card. And I didn't have any coins on me, so I just gave up on buying a ticket. No one tried to check me, so I didn't have any problems. Don't tell anyone!

I got checked into my hostel, which appears a lot like the first hostel I stayed at in Berlin. And I wasn't a huge fan of that one, so I may not enjoy my stay here too much. Unfortunately it was pretty much the only one available, so I'm stuck with it until I leave. The bedroom again feels a bit like a decorated jail cell; there's 3 bunk beds and some lockers, and that's basically it. The bathrooms are shared rather than private, which is another downside for me.

One nice thing about this hostel is there's a back garden area that looks interesting. I've not gone in person yet, but I've photos from the website. And this evening, there was actually a concert going on in the garden. I'm not really one for concerts, especially during a pandemic, but fortunately it ended by 10pm so noise hasn't been an issue.

After I'd stowed my stuff away, I took the tram back to the train station to meet up with Josh. He's a family friend who moved to Leipzig a few years ago, and he offered to show me around a few areas in Leipzig. That also gave me an opportunity to ask him questions that I've accumulated since I've arrived in Germany. It's also valuable to me that he moved from the states, so we've got similar perspectives having come from the same place.

Once we'd met each other, we started heading towards the city center. And we immediately came across a political demonstration group that was marching through the city. We didn't want to get involved, so we managed to make our way around them.

The center of Leipzig is another big pedestrian area like in Dresden, which I really like. There were a lot more people around here than the one in Dresden, which is probably a result of having a larger population, and it's a weekend. Regardless, it definitely felt a bit more lively than Dresden.

More of my attention was focused on talking with Josh than looking around at the city, so I'm going to save my commentary about that for the next post. But in short, I like it more here, the architecture is more of a modern style that appeals to me.

We walked through the Leipzig University campus on our way. It's physically much smaller than the other campuses I've visited, only 2 or 3 buildings from what I can tell. But even without students around, I liked the feel of this campus much more than the previous campuses I've visited.

I did not sleep well at all last night, mostly due to lots of intermittent noise. Someone in the room snored very loudly for short intervals, some people outside started yelling for no apparent reason at 2am, and cars driving by in the morning were very loud since all the windows were open for some reason. I did try my noise cancelling headphones a couple times, but they're not comfortable to sleep with. I usually sleep with my head sideways, which I can't do with headphones on, so it wasn't comfortable for me. Not a great night, so I've been fairly tired today.

When I did finally get up around 11am, I wanted to get some food to hopefully energize me a bit. But I have to admit, I've been really intimidated about ordering food here. It's not like it's fundamentally different from getting food in the US, just tell the person what you want and give them money in exchange. But there's a handful of minor differences that each intimidate me a little bit. And summing all these minor intimidations together makes me very intimidated about it. Here's a few of those things:

Obviously, the language is different. I do know a bit of German, enough to say things like "I'd like a pizza!" or "Check please!" But usually when ordering food, you get asked questions like "What size?" or "What toppings do you want?" or "How spicy do you want that?" Those are questions that I don't understand and can't answer in German. And I don't want to just ask to speak in English each time, because that doesn't help me learn the words.

Another big one for me has just been figuring out where to go and who to talk to. I've seen so many shops and restaurants where the entrance just isn't clear at all. So many of the doors around here are covered in stickers and graffiti for some reason, so it's not clear which door you're meant to go through. Even more confusing is that you're not even meant to enter the buildings sometimes! A lot of smaller restaurants have an exterior window somewhere that you're meant to order through, so you have to find that instead. I've also noticed a lot of businesses are really dark inside for some reason, so it's not even clear whether they're open unless you can find a bunch of people standing in line or some other indication.

Here's an example I found on Google Street View. There's 2 bars here, and 3 doors. Which door corresponds to each bar? I could probably make an educated guess that the middle door is to get to the upper floors, but how do I know for certain? Some buildings have that door in the middle, other buildings have that door on the edge. None of the doors have signs on them indicating where they go. And on top of that, all these windows look dark inside and I don't see any people. Are they open for business? I don't know!

One obvious way to tell if a restaurant is open is whether there's people sitting at tables outside the front of the restaurant. I actually quite like seats out the front like this, but that's also been another source of confusion since I've not experienced outdoor seating like this before. I'm used to restaurants having a main entrance that everyone goes through, but this style of seating completely removes that. And waiters in the US will basically hold your hand through the entire dining process, including bringing you to your table, asking if you're ready to order, asking if you need anything multiple times through the meal, and nagging you about paying afterwards.

