Day 2

We didn't do a whole lot today because it was pouring, but I did get a chance to see the Rhine River :) I woke up at 11:30 this morning and they had already eaten breakfast at 9, but I had a chance to eat some wheat bread with marmalade and drink carbonated apple juice.  After breakfast, we left the state where I am currently staying called Baden-Württemberg and headed to the state of Rhineland-Palantinate.  We stopped at the Rhine River and we crossed it using a ferry.  We got ice cream and I got a banana split and the others got ice cream in the shape of spaghetti, which was a little strange.  We went to a garden theater where a small group of people performed skits about gardening, but it was all in German so I wasn't able to understand most of it, but the one woman's facial expressions and singing made the show entertaining.  We came back to the house and just relaxed because it was pouring down rain.  In the villages around Germany it's not like our American neighborhoods because they have pizza places and restaurants between the houses so it's like its own little town in a small community.  We had pizza for dinner that we got from a mom and pop place.  The thing I noticed about the pizza was that the cheese tasted different from American cheese, but I thought it was better.  

It's hard to talk to some people here because of the language barrier, but Dr. Braun has been nice enough to translate.  I met one of the Braun's friends who is on his way to getting a PH.D. and his project is to create a solution of bacteria to put in the soil in order to make the plants stronger and healthier naturally without genetic artificiality.  We also talked a lot about how Europe is doing today and I got caught up on the current events here especially with what is going on with the debt here and how Germany is going to try to close down all of its nuclear power.  There are other sources of power in Germany like windmills and solar power (much more so here than in America), but they are worried that they won't have enough of that power to continue supplying electricity to all of Germany because nuclear power produces much more energy, much more efficiently.  It was interesting to here about this and I hope to learn more about the state of Europe later on.  Tomorrow we are going to a school in Pforzheim so I have to be up early :)

Gute Nacht (Goodnight) :),

~Kiersten