You can tell there's a different way of thinking in Europe, or maybe it's just that they've been doing things that way for so long and their streets have always been that narrow, so they work around it. I miss the buildings. North American ones are shabby in comparison, and design so incredibly limited and unvaried here. Some friends of mine (who've never been to Europe) keep insisting that it's because North Americans want everything to be cheaper upfront, but I don't buy that. It's just an established pattern and less regulation that leaves us with crappier, more uniform products. The more research you do, the more you realize we're getting the lowest common denominator compared to Europe.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/

I have been living in Germany for a couple of months now and the fact that google automatically decides that I want my search results in German is annoying.

If I wanted German results, I would have typed in www.google.de and not www.google.com!

Also if you are a gmail user, google very recently lost the trademark for gmail here (actually they never had it).  I used to always type gmail.google.com

now I have to type mail.google.com

All the bikes and people walking around the pedestrian friendly downtown areas are wonderful though:)

Meanwhile, let us never miss any opportunity to comment on art and religion, two fundamental elements of human nature which Maria von Trapp famously combined:

1. Salzburg is of course the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the best-loved composers of all time; surely DR would have had to be blindfolded, or drugged, not to notice one of the town's principal tourist attractions.

2. Of interest to political scientists and historians is the datum that the Archbishopric of Salzburg survived till relatively recently as an autonomous principality within the empire ruled from Vienna; it must have been one of the longest-surviving ecclesially administered states in Europe, after the Vatican, and Mount Athos in Greece.