Yeah

Finally I have some pictures! Sarah came to visit and flew away yesterday morning.

This is in the car on the way home from the airport. We basically went straight to Bad-Godesberg and then to Church. The sun was shinging and it was a beautiful day. The sun is actually shining today as well. It's wonderful and warm.

And this is by church (you can see it in the background). But these motorcycles with tops are cool and strange, so we took a picture of one.

And this, my friends, is the smart car that we rented. Sarah and I had talked about possibly renting one and I didn't have class on Wednesday. So Wednesday morning I called a bunch of car rental places and Europcar had a smart car on the lot and he said that we could rent it the same day. It was really great and really worth it to rent the car!

Oh, there it is. So small, so speedy, very cool. AND, it was a convertable (ible?), which just added to the coolness factor! This pictures was when we stopped by the school that Sarah had volunteered at while she was in Bonn. The teachers were really nice and I really liked how international the school was.

And here is another picture of the car. This is at some little town along the Rhine. We stopped at the tourist information to see if we could get a map or ideas for the area. It was really beautiful driving along the Rhine.

And there is Sarah, looking very schick in the Smart car! We had an amazing time putting the roof up and down.

An action shot of me driving. I really like driving, especially the challenge of trying to navigate where I've never been before. You know, when you take public transportation you get sort of a scewed picture of how everything fits together, and it was really cool getting to driving and figure it out. The only thing was that the shifter was more or less lame, because it was an automatic or manual. And by manuel they mean that you can push it upwards to tell it to go to the next gear, but it really wasn't a manuel. I guess it is better for the company that way because anyone can drive it, alas.

We crossed over the Rhine on a ferry and then drove to Linz, a beautiful little town on the river. I took a picture of these houses not only because they are cute and the street is pretty and because people actually live their normal lives here (hard to believe!), but because I think it's so cool why they are built the way they are.

If you look closely you can see they they are narrower on the bottom and then get gradually wider on each level. Sarah explained to me that this was because the taxes used to be by how much of the house was touching the ground...so people would build narrow at the bottom and then try to make it wider at the top--bigger without raising the taxes. I thought that was pretty cool.

We also drove to Cologne to visit Sarah's friend Kity. It worked out nicely because Kity's sister was also there. We went to this Lebonese restaurant which was very nice. I had some sort of hummus wrap thing and then a piece of Baklava for dessert. It was a nice time and trying to get around Cologne was exciting and scary at times. I think the whole city is under construction or something.

We kind of had to take a picture of this Mc. Donalds because it is so clean and not banana yellow. It's probably one of the nicest McDonalds that I've ever seen. We used the bathrooms, which were quite posh. That's Bad-Godesberg for ya.

Yeah, and last night I went to Hannah's birthday party (one of the woman from Navis) with a bunch of the Navi people and then we went to Rhein in Flammen, which is a huge festival thingy in the Rheinaue, that enormous park that is in Bonn. I heard that 400,000 people go to it...and I believe it. It was absolutely packed. At 11pm they had a huge firework show that was about a 1/2 hour long. I spent the night with Alex, which was really great, and then came back to Church this morning. I decided that I really like when it's sunny and warm out!

I'm really hungry and I think I'm going to go eat lunch.