Deep in Bavaria

I had a nice 12 hour plus train ride to get deep into Bavaria and have been staying with my friend Cathrin the last couple days. It is my first time to see real Germany since my only previous experiences were Oktoberfest, a few hours in the Frankfurt train station, and RUN LOLA RUN. It’s also been nice catching up from six years ago. I got to see Cathrin’s family and we went to a nice restaurant overlooking a lake last night, eating very good traditional German vegetarian food (maybe a contradiction, yes, but no so great as in Czech).

Then today we walked around some small towns, ate more very good German ice cream that I am sure is the cause of some stomach trouble but it still worth the price regardless, and ended up playing beach volleyball for several hours and mixing sunburns with sliding dives with sands and for a little while I was sure someone had put slivers of glass with the sand. I was on the losing side both times (at least I think I was, I never did understand the score, but it is was much more inconvenient to have to guess which German words meant “I got it!” and which meant “It’s yours!”, so I usually hazarded an incorrect guess and either went bumping into my teammate or passively watched it fall in front of me). To my delight for the several hours a small portable stereo blasted “PLAYIN’ WITH THE BOYS” on repeat for the duration of our game. This was nicely in the spirit of having seen Russian MiGs earlier in Czech. What can be next one can only guess— a bald cigar chomping train boss blowing smoke in my face and threatening to send me to Siberia, a dorky sidekick who follows me around and makes bad jokes, well, it can’t be anything to do with "YOU’VE LOST THAT LOVING FEELING” because that’s old hat from New Orleans.

Anyway, I am off to Switzerland tomorrow to serve a ten day Vipassana meditation course so it will be some time before I make another post. I really can’t wait… but am trying to be equanimous as well :) Once you get a taste of what it’s like to let go and leave it to nature, nothing else will do— I guess you kind of stop looking for new and greater things to hold on to :)

When I get a chance, I will post some of the Slany ceremony’s photos… did you know that after the crash, several Czechs living in town delivered wreaths to the American victims and were later arrested by the Nazis… then, the Communists wanted nothing to do with paying homage to any American war heroes, so all the materials were kept in hiding until after 1989…

And here are some photo pages from my time in Morocco...

http://community.webshots.com/user/alcmorocco, http://community.webshots.com/user/2alcmorocco, http://community.webshots.com/user/3alcmorocco

And some from SIT and elsewhere...

http://community.webshots.com/user/joahmcgee, http://community.webshots.com/user/joahmcgee2