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My second day in Cologne was actually spent away from that city, exploring nearby Düsseldorf as well as a Dutch town, Roermond.

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I don't know if I mentioned this anywhere before on this blog but I run marathons. Not very often, after all a 26.2 mile run requires some preparation, but I try to do one once a year. Half marathons I can do every month, but a full marathon for me is a special event. Typically I do them somewhere far from where I live and plan vacations around them. The last marathon I'd done before Cologne was in Honolulu, and the one before that was in South Padre Island, Texas.

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So...after an unforgettable two years and three months living in a country which for most of my life I've been fascinated by and wanted to live in, I'm now back in the USA. Specifically in New Mexico. It's not such a letdown after Baden-Württemberg, though I honestly would have preferred Colorado.

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As a really accurate saying goes, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." Those of us on the west side of the Atlantic Ocean know there's a country called Germany, and another one called Austria and part of another called Switzerland, which speak a language called German. Turns out it's not that simple. German is the official language of all those countries, but every little region has its own language, which people usually refer to as a dialect, and is quite distinct from standard German. This is nothing like the situation in the US where people in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have their own way of speaking English; it's more comparable to how people in Italy, Spain, and France have their own languages which are quite distinct from classical Latin. But those are all considered "languages" because Italy, Spain, and France each have an army and a navy, and their mother language Latin is totally dead.

  1. Ending the Trip in Kiel and Hamburg
  2. Passing through Gothenburg
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