Rolling stock

Long train journeys are so much better than long plane journeys. I tend to freak out somewhat on long haul flights - the combination of claustrophobia, dodgy food and my inability to get any sleep whatsoever usually has me reduced to a babbling wreck by wheels down. A long train ride, however, is much more of an opportunity to unwind and stretch out and eat homemade sandwiches while finishing books I've had on my nightstand for months and finally getting round to some sudoku. After fifteen and a half hours' train travel through three countries in the past five days, I'm really quite relaxed.

We had about five hours without rain throughout our whole stay in Germany, which made for less pottering than we'd hoped. We managed a few hours of soakage in Heidelberg on Friday, which was almost made worth it by the sight of all this (although we'd had lunch by the time we found it):



Saturday was spent wandering around Karlsruhe and buying various weird varieties of chocolate (green tea, pistachio, honey, bourbon vanilla, crepe suzette, strawberry & green pepper, fig & almond). We made a quick dash into MediaMarkt afterwards to see if they had the new MacBook in stock (no! still flogging iBooks at full price!) and left with a copy of a Boss Hoss album. The Hoss are a comedy yee-haw country band from Berlin who specialise in covers, including Hey Ya, Loser and, my personal favourite, Word Up. Germany would've won the Eurovision with these boys.

We also came across this on our travels, possibly the funniest of all the World Cup themed merchandise we saw (from football shaped cake tins to handbags made from inside out footballs):



The blurb on the back says it's powerful and fruity and the perfect accompaniment to that thrilling football match. I bet it's muck, but I'll keep you posted.