I'm having a beer at 7AM Eastern

OK, so it's like one o'clock here. I'm sitting in my favorite (so far at least) coffee and beer cafe in downtown Augsburg. It's a funky out of the way establishment that could easily be located in downtown Brattleboro. It's like McNeill's Brew Pub in Bratt, if it weren't for being able to hear the languages being spoken, you wouldn't know where in the world you might be. The music is even universal, some jazz-funk number at the moment. Aside from the German being spoken at the two other occupied tables nearby, the only giveaway is the five hundred year old chapel outside my window. The weather here has been mild, I'm told it's usually quite foggy, damp and cold here in November. It would appear that I brought the nice weather with me from New England. I'm out on my own for the first time since arriving here eleven days ago. My German is coming along slowly, but I've got "Ich hätte gerne ein Bier bitte" which is "I'd like a beer please". That expression is good for coffee too. Coffee's easy, it's "Kaffee". I like it when it works that way.

Augsburg is really quite remarkable. It was originally founded by the Romans, of all people, in 15 B.C. Yeah, B.C! There's sooo much preserved history here and such a profound character to this place. It's pretty significant tourist destination, yet it doesn't seem to have a bunch of tourists. Maybe it just seems that way because even the tourists are speaking some language that I don't understand. Also, there's a distinct difference in the humans here so the "tourists" may not be standing out to me like they might otherwise do in more familiar surroundings.

We went up to Cologne this past weekend and saw, among other things, the Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom). Experiencing the "Dom" is akin to walking up to the edge of the Grand Canyon for the first time. Your eyes and your brain simply aren't used to experiencing things on such a gigantic scale. It actually hurts to look at it the first time you see it. Oh, and you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an old church over here. And most of them seem to be founded to honor someone who was horribly killed by the Romans. At least that's the case again with the one we saw yesterday here in Augsburg. They even had the skull of the young woman that was burned at the stake for refusing to renounce her religion before her Roman captors back in 304 A.D. The ground here in Europe is soaked with a lot of innocent blood. OK, well...enough of that!

My beer is good. Mmmm...Bier...

~B