The Return of the Dead-eyes.

That was exhausting. I feel like I have been doing jumping jacks for the past month.

I truly don't know where to start. I have been typing and retyping these first two sentences for five minutes now.

Stockholm is crazy awesome, Amsterdam is in the process of slowly falling over, Dusseldorf has the best tram system ever, and rural Germany is exactly like a painting.

Let's try this: Europe is getting it right. Everything over the pond is quite similar to what we have here, but the small differences become glaring. Both continents have great food, fantastic landscapes, and nice people. Both are very prosperous, and are trying to deal the the problems of a city in marginally effective ways.

However, here in the states, we have a very different process. We are not really expected to have any personal responsibility, as most things are done for us, or told to us. We have very little impetus to figure out what is going on for ourselves because it is plastered all over the walls in yellow lettering. The places that I visited in Europe did not have that mindset. One was expected to apply a certain amount of common sense to everyday things in order to stay safe, definitely not too much to ask.

The most obvious example: Trains. Getting on a train in Düsseldorf is extremely straightforward. There is a white stripe next to the drop-off, and there is a chime that lets you know that the doors are about to close. In the US, we are barraged with vocal and written warnings, lights, bells, and whistles. We are told to move away from the doors, even though the doors are equipped so as to not cut off fingers. We are cautioned to grab a handhold because the train is about to start moving (as if we were expecting it to stand still).

This type of thing makes up the most apparent difference between the mindsets of these two regions. People seem to be given a modicum of leeway over there, acknowledging that we usually have a large amount of reason available to us, and that it is healthy to use it on a daily basis, lest we end up expecting too much hand-holding.

Also of note to me in particular was the accessibility of every city that we were in to bicyclists. Stockholm and Amsterdam in particular, but even Berlin and Düsseldorf had cycling infrastructure that would put any US city to shame. What I saw was an acceptance that people were going to bike around the city; the easier you make it, the more smoothly people can get around, and the less congested the roads get.

Also, Germany has wind turbines all over the place. It seems like every other little farm has a handful of them. This makes me very jealous.

I could only really find a couple of things to dislike about the places that we visited:

• No drinking fountains.
• No free water at restaraunts, you order a water you get a $3 bottle of it.
• Very few public toilets, and the ones there are usually cost $$.
• No real parking restrictions, people park on anything and everything.
  

Aside from having to plan water intake and output ahead of time, the trip was possibly the best vacation I have ever taken, vying for #1 with the Hawaii trip with my family in 2000, and the Canada Road trip of 2005.

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