someone's got a case of the Mondays

I gotta be honest, lately I've been feeling very introspective, melancholy and got a raging case of wanderlust. Do they make a cream for that? No? Anyways. I was reading through some journals from the summer I studied abroad and laughing and reminiscing. Most of this has been brought on by the World Cup, since I studied abroad IN GERMANY when the World Cup was last there. And that my BFF (presumably past tense) is getting married, whom I met in Germany, and I haven't spoken to in months.

So in absence of anything truly funny or witty, please enjoy some lessons learned from some of my past travels.

• Airports have turned into malls.
• Duke rowdies and New York Yankee nuts seem like churchgoers compared to soccer fans.
• The lower the latitude, the crazier the driving.
• Large drip coffee? Free refill? Still a foreign concept.
• Open doors are often widest from the people with the least.
• ATMs are the world's currency. And the US dollar will often suffice. I've paid for gas in the Czech Republic, tolls in Italy and t-shirts in Poland with American greenbacks. Next time I'm in North Dakota I'll try to give Russian rubles to a gas station attendant.
• I thought my to-visit list would shrink once I'd visited other countries. Only to find it's grown exponentially.

Big win for Deutchland yesterday. Close tie for Italia today. Should be a good game for Brasil tomorrow. Can't wait for the first round games to be over, its been kinda boring. And for those stupid swarm sounding horns to be out-lawed. (And yes, I'm pompus like that, spelling countries like THEY spell them, at least during the World Cup)