From what I've gathered, that's not the case in Germany. Your waiter will not hold your hand through the whole thing, you basically have to summon them when you want something. You choose your own seat, and you call the waiter when you're ready to pay. It's still not clear to me whether you have to call them when you want to order or if they'll come to you. How do you know if the waiter knows about you after you sit somewhere?

These are just a collection of things I've come across since I've been in Germany. I've managed to figure out some of them, but I'm still confused on a lot of them. And that's not helped by the fact that I've been very concerned about not doing the wrong thing. I don't want to be seen as the dumb American tourist who doesn't know how to order food in the country he's visiting. Which is pretty silly, since literally no one here knows who I am, and I will never see any of these people ever again. So who cares if I look foolish?

I only just consciously realized this today. Ever since I've arrived in Germany, I've been subconsciously fussing over how people would think of me if I did something wrong. Because I've had this anxiety about not wanting to look foolish, I've been incredibly reluctant to order food even though I'm hungry. I'm glad I've finally realized that I've been doing this to myself, because it's a bit ridiculous. It really doesn't matter what people think of me, it's much more important that I don't starve myself, and don't have so much stress about it. I'm definitely going to be more conscious about this moving forward, and just let people think whatever they want about me without letting that affect me!
​
After I'd finally gotten some food, I wanted to visit the university in town, which is TU Dresden. I took the public transit to get there and was looking up routes through Google Maps. But I think its routes must be outdated, because the trams and busses kept turning in places I wasn't expecting. So I had to hop off and find another vehicle going in the right direction until I got close enough to walk.

I eventually made my way to TU Dresden. Again, I was expecting students to be roaming around campus since it was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, but there was hardly anyone around. It felt a bit like a ghost town with the occasional person just passing through. I'm beginning to suspect there's just no in-person classes because of the pandemic. Or there's something else going on that I'm not aware of. Regardless, I was definitely hoping to see some actual activity happening on university campuses, but right now they're just dead areas.

Lack of people aside, I still had a walk through campus anyways to get a feel for it. The buildings aren't as imposing as the ones in Berlin, but they're still very large. And similar to TU Berlin, TU Dresden has a big main road running through the middle of it. However the Dresden campus actually has a pedestrian bridge running over it, so that's nice. But there definitely seemed to be a lot less foliage around the Dresden campus, most of the place seemed to either have buildings or paved roads. There was also a lot of construction happening on several buildings, meaning it was hard to actually go everywhere I wanted to see.

So I've not really seen what I've been hoping for in the campuses in Germany so far. The biggest disappointment for me has been that both campuses had very few people in them, making them feel like dead places. In my mind, a good school has lots of students bustling around, but that's clearly not what's happening here. I guess my expectations have been out of line, so I'll need to readjust for the future.

I made my way back to the center of the city to better document some of the road infrastructure here, because there are some very neat things I've noticed. As I mentioned yesterday, there are very few places that cars to go through the center of town, less than 5 main roads (depending on how you count). This means pedestrians and cyclists encounter cars very rarely, so they're not usually a concern at all.

When cars are encountered, it's handled really well from what I've seen. One simple solution is to just have people go over the cars, such as this bridge that connects the north and south sides of Dresden. It also goes over a major road, so there's no interactions between people and cars.

The other main solution is very well designed crosswalks. In the US, there's usually a 6-lane road with hundreds of cars zooming down at over 40mph. Here, there's only 1 or 2 lines of cars going in each direction, and the lanes are designed in a way that cars drive under 20mph, which is a heck of a lot safer. Additionally, the lanes going in opposite directions have been physically separated from each other, which allows people to deal with one direction of cars at a time. This also means people don't have to wait for a clearing on both sides, a clearing on one side is sufficient progress through.

The car lanes also have a bike lane painted onto them for cyclists. It's not fantastic bike infrastructure, physical separation from car lanes would make them a lot better. But they're at least more than 3ft wide like in the US, so that's something. And they're usually denoted by red surfaces, which is a nice visual indicator that cars should keep their distance.

In addition to separated car lanes, the lanes are spaced even further apart to allow all the public transit vehicles to have their own section in the middle. The busses and trams are the only vehicles allowed in this area, so it gives them extra priority over cars. And because the public transit vehicles often have tens or hundreds of people on them, fewer of those vehicles are needed to move people around than if each person had their own car. And fewer vehicles means there's less risk of a person getting hit by one, thereby helping improve safety. Oh, and they're bright yellow, so it's hard to not see them. There's also a station placed in the middle for people to get on and off the public transit. It's right in the middle of the pedestrian area, so it's easy to get in and out as needed.

