Daniel Gallagher

From the Blog Backlog: This photo was taken with my iPhone near the Holland Casino and HardRock Amsterdam. A very large game of chess in the plaza being played by two men. Later I’ll post the photos of the groups of men playing Chess in a park in Roma near San Giovanni.

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Just a quick post with a map of my key locations in Freiburg. Click on the pointers for a quick description. I intend to add to this map. I am currently renting a room in Gundelfingen. However, I have slept my friend Jake’s place almost as much as I have slept here since it is so far away from the city center (The HBF and near the Münsterplatz). Its only a 5 min train ride, but the last train leaves the main train station about half past midnight. This is not very conducive to going out to bars with friends. Last night I actually walked the whole way home after the 2:30 night bus never came (perhaps it does not run on Sundays). I got to my place about 4am. I think I should buy a cheap bike so I can stay out and still get home in 30min. Otherwise I will be sleeping in Jake’s little reclining chair on the weekends. I do have another toothbrush there (haha). It is the colors of the German flag.

The train to work only takes a few minutes from the HBF, but it is a separate train than I take from my place and requires a transfer. This is the distance I walked during the first day here in the rain.

GLOBAL GENERATION – LIFE CONCEPTS AND EXCHANGE OF THE YOUNGER GENERATION

Global apartment-sharing: Matsuyama (Japan), Madison (USA), Isfahan (Iran), Freiburg (Germany)

The venue provides an adequate space for presentation of the results, which on the one hand lives up to expectations of the topic itself and on the other hand helps the visitor to get a stirring and new experience.

The exhibition unites different forms of todays life concepts and illustrates them. As an agile and attractive location, for such an idea, we focus on a “student apartment-sharing community” that on the one hand symbolizes the intercultural togetherness and on the other hand represents young coexistence, cogitations, understanding, learning and style.
This means that the exhibition will be situated in a spacious flat in Freiburgs centre.

Last night was the opening of an international art exhibition I helped set up and made a very minor contribution to. Details can be found here: http://global-generation.net/en. The night consisted of art, music, film and lots of cool people from around the world. Regretfully I left my camera back at the place I was staying. I really wanted my camera for many parts of the night, especially when two of the people started juggling fire outside after they were playing music most of the night. This was something I ever expected to see at a party. I thing the jugglers were from Spain.

The party was great fun. I will go back this weekend with my camera and get some photos of the art.

Tonight I plan to head to a meet-up at the Dreisamufer Cafe. This is organized on an amazing website for travelers. I will have to explain this site in a completely separate post at another time.

Sunday, I hope to make it out to a small black forest town to visit distant cousins and also watch the EuroCup match between Germany and Poland in a local Freiburg park. This will be very exciting. There are many German Flags visible already in support for Germany’s fußball (soccar) team.

I am very happy to have now recovered from being tired, wet and cold.

I got here at 6am Wednesday after a very long train ride and was unable to get a hold of my contact at the University here. It called and texted and emailed him but didn’t get a response. I later found out he was in Munich. While I was waiting for a response and for it to get later, I explored the city and search for free WiFi. It was cold and a little misty at times. I went back to the train station to drop off my things in a locker cause they were getting really heavy. I went out again and found the university’s library looked up on a map where the building I think I am supposed to work in might be and set off to find it. On my way there it rained hard and I could not find an umbrella anywhere. I had a poncho with me but that actually seemed to make things just as bad since it didn’t cover my jeans. Also I bought new shoes before I left the USA specifically for Europe. I have done so much walking already that they both have worn holes in them and water was getting in through the bottom. I finally found an umbrella at a pharmacy for 2 euro. Its a big umbrella and a good price… the catch is it has aspirin advertisement all over it. I really didn’t care about that especially at the time… but people sure were looking at me funny with both my poncho and that umbrella. After walking forever I found my building and the professor I knew and he was on his way out for a meeting. So I went to eat some food since I had yet to eat anything. It was quite the day.

I slept at the train station the night before since my Italian trains were delayed so many times that I got to Basel Switzerland and was stranded. I arrived there at 1230 in the morning and the next train was not until 6am. I actually didn’t really sleep at all. I ended up sitting in the train station talking to a Korean/Japanese lady who was living in the UK and moving to Germany for a couple hours to kill time.

