This morning I left early the hostel I stayed. By the way this is my first time I am traveling alone, and the experience has been quite good do far. Yesterday night I met a Korean and an Austrian and we talked till midnight. Hostel is such a great place.

Back to topic. I packed everything and left for English Garden. This is such a pastoral place! Trees, lawn, rivers, and even people riding horses! Was I in the center of the city? There is also a Chinese Turm in the garden. I couldn’t help but played the pastoral symphony while I wandered in the garden. So idyllic.

Later I went to the Residenz museum. Wha! The corridor is one of the most lavishly decorated passage I have ever seen. It was beyond word description. Very pretty. Walking through it one can really feel the lavish life of the royal family centuries ago.

In the evening I travelled to Salzburg in Austria, on the border of Germany. I felt I love Munich. I don’t usually  love a city. When I went to Prague I found it interesting but not charming, but it was probably because of the language: I don’t understand Czech language, and this made my travel experience not that great. But I really like Munich. History and modernity. City life and pastoral life. peace and dynamics. It combines three elements in one place. Such a well designed city!

I have realized that I haven’t been updating my blog for a while. This is partly because for the past week I was busy preparing my travel starting this Saturday, partly because the thunderstorm cut down the internet access in my room, but when I wanted to write and post something yesterday, I found that my computer couldn’t start. WHAT A BAD NEWS FOR ME! That means, from then on, I can only go to Starbucks for Internet and write my blogs on my iPad. It also made booking hotels and other things more difficult. But I need to accept the reality. Maybe I will change a computer.

Bt anyways… Let me talk about what happened last week.

Highlights:

1. I bought a Deutschland Railway Pass, SPEAKING GERMAN TO THE DB STAFF THE WHOLE TIME. It took me more than 20 minutes, and I can only understood 50% of what she said. But I still successfully bought the pass. Such. Great accomplishment. Since that time I felt so much more comfortable speaking German to German people.

2. I went to Dresden, capital of Saxony. Scenery in the city was OK, lots of gloomy buildings, the lucky survivors of the World War II. the scenery at the top of the Frauenkirche was great. I also took a steam boat along the Elbe river. There are so many castles along the river. The riverside was gorgeous.

3. Also in Dresden. On Saturday morning, 6.29, I had the most wonderful breakfast, or dessert, in Germany. I bought a Dresdener cheesecake at a restaurant next to Frauenkirche, went to a Chocolate museum and bought a glass of chocolate ice coffee. The cake was good, the coffee was good, but when the two were combined, OH MY GOD. A special sweetness of cheese and cake, and a special bitterness of the chocolate coffee. COMBINED. The most absolutely wonderful flavor I have ever tasted. It is hard to describe, but I felt in wonderland, that this taste couldn’t be produced in our world. Well. I then thought, that cooking is a kind of art. The great masters of art are the ones who can combine different individual elements into a harmony. Musicians make use of the special quality of every instruments and compose them into great music. Cooks combine different favors and create new flavors. Engineers and architects combine elements in art, science and  humanity and creat great products. It reminds me further, that nothing in the world works wonderfully alone. But there need to be a person who have the ability to integrate things and make them work together properly and beautifully. I wish I could become that kind of person.

4. Also in Dresden. It was I pity that I didn’t visit the green vault. Tickets were all sold out! But what surprised me was that the lady selling the tickets can speak Chinese! I was so surprised that for a moment I had nothing to say. You need to know that in DDR not many people speak even English.

5. Saturday afternoon I went to Prague. Oh man, what a beautiful city and friendly people. I stayed at a home stay, which is actually a real Czech family. It costed only 26 euro, but the family provided me with a super large room, super comfortable bed, delicious local food (especially breakfast. It was the best breakfast I had so far since last year when I left China), and so much fun. The lady in the home has a 6 year old kid, and in the morning after breakfast we played games and it was simply great. The lady and the kid literally don’t speak English, but the friendliness was expressed without words. I was also a little surprised that English was not so widely used in Europe. I used to think in Europe everyone speaks English, but that was such a wrong assumption… In Prague, for example, when I asked passerby for direction, most of them cannot understand what I said. Even people in tourist sites speaks only little English and German. Now I understand the advantage of having the ability to speak several languages. People find it better to communicate if the one he/she is talking to can speak relatively good his/hers native language.

6. I forget to mention that the train from Dresden to Prague drives along the Elbe river. The scenery along the way was also great.

7. On the train back to Leipzig I met an interesting Arabian guy. We talked all the way in German. I shared with him the delicious candy I brought from Chongqing, and we talked a lot about our languages, Arabian and Chinese. In the end he gave me a postcard he bought in Prague as a present and wrote on it wishes in German and Arabian. This postcard really made my day! A nice encounter, discussions of cultures, spending good time, and lots of thinking: the meaning of traveling??

1. BMW! The museum is fantastic. Lots of cars. History of the company. Some future car models. Really caught my eyes. But I am not that into cars… In the museum there seems to be millions of car models, and I didn’t pay any attention to remember one. And one thing learnt from the BMW museum: BMW once made aircraft engines.

2. The Olympia park! It was definitely big, but comfortable. Lots of people come here for exercises such as basketball, soccer, cycling and running.

3. The city center. Lots of people. Really dynamic! There was a street band playing works of Bach. There are people under tents on the street selling various items. But the most significant sight was the buildings. It is amazing that in such a modernized and huge city, in the center of it lie so many historical buildings. I use to think only the cities that survived the WW II maintain the egg shaped city layout, but actually big cities like Munich also follow this construction. It seems to me to be the perfect example of the integration of history and modernity.

4. The original Augustiner Brewer! This is a restaurant located a little bit far from the city center. Not a lot of people, but it is in fact the authentic Augustiner Bier Brewer. Beer here was sooooo good. I also had a typical Bavarian dish, comprised of duck and pork knuckle. But little expensive. The entire room had only one servant, and he was super busy that night.