lasts

I'm typing this over my one and only Free Hostel Frühstück (it's toast n' toaststuff) at my hostel in..........Düsseldorf! Took another spontaneous city visit, because the supposedly infallible Deutsches Bahn didn't actually ever check my Eurail ticket on the 2 hours from Mainz to Trier. A gift from Germany, how nice.

In an hour and 15 minutes I'll be on my final train trip to Leipzig. I'm increasingly excited to get there -- people keep telling me that it's actually a really cool city. It apparently started the movement against Communism in East Germany. Leipzig is my first eastern city I'll be visiting so it'll be really interesting to see the difference there. Cities like Hamburg and Stuttgart and Düsseldorf that got the shit bombed out of them in WWII are incredibly different from, say, Heidelberg and Vienna. The architecture makes so much difference in the feeling of each place.

Düsseldorf/Trier/Mainz photo posts are coming soon (probably will do that on the train today), but I want to record my feelings on Traveling Alone. It's pretty awesome. The times in Hamburg when I was really lonely weren't invalid, but I was also at a special unhappy place in my hormonal cycle and the first few days anywhere new are always uncomfortable. It's amazing to really be able to do WHATEVER I WANT. I had a large and un-ladylike meal at a restaurant last night, sitting at a table for six by myself, surrounded by boisterous Taiwanese tourists. Some people would hate that, but I thought it was kind of hilarious and awesome to be a young cute girl alone in a noisy restaurant, devouring a meat mountain and drinking beer (INCIDENTALLY, Düsseldorf's Alt Beer is the winner for Best Beer on this trip). This kind of freedom traveling is incredible, and sometimes it hits me when I'm walking around that I'm doing it alone in Germany, where no one in hundreds of kilometers gives a shit about me; I'm just another face in a crowd. I couldn't do this forever, but I'm not sick of it yet.