From Celli: Okay, here's the update: Today is my last day in Germany for a couple weeks. Beautiful time...rested my inner introvert (I hermitted here for about 1-week by myself). So little to do that I've become a wicked fast runner, and can blast around the 10km lake near by in, like, no-time-at-all.  

Tomorrow an early train takes me from the nearby town of Radolfzell to the Swiss mountain Engelberg (yep, you guessed it 'Angle Mountain') for two days of extreme hiking before back to the US on Monday.  

Gotta love these crazy Alpine people...in the US, if you have the good sense to look down from a vast height on a geologically-ephemiral surface like a crumbling-shale-rock (for crying in a bucket), you would have 'a fear of heights' and be considered a fairly reasonable soul as a result. In Switzerland (and Alpine Germany), if you look down from said-crumbling rock and think 'Wow, nice view. I think I see my dad.' then you are called 'Schwindelfrei' (aka, free-of-vertigo) and considered normal. They are nuts!  

But on the positive side, if you buck up and think, 'Well hell, this is the scariest crap, I've gotten myself in to yet, but shit, we whooped 'em in WWII, so we can do it again' and you hike those beautiful mountains, then you do get to see amazing things, eat the most ungodly, awesome food (rounds of cheese, piles of chocolate) and pay out your nose for deeming to sleep on what has to be the most expensive soil in the world!