Hey guys I know it’s been forever since I posted in here.

Coming back to Germany has probably been one of the most difficult things I had to do in my life. It was really hard to get used to everything again and with the weather now getting cold again…aah how I hate it haha!

Also, my boyfriend and I broke up like two months ago which is overall not really a bad thing because it eventually had to happen (I know that now) and now we can both move on to the next big thing, so to speak.

Then I moved back to Munich which took a while since it was close to impossible to find an apartment…but here I am, with the coolest and most fun new roomies ever! We’ve been partying quite a lot together, and then I started wworking as a waitress again, all part of the reason why I couldn’t really come up with some spare moment to dedicate to this blog.

I am sorry and I hope you haven’t completely forgotten me, I’ll definitely upload some new pictures soon.

By the way, I just remembered that I created this blog a year ago shortly after I got accepted into SBCC. Incredible…my life has changed in so many ways since then!

After four days in San Francisco we headed east towards Yosemite National Park. I was completely flabberghasted when we passed the viewpoint Tunnel View on our way to the camp village – Yosemite is definitely one of the most impressive and beautiful places I’ve seen so far. And I pretty much grew up in the German Alps and we have some amazing mountains here…!

On the first picture you can see Half Dome and this one shows El Capitan, two of the most famous granite rock formations in Yosemite Valley. I took so many pictures, it was quite a task to select the ones I wanted to post on my blog. Anyways, I still had to split it into two posts, otherwise it just would’ve been way too much too handle at once ;-)

The sun sets on Half Dome and makes it glow like it was on fire. Never seen anything like it before…!

Merced River and Glacier Point.

Amazing wildlife: saw a bear sitting in an apple tree and a doe with her baby fawn *__*

The Yosemite Valley meadows. So serene and beautiful.

Since the famous Yosemite Falls are all dried up in summer, we hiked up to Vernal falls instead. I didn’t like the first part of the ‘hike’ so much because it was ridiculously crowded with people and there weren’t any hiking trails – there were actual streets up the mountains. Just didn’t really feel like an adventure out in the nature at all! Until we hiked down on an entirely different trail that was completely deserted. I hated all the tourists in Yosemite, it was just waaay too much. And the view on the way down was a lot better as well:

Some rock formation I forgot the name of and Nevada falls on the right :)

Part II coming soon! Featuring Giant Sequioa trees, Glacier point, Tenaya lake and photos from the amazing Tunnel View!

This lovely fella greeted us on Haight & Ashbury and I loved his attitude – smiling and insulting passers-by all at the same time :D

So our next stop after Monterey was San Francisco! I’ve already been there during spring break (links 1 & 2) but since my boyfriend has never been to SF before we basically did all the usual touristy stuff again. I already did two posts on San Francisco and all the typical places before so in this post I’ll show some different photos and also some pictures my boyfriend took ;-)

We stayed at the beautiful Marines Memorial Club right next to Union Square which offers considerable discount to members of the military. My boyfriend being in the German Air Force came in quite handy this time!

City view from coit tower and Golden Gate covered in thick fog – that didn’t change for our entire stay and was really annoying. My boyfriend couldn’t get a single decent picture of the bridge!

View from Lombard Street.

After making San Francisco the holy land of his novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac definitely deserves a SF street named after him.

At Filbert Street, the steepest street in San Francisco!

And now some pictures my boyfriend took with his phone:

Cable car climbing up the steep hills of San Francisco//the bay and Alcatraz in the background.

Walking towards Financial District and the Transamerica Pyramid.

Digging the SF nightlife!

The first station of our road trip was Monterey. The drive up there on the Pacific Coast Highway ist just amazing and was really one of my favorite parts of the trip.

There was a big motorcycle event on Cannery Row (which also made the room rates soar up…) and it was even more crowded than usually with all the tourists…

me with a motorcycle cop haha. I love those silly photos :D

playful seals at the monterey pier :)

We also met up with some of my boyfriend’s old friends from high school (he spent a year in the U.S. when he was 17) and went to the beach…

my boyfriend with Drew and Andrew. Drew has a really cool blog about creative writing and poetry by the way ;-)

Pheww…that was a rather long post…what do you think of the coloring of the pictures? I experimented quite a bit this time….

Captured through the windshield – kicking off a series of blog posts about our road trip, I thought I’d show you a few pictures of the different landscapes we drove through:

…driving up North towards Monterey on the Pacific Coast Hwy…

…then westwards through grassy yellow hills after leaving San Francisco behind…

…entered the mountainous forests of Yosemite National Park…

…from where we drove through a complete desert on our way to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Those breathtaking and everchanging landscapes alone were totally worth the trip. Driving from Yosemite Valley to Las Vegas in a day gives you so many different things to see and the scenery changes basically every hour. I thought that these 8 hour drives would be boring and exhausting at some point but I was clearly proven wrong!

This post is clearly a bit Kerouac-inspired, though I’m glad we had our own comfortable rental car and didn’t have to hitchhike all over the place :D But now I can definitely understand a bit more when people talk about the freedom you feel on the road. Especially when there are no other cars passing by for more than an hour (not joking here!) and there is nothing around you but vast and almighty land…

“Why think about that when all the golden land’s ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see?”

- Jack Kerouac, On the Road

[beautiful summer's day at lake Sylvenstein.]

It’s been over a month since my last blog post! I feel so bad…!

My last weeks in the U.S. were really great, we had the most fun road trip and I have tons of amazing pictures to show you. But for now I thought I’d show you pictures of my home instead:

[hike up the Seekar close to Lenggries, Germany.]