Lastly, pedestrians have their own stop lights at each cross point. And people here seem to be really good at actually waiting for the light to change even if there's no vehicles in the intersection. Unlike the US, where people often just walk across if there's no cars around while the light is red. The lights here appear to be on a timed circuit, and it's frequent enough that it doesn't feel like you're waiting forever to get your turn.

​I've also noticed that people are incredibly good at passing by each other. I've noticed a few times when there's a few dozen people waiting for the crosswalk light to change, and everyone gets past each other in about 10 seconds. Take this picture for example.

Now imagine that we repeat this chaotic crossing where every person has their own 2-ton death machine (*cough* I mean, uh, car). Without any other infrastructure to guide people, it would become a congested mess that wouldn't clear for several minutes. Even with modern infrastructure, it would still take a lot longer than 10 seconds to get everyone across. since drivers have to wait for the car in front of them move before they can. This means people further from the traffic light are still sitting around after the light turns green. People are just so much better at navigating past each other when not in giant vehicles.

The last thing I want to highlight is crosswalks that separate pedestrians and cyclists. These are great, since cyclists don't like to be held up by pedestrians, and there's a higher risk of a bike hitting a pedestrian. The red on the ground makes it very obvious where pedestrians and cyclists are meant to go. Also, the stop line for cars is very far back from where people are actually crossing, you can just barely see the dashed line on the left in the picture below. This makes it much easier to tell that a car will stop sufficiently far away to not hit you, rather than stopping 2ft away from you like crosswalks in the US.

That's all I've got from Dresden, heading to Leipzig tomorrow! I've got a family friend who lives there, so I'll be able to ask all the questions that have built up over the last couple days. Looking forward to that!

I'm in Dresden now! I'm liking it a lot more here than Berlin, more of that below. But first, I had to get out of Berlin.

Sleeping in the space capsule was pretty nice, didn't have any disruptions from anyone else for once! I got some pretty deep sleep, so I felt pretty refreshed when I woke up. Although one problem I encountered is that daylight doesn't get into the capsules. At all. So there's no way to know what time it is other than looking at a clock. I did have an alarm set, but I found myself waking up early in paranoia thinking I'd overslept.

I turned on the light to help me wake up, the lights don't have any dimming. So either it's nearly pitch black, or blindingly bright. Not the nicest way to get up, would be nice to put the lights on a knob of some kind to adjust the brightness.

I got up at 9am, which left me with about 2 hours before my train left. It was plenty of time for me to get ready, pack up, check out, and make my way to the train station without feeling rushed at all. I got the the platform about 30 minutes early, so I think that's a good routine for the future. Most hostels seem to have a check-out time of 11am and a check-in time of 3pm, so I can spend the interim period on a train between cities.

Since I had some time to kill, I was going to pull out my headphones to listen to music, when a guy came up to me and asked "Do you speak English?" I was a bit caught off by that, given that he could have asked anyone else at the platform, and just happened to choose one of the few people who isn't German.

It gets even better. His next question was "Is this the platform to get to Dresden?" I'm going there too!!! Literally the first 2 things he said, I couldn't believe it. On top of that, even he was using the Eurail app with his trip planned out, and he's from the states too. Definitely not what I'd expected to find this morning!

It turns out he'd selected the wrong station out of Berlin when planning his trip, so he just joined me on my train to Dresden. That's definitely one of the best things about the Eurail pass, it's not a big issue if you somehow mess up your trip, you can just get on another train without having to pay extra for it. We even had our tickets checked on this train, which was no problem with the Eurail app. We chatted for most of the train journey, it was nice to have a friend for a couple hours.

Speaking of train journey, it was fairly pleasant, definitely a lot nicer than flying (yes, I'm going to keep saying it, too bad if I'm being repetitive). There weren't many exciting things to see, a lot of it was surrounded by forests, which reminded me of how much of a desert Colorado is. There were also a few houses we passed by occasionally, plus a handful of wind turbines.

We arrived at the station, where I had to part ways with my new friend. Getting to the hostel wasn't too bad, it's pretty easy to navigate if you've got you're phone with you. One annoying thing is that my suitcase has hard plastic wheels, so it's pretty loud when I'm walking through quiet streets. Especially since a lot of places have bumpy sidewalks, feels like everyone's looking at me thinking "could you keep it down!?" But that's probably just what I tell myself. Probably...

The hostel I'm staying at in Dresden is on the corner of a building, so I went through the door on the corner, which actually led into a bar. Fortunately the people there saw my bags and redirected me towards the hostel doors. Which was even more confusing. There were 2 doors covered in about 100 stickers, but I didn't see a sign indicating whether it was the entrance to the hostel. I tried opening each door, but they both felt locked.

