Me and my partner in crime. Emily had just taken a picture for another couple, so we made them take ours. Seriously, I physically forced them to do it.

The sweet time lapse picture that I took at night by keeping the shutter open. Ididn't know that the water bus was coming around the corner, but it worked out kind of nice.

In the morning when the tide is higher, parts of Venice flood and they put up all of this temporary walk-ways for people to get around

Early in the morning. Ghondalas that have not yet gone out to play.

Cool Canal. I have alot more of these types of pictures

Venice!!

The bay with lots of street artist street venders




Alright Everyone I'm sorry that it always takes me so long to get a new post out, but frankly keeping up a blog is not as fun as I thought that I might be. Not to say that I ever thought it would actually be fun to sit down and write everything down, but you know what I mean. But part of my motivation today is that I want to see if I can beat Emily at posting about our most recent trip.

So as the title of this post describes, Emily and I decided to go to Venice over our weekend (wednesday and thursday). We hustled through our rooms on Tuesday and were able to get on the road by 3:00. It is about a five hour drive from Garmisch to Venice. Side-note, I'm very thankful to have a car here. Anyways, driving through Italy was very pretty. About every 10 minutes I would spot a new castle up on some cool hillside. The best one was situation on the edge of these cliffs and it had a vineyard going down the back side of it. For those of you that don't know me very well, I have always been kind of fascinated with castles for some reason. When I was little, there was a book at the library that I would always get that told you all about castles and in the back of it, it showed you how to build a castle out of toilet paper rolls and popsicle sticks. Awesome.

We parked my car at a parking garage in Mestre ( the town just outside of venice which is way cheaper). From there we hopped on the train for a seven minute train ride across the water to the islands of Venice. We got of the train and walked through the train station towards the exits. Nothing was impressive at this point. However as soon as we walked through the exit doors of the train station everything changed. About 30 meters in front of us was the Grand Canal with boats trolling by and all the buildings were lit up by the night lights. Emily and I both kind of stopped and were like "whoa". Pretty awesome first impression. Our entire weekend was awesome. Basically just spent the entire time wandering around and checking everything out. I love all the canals and took a lot of pictures of them that I will try to upload. I loved just about everything of Venice. I am definitely a water person, so the idea of a city that is built on top of small little islands and people use boats to get around is pretty much perfect for me. I don't really know all what to tell you what we did, because really we just did a lot of wandering around trying to see everything that we could and just enjoyed the atmosphere of everything.

Getting back home on Thursday was a little bit more interesting than we had wanted. A friend of ours who had recently just been to Venice told us that we could get cheaper American gas on the way back from Venice at the Aviano Air Force Base. It was about an hour out of the way, but paying American prices per gallon is alot better than paying Euro prices per liter. We got to Aviano which the base is huge, but we couldn't find the gas station. We went inside the commersary to get some snacks and then asked one of the workers where the gas station was on base. She replied that there was not a gas station on base. Awesome. After getting over our initial shock and disbelief of our situation, we attempted to make our way back home. To make a long story short, the route from Aviano to Garmisch is very confusing and very indirect. Our 5 hour drive home took 10 hours. But in the end we made it home safely and had a awesome weekend.

German Food!!!

Now that I am here, one of the things that I am curious about is why people seemed to be making such a big deal about the German food and that I wasn't going to like it. I love German food. It is delicious. Great meats, breads, cheeses, beer. Maybe it is the kind of food that is more appealing to a man or maybe it is because I have German ancestry on both sides of my family, but regardless....it's great. One of the things that we did when we were in Munich was go to the famous Hofbrauhaus. Live Bavarian music, servers in the traditional dress, great food, good beer and giant pretzels. Loved it. And if my Mom or Michelle or anyone comes to visit, I will take you there. One thing that I like about the beer here is how simple it is. Yeah there are tons of different breweries, but their beers are very simple. Duncal, Helles, Weisen. Dark, Light, or Wheat. You can get the wheat in light or dark. But one of the really interesting things that you can order here that I think people should try at home is beer with lemonade or maybe it is lemon soda. But it is great. In a dark beer it adds the perfect amount of sweetness. Don't worry though mom, I'm not becoming an alcoholic. Chow!

I suck at blogging.

Well everyone. I'm sorry that it has taken me so long to do this. We are coming up on 3 weeks now and I have not submitted a new post. Luckily though if you have been reading Emily's blog, she does a much better job than I of keeping hers up to date. I'm not going to do a recap of the adventure that we had last week because I simply don't want to type that much. You can look at Emily's blog for that. However, if you ever find yourself in Sulzberg Germany, you should check out the Ryan and Emily castle ruins that we decided to name after ourselves.
This coming monday, Emily and I will have been here for 3 weeks. In some ways it feels longer and in other ways, it has simply flown by. I have new news though, and that is that I just recently bought a car here. Before coming over her, I didn't really think that I would need or want one, but we quickly realized the conveniences of having one here. It is a 1991 BMW 325i. Emily and I were laughing today because one, I now own two cars, which I would have never expected, and two is that my car at home is a Cadillac and my car here is a BMW....so I guess that I like nice cars? Actually the BMW is almost 20 years old, so I don't really feel like I am driving something that nice. And compared to my grandpa's Cadillac, the BMW might as well be a Ford Focus. Anyways, it's nice to have a car here now so soon.