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I realised the secret to my taste in people: if your last name is Jones, I will like you: Scott Jones, Preston Jones, Norah Jones, Catherine Zeta-Jones and, of course, Indiana Jones. Last night (or maybe the night before because crossing seven timezones will confuse your sense of time), two of my travelling companions and I had the opportunity to stay at the Castleman estate. Doctor and Reverend Castleman put us up in their home for the evening and fed us delicious lasagne. For the entertainment that evening, we managed to watch two of the Indiana Jones films. In the morning, Dr. Castleman took the three of us to Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport which we all colloquially call XNA. The ride turned interesting when a local Gentry police officer witnessed Dr. Castleman's vehicle run through a red light while turning right. The good professor threatened us with bad grades if we let news out of the incident to anyone else. (Obviously, if you're reading this, you should know that I didn't follow through on that.)

Anyway, our first leg of the trip was a short jump on an æroplane from XNA to Dallas/Fort Worth where we waited for a few hours for our flight (American Airlines flight 70) which ended up being delayed considerably. Eventually, we made it in the air. Nine and a half hours, two CSI episodes, a book entitled Night by Elie Wiesel and seven countries later, we arrived in Frankfurt, Germany. We got off of the æroplane and headed through customs. Passport control was our first stop. It was there that I got my first stamp in my passport and had my first conversation in German (consisting of a simple “Danke.” and “Bitte.” with the control officer after he stamped my passport). You would think that customs would be the dreaded ordeal where your luggage is rummaged through and your cavities are searched. No. Such was not the case. We simply got our bags and walked through a door indicating that we had nothing to declare. After that, we went through the ordeal of trying to get the proper vans for transportation here in Germany. I say vans, but I don't think that van is the proper term. They were more like boxes with wheels. Anyway, they got the job done… when they finally arrived. We loaded into the boxes and proceeded to head towards the city of Würzburg in the great region of Bavaria in the great country of Germany. I was expecting Germany (and Europe in general) to be some completely different contrast to the United States, but I couldn't help noticing that the landscape looked remarkably similar to the state of Mississippi when I had been through there a few months earlier on my way to New Orleans. Then, I fell asleep in the box.

We arrived in the town of Margetshöchheim which is slightly north of Würzburg. We came to the home that the university rented. It's a skinny, three-storey building with a loft above the top floor. I ended up being placed up in the loft with two other companions. The disadvantage to living in the loft is the fact that there are three flights of stairs to ascend and descend. In one instance, I fell down the stairs and bruised by elbow. (I'm still internally bleeding.) Despite the nasty fall down the stairs, I stood up and went on with life. Despite the fact that we had all arrived in a foreign country in what was described by the previous group to be the best four weeks of their lives, we were all… unamused. After the flight, the wait, the next flight, the wait and the ride into Würzburg, we were all pretty tired. However, we all gathered into the parlour for a game of B.S. while Mrs. Ostrander found us some food and prepared it. Although I had had bratwurst for practically all of my life in America, nothing came close to the great taste of the bratwurst here in Bavaria. In addition, the jam that we spread on our kaiser rolls was amazing. I didn't know whether the food itself tasted better or if there was something magical about Europe that made the food taste better. Dr. Ostrander proposed the fact that we hadn't had a meal in ten hours.

After dinner, some of us jumped into the boxes to head to a grocery store around the bend. I didn't need to buy anything, but I went along anyway just for fun. I took my German dictionary along and started looking up words that I found on labels of certain products. To my amazement, almost a third of the store was devoted to the sale of alcoholic beverages. There was all kinds of different wines in the store. On one aisle in the alcohol section alone, I managed to find labels in eight different languages: German, French, Italian, English, Dutch, Spanish, Greek and Russian. After certain provisions were purchased, a few of us headed over to the bank to obtain some Euros for ourselves. Technical problems prevented most of us from obtaining the money that we'll need. When I got back to the house, I managed to pull out my laptop and type away about what had happened so far (with a short break so that I could go out and find out how to spell Margetshöchheim). Hopefully, I'll find some Internet café where I can post this online.