WHEN SWEDES INVADE (Dah-duh-DUHH!! Gasp!), i.e. World Cup mayhem: So I was just typing with my window open, watching people come and go. I began to notice yellow shirts start to enter the platz and then more and more and more until finally THE WHOLE PLATZ WAS YELLOW and Blue! I couldn't believe it! The Swedes were playing Paraguay that night and so apparently they all decided to come to Theodor-Heuss Platz and meet before the game! There were 8 polizei vans!I walked through the Swedish invaders' encampment only to find they had taken over our local store as well! Walking through the aisles it seemed as if the color yellow was everywhere...
This was a video I took from my dorm window. There were lots of people with Viking hats and banners. Somebody lit off fireworks and then this guy lit off an orange (I guess yellow if your color blind) smoker....I wanted to shoot him for ruining my air! (After living through several Interior Alaskan summers with smoke-filled days....let's just say I love clean air!)

That night I walked through the platz and it was just sad - garbage and junk everywhere! But those Germans....I tell ya! Ausgezeichnet, par excellence if you will...by 9am the following day the platz was clean and you wouldn't have known that the Swedes had been there! Good job cleaning crew!

What is with Heavenly Father and blessing me with rooms with a view?! Beautiful!
For you 'motherly' types, just to show you that I live in safe and sound surroundings (that was a lot of S's ;)

I belong to Dahlem ward. This is the chapel and it's located in a beautiful part of Berlin with a park and and and... I couldn't believe how nice the bishop was and probably 6-8 people went out of their way to greet me (point is, where are these 'mean' Germans - I don't get that kind of a greeting anywhere else!).

So, after my 19-hour bus ride, I dropped off my stuff and flew back to London to grab the rest of me stuff (I brought my two bags with 70 lbs. worth of stuff from the States which I was allowed, but inter-Europe travel I could only take one bag with 44 lbs. At $8 per extra lb + the fact that I am cheap, well, that's why I did all of this 'running around'). In the Berlin airport there were these advertisements for a newspaper that would be more compact hence the 'BIG NEWS. Small Size' theme. So they had all of these little baby pictures of famous peeps. This one is of course of our one and only Kim Jong Il, who can't feed his own people and constantly harrasses Japan and South Korea - isn't it weird to think he once was that 'cute and innocent'?
Then we have 'Cardinal Ratzinger' now the Papa/Pope/Papst... I don't know...this makes him have a 'Gollum' look to him. A bit creepy if you ask me...
And I'll leave it to you to guess who this is...

The French and Belgian countrysides were very beautiful - flat, green and now I know maybe why French farmers are such a powerful lobby - I think just about every piece of ground I saw was being farmed!
I thought of Caitlin and how much she loved Amsterdam when we 'touched down' to take on new passengers at midnight - this is proof that the Dutch sure do love their bicycles!!
This is of the German countryside (outside of Hannover(?) - those windmills are so tall!!

Here I be contemplating the 'realities' of the situation after reading their evacuation plan for us. Hmm...


















Literally, as I said, the bus just drives in...kind of reminded me of space travel from some sci-fi movie...only...with a bus ;) There were several other buses full of kids presumably on field trips...

Viva la France! We made it! Blessed daylight once again!

I know I look 'ecstatic' but I was on tip-toes trying to get a picture of me with the Eurotunnel sign. I honestly wasn't sure if we would cross by ferry or the 'Chunnel'. After realizing it was to the depths of the sea for us, I was like a little kid wondering what our trip would entail (I honestly didn't know how it was supposed to work. I thought it would be this huge tunnel that you drove through)...







However, I was incorrect to say the least! This is what the Eurotunnel involves - the bus literally drives on to a platform, then a train pulls you through until you reach France.














This was one of the last things we saw of Britain. I don't know if it is one of those ancient 'drawings' on English hillsides or just the Eurotunnel company logo, but nice nevertheless... GOODBYE BRITANNIA!! AHH! Gurgle, gurgle....

I admit that I was a little bit worried when I was told to get on this bus (the name of the bus company didn't match the ticket that I had)...

This marked the beginning of my very own 19-hour odyssey from London to Berlin (people's BO was plentifully included).