I like Germany but going from country to country takes some adjusting that I didn’t have the patience for on zero sleep. I just left Italy where everything is pronounced phonetically one way to Germany where the same thing is pronounced completely different. I was just getting used to Italian when I switch back to German that I had to get used to before. I am trying to order food half asleep in GermEnglitalian. They just give me a crazy look, laugh and try to figure out what it is that I actually want.

After all this mess, I set off to try to find this house that I have arranged to look at and see if it looks like a place I want to stay… then hopefully get some sleep and warm dry clothes on. The room is in a place in Gundelfingen two stops north of Freiburg by train. Two older ladys live there and I have no internet. I could get a internet card for my laptop that uses the cellular networks. The card is 90€ and service is 8€/day with no contract. This is not too bad, but really not very affordable either. The plus side is that I would have fast internet while on the train in Germany.

I also bought some gummy bears that are enriched with vitamin C at this cool little black forest style gummy store I found. Hopefully that helps me keep from getting ill after the cold and rain. Yesterday I got a jacket from the Freiburg H&M store. That has helped also.

It was a long couple of days…. But I am doing well!

I got to Freiburg early this morning after spending the night in the Basel train station due to delays making me miss the last train here. This also means I had to pay 37 Swiss Francs for the quick one hour train ride here rather than have it included in my rail pass day. I will update more later since I am currently paying by the hour for internet at the train station starbucks.

Rhine Helicopter Transport, originally uploaded by dgallagher.

I found this really interesting. We passed many cargo ships along the Rhine in addition to the many castles. Out of everything, this seemed to be the most popular thing to photograph by passengers of the Rhine river cruise. Everybody started snapping photos of this boats cargo more than the many castles.

Navigating the Paris Catacombs, originally uploaded by dgallagher.

This was at the end of the underground maze of bones. I figured I better ask someone to take my photo before it was too late. Yes I had all my stuff on my back during the entire trek. My back was very tired after walking around and seeing most of Paris with all my stuff on my back.

Click the links for photos, this will open a new page. On the lower right of the new page, click the map link to see where the photo was taken. I will figure out a better way to do this when I have more time. I will also add some photos to this later. Here is the map and story for now.

On my first day in Germany I landed in Frankfurt at 6am local time. Very shortly after checking into the hostel near the Frankfurt train station I made friends with a guy, Steve, from Perth Australia. Together we set off to catch the Rhine river boat. The KD (Köln-Düsseldorfer) river boat travels between Mains and Köln Germany. The main stretch between Bingen and Koblenz is very scenic with many Burgs (Castles/Fortresses) along its route.

We first tried to catch the boat in Mainz. We ended up getting off the train a stop or two too late and trying to get to the Rhine through what ended up being an industrial area. After walking a while we waited for a local bus to take us to the docks on the other side of the Rhine in Mainz. After finding the K-D booth in Mainz we were informed that the boat left there at 8am for the only time that day and could hopefully take a train to Bingen to catch the boat for its last trip up the river for the day. We grabbed a quick snack and a drink and tried to find the train station hidden behind a construction site near a cinema in some back streets. This part of the mission is plotted on the map in green. Zoom in the detailed path of slightly lost travelers.

We arrived in Bingen and took a Mercedes cab to the K-D dock after asking some locals for directions. The cab got us there just in time to see the boat pull up for it’s very short docking. I got a beer and went up on the deck for a better view.

The boat wend up the Rhine past the many castles and little towns. I used my Rick Steves book on Germany to get some background of what we were sailing past. There seems to be one hostel in Bacharach located in a castle. There was a group of people sitting at one of the tables inside the boat singing German songs and many people in the boat were singing along; at least to the chorus. I had the opportunity to listen to the music for a while as the cold rain fell during the last half of the trip.

We got off the boat at the last stop in Koblenz and ate dinner. I ordered the sauerbraten with red cabbage and potato pancakes and a large beer. The meat was nice and thick and extremely tasty.

Let me begin by saying I have the greatest friends in the world. Today Mike lent me his backpack for 3 months to take around Europe. This thing is awesome. I can’t imagine my trip ahead without this thing. The pack is the Kelty Tornado 4900