On Monday all the Americans got together for a BBQ. One of the families has moved back to the states this week and it was a going away party. Most of the time we end up talking about how things are different in the States and when people are visiting home again. We also talk about how difficult German is for Americans. I wonder how many years those will be the main topics of conversation.

Elisa got me shoes on Tuesday and I am so excited! I have to give you a little background on that first, (so forgive the long story). I had been looking for new shoes for awhile and I finally bought a pair (size 43). After I wore them for a day they had stopped feeling like they fit. But the store wouldn’t exchange them for a different size by that time. I was really sad, because I had wasted the money on shoes that were going to be so fun but that weren’t comfortable. After that, Elisa and I went to the mall near our house to a different shoe store run by the same company. We went because we also wanted to look at dress shoe styles. I brought my first pair of shoes just in case they could do anything about it. No one in the shop spoke English. So Elisa chatted with them in German. She explained how I had gotten the wrong size before, and we wanted help to make sure we didn’t make the same mistake with my dress shoes. The ladies chatted with her for awhile. Elisa has learned so much German! They ended up going down to their cellar and finding a pair of size 42 casual shoes to exchange with me. It was especially lucky because they didn’t even carry that shoe style. I was so excited, because the shoe style is my favorite. I never could have gotten by in English like that. Thanks Elisa! 🙂

This weekend is another three-day holiday weekend in Switzerland. We get Whit Monday off, even though nobody knows what that is. Well, people know that it’s some Catholic holiday. Elisa and I decided to take a trip to Munich. It’s about 5 hours away by train. We’ve been walking around seeing the sights. Our feet are kind of tired. Some of the things in Munich that were fun are the Glockenspiel, which is like a giant cuckoo clock. And the Olympic park, which was used in the 1972 Olympics. And the Nymphenburg Palace, which is enormous. Unfortunately we weren’t prepared for the weather to turn cold and wet. Today we wore shorts in a cold drizzle. Yesterday while we were on a train Munich even got hail.

When we arrived on Saturday we took a train to Dachau. Elisa’s grandpa Walter Stabler was in the 69th Rainbow Division with my grandpa Jack Parry during WWII, and that division was the first of the American forces to arrive there and liberate the camp. Dachau was the only camp to be used during the whole time the Nazis were in power. They had a good museum. But the whole thing was really unsettling. We didn’t see anything that was graphic. We saw a lot of cells and barracks and read some sad historical captions.

On Sunday we did an excursion to Salzburg. The Old Town there is a good place to go walking around. I loved Salzburg. I tried to get Elisa to sing the Sound of Music soundtrack at each of the historical sites. She sang for a few of them but she was too shy to be on camera at every one. 🙂 I was really excited because I recognized so many of the places. There is a staircase in a garden where the movie shows the family leaping up and down the stairs and singing. We got Elisa on camera for that one. She thought she had sung the wrong notes (“do,” “re,” “mi”) during part of it, so she spent a long time singing it to herself to transcribe it from memory. She admitted to being a little obsessed. I do the same thing though. Sometimes I take hours to run through a math problem in my mind until I have it figured out. Elisa pointed out that music is all based in math too, so we decided that we have the same obsession but we just give it different names. Also in our tour group we met someone who had worked for Maria von Trapp after she had emigrated to Vermont.

• Pictures of Munich