Good evening to all

It is evening here in Busingen. I'm still adjusting to the time difference. My internal clock is a bit messed up yet. It seems that it should be afternoon, not evening! I'm having a little trouble getting to sleep at an appropriate time at night so I am not waking up as early in the morning as I would like. Perhaps by the time we're ready to leave Europe, I will have it all figured out!

This part of Germany and Switzerland is experiencing unusually warm weather. Our high temp here was about 90 today with relatively high humidity. Not too many places are air conditioned (that includes our apartment), so it's somewhat uncomfortable, but we're making it. We're just thankful for a nice place to stay otherwise. I am still amazed by the beauty of the landscape surrounding this part of the world. I wish you could all be here to enjoy it with me. It makes me think of my father whose mother and father were born in Germany and Switzerland respectively. My grandmother never lost her German accent when she was speaking English and she would often mix German words with the English ones. I don't remember my grandfather since he passed away when I was only two years old. My father always wanted to visit Germany and Switzerland, but he never had that privilege, so I'm doing this in his memory.

We went to the Rhine Falls this afternoon - just a hop and a skip from the campus of EuNC. It's quite impressive, not exceptionally high, but a massive flow of water flows over it. The place was swarming with people, but interestingly enough, I did not hear anyone else speaking English! We managed to get two pastries ordered from a snack shop. One of the attendants spoke enough English to understand what we wanted. I can always spot a bargain since the pastries were on sale at two for one. I managed to read the sign indicating the bargain! Like I said before, I know just enough German to be dangerous!

Lee mentioned in his blog about us going to Stuttgart yesterday to visit with our friends, Alfred and Mary Schaar. We had a wonderful time getting reacquainted with Mary (a friend from college) and meeting her husband Alfred (a native German). They treated us to lunch at an authentic Schwaben restaurant (characteristic of this part of southern Germany). We had our picture taken with the waiter who was most congenial.

It will be a special memory for sure! Alfred and Mary did a great job showing us around the city and welcoming us into their home.

We are still deciding what our adventure will be tomorrow, but when we post again we will share it with you. Oh, one more thing before I sign off - we had an interesting time fixing lunch today. We bought what we thought were two refrigerated cheeseburgers to heat up in the microwave. No problem - right?? Well, I bit into mine and looked at it and mentioned to Lee that it didn't taste like a cheeseburger or look too much like one either. We discovered after deciphering the German description on the packaging that it was Schweinfleish (some sort of pork) It was ok, just not what we were expecting. I couldn't read all the directions about how to prepare the green beans we purchased so I just did them like I would at home and they came out fine.

Thanks for taking your valuable time to read this. I look forward to sharing more with you later. Hopefully, we can get a photo album put together so we can share some of our memorable pictures as well. Until next time I remain your friend from afar!