one anecdote:

adam and i had been seperated at the train station, but we both decided to get on a train to salzburg as planned and see if we could find the other there. it never happened, and i didnt end up seeing him until a couple nights into vienna. (during the elapsed time he had gone through slovenia, croatia and italy in a search for a small town in the mountains where his great grandfather was born. i cant begin to tell the story as well as he can, so i wont even try. lets just say it involved impossible train stations, armed gaurds, snaked, deserted mountain paths, and people showing him baby pictures of his mother.)

so i took the train from munich to salzburg on my own. three people sat down with me -- two men and a woman, all wearing jean jackets. the woman was wearing aviators, and one of the men had a mullet. this same man was carrying a beer and small dog prone to explosive sneezing. (if there is one thing i love about munich, its the open-container policy. moreover, all city dwellers have to pay a pretty hefty dog tax, which means that people who have dogs tend to actually want them.) we ended up making conversation of sorts, between my shitty german and the aviator-lady's pretty decent english. i asked about the words for sneeze and rain, the mullet man asked me if i lived near highway 101 in california. the other man didnt know any english at all, except for one phrase which he kept repeating after he saw it made me laugh:

"yes we can! yes we can! yes we can!"