Where was I?

Sorry about the delay. I know you all were on the edge of your seats about our fourth day in Europe. When we got back to the U.S. I remembered that I had a half finished bathroom project downstairs that needed attention. My brother told me that old houses will eat you up, but until this point we had dodged some bullets. Not so with this project. It was a pain in the butt, about 4 times as much as I expected, and WAY more work, but as of tonight I am more or less done. All that needs to be done now is new paint, and a new light fixture. That should be pretty simple.


So anyway, once we got back from the Neherlands we had one day in Germany before we headed to France so we decided to take it easy. We did want to see a castle however, so we took a short train ride to Bruhl where we saw this.

This is the Brühl Castle Augustusburg. It was commissioned by the Archbishop of Cologne - Clemens August von Wittelsbach. It was started in 1725, and modeled after Versailles. From what I am told it is a great example of Rococo architecture. This castle had a huge amount of property and about a mile away through the woods and gardens was this "hunting lodge."

This was his weekend retreat from his weekend retreat home, as if I have my facts straight the first house was not his primary residence. It would be best not to think about that for too long.
As we were walking around the property I started to miss millie. Everyone had their dogs with them. I did not see any German Shepherds or Rottweilers, but I did see a standard poodle, and I wanted to pet the dog, but I couldn't remember how to ask if I could, even though Courtney told me about 10 times.

The day was kind of dreary so we headed back to Cologne by way of a thrift shop, and grocery store. As I remember we tried a bunch of random things, cheese, drinks, bread, candy. I also went on a mission to try to find out the difference between liverwurst and brunchweiger, turns out brunchweiger is what they call liverwurst in Braunschweig, Germany, but not in Cologne so people had no idea what I was talking about.

Back in Cologne, Courtney and Dustin had three of their local friends over, Kai, Gunnar, and Susana. It was neat to meet some locals, so I learned much about being a German and they got to practice their English on us. Their hunger for English, and determination to go beyond their native tongue impressed me and convicted me of my laziness to pursue a broader knowledge.

So anyway, I think we stayed up until 1:00 a.m talking, eating awesome cheese, and sampling new beer and wine.

Tomorrow we go to Paris....parle vous engles?