A final goodbye from across the pond.

Well, this is it. My last night in Budapest and my final night in Europe. It's been a wonderful, scary, enlightening, frustrating, magical experience. I will be so happy to get back home to Bear and friends and people who speak a language I understand and Diet Pepsi and my own bed and a closet. It will be great to sleep in and not have to eat out for every meal. But I will miss many of the places I've seen and some of the people I have met. Here's some of best from my European 2007 tour:

- The tour guide, Paula, in Rome. She sounded like she smoked at least two packs a day, hated the French, Japanese, Korean and anyone else who broke the rules at the Vatican. She was not afraid to give us the dirt on them crazy Popes.

- The outdoor festival for May Day in Florence. I saw a woman making cheese! I also ate some delicious food goody covered with powdered sugar and filled with custard cream.

- My father wandering off when my mother and I asked him not to and his being left behind by the tour bus at the Anne Frank House. This may sound sad, but if you know my father, you know that it is, as my brother put it "Delicious poetic justice." I threatened to put him on one of those little kid leashes after that.

- The bread all over this glorious continent. Mmmm...bread...

- The doors over here are a bit tricky. They always open in the opposite direction of what you think they will. However, most have signs tellling you whether to push or pull. My mother never read the signs and always tried to push when she should have pulled. She also always assumed that when the door didn't open the way she though it would it meant that we were locked out of which ever building we were trying to enter.

-Our guide in Vienna was an insufferable woman with a severe superiority complex. She talked to me like I was five and she commented to my father that "We gave you Mozart and you gave us McDonald's!" She also ALWAYS had more lipstick on her teeth than on her lips. Seriously. It looked like maybe she thought she was supposed to use her teeth as the lipstick applicator. Whenever she got to be a bit more haughty than I thought I could stand, I simply imagined her going home and realizing that she had a grill full of Estee Lauder and wondering how long it had been there. HA! HA!

- My Dad constantly, CONSTANTLY, trying to convince my mother and I that he could speak not only Italian but German, Dutch, Czech and Hungarian as well. In reality, he just spoke Spanish with what he assumed to be the local dialects. Hilarity at it's most brilliant.

-Getting to see some things I never dreamed I'd actually see in person. The David, the Sistine Chapel, the Anne Frank House, the Danube River, the Vienna Boys choir, the Coliseum, etc. Wow.

Alright. I have to pack and get some sleep. We're leaving for the airport at 4:50 in the a.m. tomorrow. Meh. I guess I can't really complain though, can I?