I came back to Germany on Aug 8th and on my very first weekend back here I went on a beautiful mountain hike with my friends. You can see the breathtaking view of the bavarian and austrian Alps in the background.

[this little fella was blocking the path at one point :)]

[Summit cross on top of the mountain. This is a very typical thing in Germany, haven't seen that in the US so far ...]

I haven’t been doing many exciting things since I got back here, this is what I usually do every summer in Germany and it doesn’t reall feel that special anymore. I know how stupid that sounds, I should be grateful for all this, but after all the different landscapes and sceneries that I got to see in the states, Bavaria (although still beautiful to me) is just same old, same old.

I did and saw so many exciting things in those seven months in America that I’m just a little unimpressed with the things back here. It feels like I grew out of my old life, it’s like a piece of clothing that you still like somehow but it doesn’t really fit properly anymore.

As you can see, I’m having a little trouble with getting back to my old life here. We’ll see if it’s just a temporary thing and just takes a while for me to get used to things again – or if  I got used to like that air of adventure and new experience that comes about with living in a different country so that I’ll probably go abroad again soon.

We’ll see what the future brings! ;-)

[summer sunset a little outside of my hometown of Bad Tölz, Germany.]

Yesterday it was time for me to say goodbye to beautiful Santa Barbara. You cannot imagine how sad I was, saying goodbye to all my friends and leaving this beautiful place…

We embarked on our road trip yesterday morning and are currently in Monterey, CA. Today we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a really fun place but I don’t really recommend going there on a Saturday, it was incredibly crowded. Every once in a while I only narrowly avoided knocking over some random kids, haha.

This is the biggest fish tank I’ve ever seen, it’s supposed to show you how life in the deep ocean looks like…they had Tuna, small Mackerels or something and even some rather moderate-sized sharks in there! The glass pane is supposed to be one of the biggest in the world.

The jelly fish room! Probably my favorite part of the aquarium after the deep ocean room.

Tomorrow we’re headed to San Francisco and after that we’re going on to explore Yosemite National Park.

I hope I can keep you posted on a regular basis, but I can’t make any promises.

…well, almost. That John Denver song has been stuck in my ear for the last few days!

I’m sorry you haven’t heard from me in so long but I’m terribly busy these days with preparing for my finals, spending time with my boyfriend and trying to figure out how to fit the enormous amounts of clothes I bought here into two suitcases. Right now I can’t decide between shipping a huge package in the mail or checking a third suitcase, both of which will be almost equally expensive…

I doubt I will have the time to do proper blog posts during our upcoming road trip either and the first two weeks back home in Germany will be incredibly busy as well but after that I have a huge load of pictures in stock for you guys. I’m really sorry, I can’t figure out how many bloggers still manage to keep up their regular postings while traveling, I certainly can’t.

Also, I really want to enjoy my last days in California as much as possible, even though I have tons of stuff to do lol. That picture was taken last Saturday when my cousin was visiting from San Francisco and we went to Red Rock again. I think it represents the blissful and sad mood that I’m in right now very well!

On Wednesday America celebrated Independence Day! You could hear words like Freedom! Independence! Gift of Liberty! literally EVERYWHERE, the news, magazines, written on cars :D And I’m not even getting started on the numerous star-spangled banners waving all over town or the cannon built from Budweiser Kegs and sixpacks at Ralphs (one of SB’s supermarkets)!

I met up with some friends to watch the parade on State Street at noon and what can I say, I really enjoyed it! We don’t have parades like that in Germany (except for carnival, but that’s a different thing) and I got a little jealous because it is so easy and natural for Americans to show their patriotism whereas its a rather uncommon thing in Germany. That’s quite sad but I guess Germans being careful about national pride is still a relict from WWI & II.

Anyways, here are some pictures from the parade:

War veterans and a Bell-something helicopter used in the Vietnam war.

Normally Americans LOVE to bbq on the 4th of July but this time the weather wasn’t good enough and it was a little cold outside…that’s why we went home really quick after the parade and then hit some of the bars before watching the fireworks.

me with one of the waiters at Sharkeez

The beach was packed with people, all waiting for the fireworks to start.

And then it began! The firework show lasted almost half an hour and was very different from how we do our fireworks in Germany! Those fireworks explained America in a nutshell: louder, bigger, more colorful and more expensive then everything I’ve seen before haha!

I was a little deaf after it ended and that’s no suprise, the explosions from the fireworks were so intense, at some point you could even feel the blast wave. The whole time a music corps from the U.S. Air Force was playing patriotic music and at one point some random guy stood up, threw his fist in the air and shouted “proud to be American, God bless the USA!” whereupon everyone started cheering and applauding him :) This day was just so overloaded with American patriotism, it’s almost like you’re being brainwashed, you just can’t help it, you’ll LOVE America :D

On a different matter…

The anouncement of the discovery of the Higgs Boson was also a pretty big topic on wednesday…

….and the typical American reaction to it:

just kidding, I love Americans and their obsession about freedom :D

Just quickly wanted to show you a picture from tonight. Watched the 4th of July firework show at the beach, it was perfect. Earlier today we watched the parade on State Street, really impressive with all the marching bands, bagpipe players and so on…!

Lately I’ve been a little busy with some work for my classes and also I need to get started with my preparations for going home…I don’t even wanna think about it! I remember when I arrived here exactly half a year ago and how long I thought those six months away from home were going to be…and now it’s almost over and it hasn’t been nearly long enough!  Anyways, I’m gonna show you some of the pictures I took today and I also still owe you the pictures I promised you from the road trip we did like…3 weeks ago? haha, time flies!