Friday I’ll be off to the US to go to my sisters wedding and work for a couple of weeks. Getting tickets isn’t cheap from Germany this time of year (end of July, beginning of August), so we decided to wait until the last minute and book tickets from www.ltur.de. They have extremely good prices for various trips to the US and vacation packages to areas in and around Europe. Actually getting the tickets you want can be a bit of a problem, but overall they’re a good deal; you just have to sit at the edge of your seat, bite your nails, and hope that a ticket comes along that gets you near your destination. Not everyone can play that game – and it almost backfired when I booked one ticket, but then couldn’t get a second one until about 20 minutes later for some strange internet reason.

I haven’t been to the US since November of last year (about 9 months I guess), and since I’ve only been to Mexico and Czech Republic. I miss only a couple of things about the US so far: the Pizza (getting pizza in Italy, believe it or not, just doesn’t replace the thick greasy pizza from Dominoes or Papa John’s), and living near the beach. And maybe some other things that I can’t think of in the food section, but nothing worth noting. But otherwise, there are a lot of advantages to living here (most noticeably a much higher occurance of good food and drinks than where I am from), and being able to walk downtown and sit outside at a cafe or restaurant during the summer is a real plus. And the abundance of vacation days is more along the lines of what I think a proper vacation should be here.

My mother got me thinking about going to Lithuania, since we have some relatives there – somewhere. My grandfather was from Lithuania (Ambrose) and ended up in Chicago along with many other Lithuanians. It’s not to terribly far from here, and from Stuttgart its only about 250EUR. Not bad. Looks like thier State Department of Tourism website could use some help, though.