I spent the next couple minutes trying to figure out where the heck the entrance was when I heard the door start buzzing. I pushed on the door, and it still didn't open. I pushed harder and it finally opened. Is it just me, or is it unnecessarily difficult to find business entrances in Germany? I've been expecting to find obvious signs saying something like "HOSTEL ENTRANCE" but nope, just a lot of guessing so far.

Anyways, I got checked in and made my way to the room. Here's an image from the hostel website of my room, it's pretty homely! This is way more cozy than the first hostel I stayed at, which was totally barebones and felt more like a jail.

Also, it turns out some hostels charge extra for bed sheets. Apparently that's because a lot of backpackers bring their own sheets, so it helps them save money if they don't need it. It was only 2 Euros for the sheets anyways, which isn't a deal breaker by any means. So I got to spend a few minutes making my bed, glad I know how to do that!

After settling in, I wanted to explore around the city to get a feel for it. The city center is a couple miles away from this hostel, so I decided to figure out the public transit rather than walking all the way there and all the way back. I discovered the transit company here has an app for planning routes and buying tickets like in Berlin, but this app isn't as good. In fact, I actually got stuck on the registration step because it requires a phone number, but it has to be in a specific format. And it doesn't specify what the format is, so I wasn't able to register. I tried with and without the country code, adding spaces in various places, nothing worked. I gave up and just bought a physical ticket from a machine near a tram stop.

And today was my first time on a tram! I never did end up getting on one in Berlin, but trams seem to be the main transit mode here in Dresden. I think they're nifty, basically trains that are also on the road. Or like really long busses confined to a single route. Oh, and they're all bright yellow here too, is that a German thing? It certainly makes them easy to spot!

I got off at the castle in Dresden. Or the Frauenkirche. I'm not sure which is which. There's a bunch of buildings that were destroyed in the war and rebuilt, that's pretty much all the history I know about Dresden. Regardless, I got a photo.

I kept walking past this area, and came across an awesome pedestrian area! From what I've gathered, the center of Dresden is split into a few different places. South of the River Elbe is the Altstadt, and the north side is the Neustadt. The center of each side are primarily pedestrian and bike areas that are very large, and they're loaded with people going about their days. Altstadt is bigger and seems to have a bit more activity.

I took some photos to show off these areas, because I really like them. I'll go in geographical order from south to north. This is the southernmost area of Altstadt, it's basically a big shopping area that feels pretty modern.

Next is the north side of Altstadt. This is more of a dining and social area from what I could tell, there were loads of restaurants around with lots of people. There was also a market area where you could buy loads of different things from tiny little shops.

And here's Neustadt on the other side of the river. This was also a shopping area type of place, but had a lot more foliage around than Altstadt. It wasn't nearly as busy as the south side, but there were a good number of cyclists commuting through.

Both sides of the river are connected with a few bridges. One bridge is exclusively for pedestrians and cyclists, and connects the pedestrian/bike areas of each side. It's super easy to get from the north side of Neustadt to the south of Altstadt as a pedestrian or cyclist, this area has been designed very well!

Even when you get out of the pedestrian and bike areas, cars are still uncommon except for the main roads. And there are very few main roads in downtown Dresden, less than 10 or so (depending on how you count it). The rest are these side streets dominated by people, not cars. Plenty of cyclists and pedestrians go through these streets to reach nearby places, it's wonderful having everything you need nearby. There are cars parked on these streets, and some cars do occasionally come through, but these aren't treated as through-roads. This is so much more pleasant Berlin.

And just north of Neustadt is a large park that gets used very well by the locals. It wasn't very occupied early in the day when it was cloudy and lightly raining, but it had a lot more people in it once the skies cleared this evening. There was even a group with an enormous kite, I think it was about 10m wide. I think they were trying to fly with it or something, I'm not quite sure. They had a big backpack that it was attached to with relatively short lines, and they would start running once it was in the air. It wasn't really windy enough though, so the kite kept falling back to the ground. It was fun to watch though!

While I was watching the kite group, another group sat down near me. One of them came up to me and asked if I had a lighter for his joint that he just rolled up. Now... I'm not familiar with smoking culture in Germany (or anywhere, for that matter), but the legal smoking age in Germany is 18, and this kid looked more like 15. And I couldn't tell if it was weed or not, but that's illegal for recreational use in Germany. Or at least, that's what Google tells me, it seems the culture is perhaps different from what the law says. Regardless, it didn't feel right for this kid to be smoking whatever it was.

I want to talk more about some infrastructure things here, but it's getting late, so I'll save it for the next post. One of my roommates is snoring, so I might keep my headphones on for the night. Bis bald!