Rambling on . . .

During the past few years I have been able to venture out from my home and experience other lands, cultures, and people, and it has fulfilled a desire of mine since childhood. I don't know how it started but I used to write to the embassies of different countries and ask them to send brochures about their countries, then when they arrived, I would spend hours looking over them. I was also fascinated with my special dolls that were dressed in costumes from the lands they represented. Now it seems that this the world is closer or smaller as "they" say, we are more the same. Kathy was looking forward to having lunch at a nice little restaurant at the bahnhof in Salzburg that she had enjoyed before, but was unable to find it. Then she realized the spot it had occupied was now a Burger King. Sad but true. All of us out on the streets of Munich and Salzburg were dressed pretty much the same, but I think we were recognized as foreigners or maybe Americans more by our shoes than anything else. The only places I saw traditional or local dress was by the servers in some restaurants. In the nicer places they wore neat black attire covered with spotless, crisp, white aprons, and in the "beer hall" type places, some workers were wearing the famous lederhosen or dirndls. As far as language goes, one thing I noticed is that two words are universal, understood anywhere. They are coffee/cafe and toilet/toilette.