Passau

For those of you interested in the sights of Germany, Lisa and I spent three days in Passau, a beautiful university city near the Austrian border and on the confluence of the Danube, Inn and Ilz rivers. It was a very pleasant trip, but of course not without some oddities. Follow this link to the photo gallery.

The first oddity came Thursday evening. We had a very pleasant Croatian dinner and then looked for a bar with a TV to watch the European Cup soccer game between Bayern Munich and the Spanish team FC Getafe. Bayern, a powerhouse in European soccer with lots of very well paid superstars needed a strong showing to make it to the quarter finals. Getafe has no real stars and ranked near the bottom of the Spanish league … they’ve been incredibly lucky during the tournament just to get this far. We found a small bar run by students with a big screen TV and settled in with a couple beers for what turned out to be a very exciting game that went into overtime tied 1:1. Soon Getafe was ahead 3:1 and after the 15 minute overtime we went home thinking Munich had lost. Oh, did I mention we’d had wine with dinner and an after dinner schnapps on the house? Or that we had three beers at the bar with two schnapps on the house? The first news story the next morning was how Luca Toni had saved Bayern in the closing minutes of overtime … the second overtime period. This of course clinches my status as a soccer genius. By the way, my hung-over four mile run the next morning along the River Inn was even less inspiring.

We took a river ship ride Friday with lovely weather and were among the five youngest on the entire ship of 350 passengers. And surprise, we accidently got on the Kristallschiff (Crystal Ship), a 262 foot three decked, 700 passenger river ship decked out with millions of Swarovski crystals. The tickets weren’t too expensive, neither was the on-board meal, but add in the drinks (only one beer thank you) over five hours and they did make some money off us. The 300+ group of elderly folk got off on the return voyage and left roughly 30 of us on board for the last hour or two. Of particular interest was going through a set of locks with another ship.

The last day held a trip to a nice museum, really lousy weather and a drive home.