Once again, we decided to change our plans for Europe. Instead of flying into Frankfurt, we wanted to fly to Ljubljana, Slovenia so that we would have only a quick trip down to the Croation coast, and then onto Sarajevo. We figured this would be easy enough, since our flight to Frankfurt had a connection in Ljubljana and we could simply only check our bags to there. Adrana Air had a different plan however, and refused to make this change without a charge of E130 per ticket (note - we did try multiple avenues to accomplish this, each with the same result). So, we went to Frankfurt instead. I'm quite happy about that fact now, because we got to spend a night in Mainz on the Rhine river.

I'm not sure if was the complete return to modern society, the respect for personal space, or just the peace and quiet of a mid-sized German town, but I really enjoyed Mainz. That is, I really enjoyed Mainz once we figured out how to use an automated train ticket machine in the Frankfurt Airport, once we found a hotel room, since the local tourist office's help proved to be a bust, and once I personally got over the shock of how much that hotel room was. And this wasn't a fancy place, it was absolutley the cheapest place within 10km of the city center. Anyways, once over those things, Mainz turned out to be great. We had sausages and sauerkraut and mashed potatoes and beer and they were delicious. About 80% of downtown Mainz was bombed, burned or otherwise demolished in WWII, but most churches have been rebuilt since then. We saw where Johan Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable typeset printing press lived and died, as well as a pretty bad modern sculpture of the inventor. Also on the agenda was St Martin's originally built in 975, St. Christopher's, constructed between 1292 and 1325 and not restored after WWII, and finally St. Stephen's which is adorned with beautiful stained glass windows created by the Jewish artist Marc Changall in 1978.

It was really cool to see the dramatic difference in the sculpture taking place in Europe after seeing comparatively aged carvings in Asia. I guess it is really the change in religion that makes the difference, but after seeing the carvings of Hindi stories and dancers at Angkor Wat or Hindi and Buddhist carvings at Ellora caves in India -- or even Christian paintings and mosiacs in Istanbul (okay, not all of those are exactly the same timeframe, but they're all pretty old) you're struck by all of the skulls and skeletons and doomsday depictions here. Anyways, enjoy some photos from our quick trip to Mainz, and we'll hop on a flight to Bratislava (Nowhere near Berlin!).

Funny interaction in Mainz: Ashley asks a woman in the market in German that the woman understood (so I guess it was pretty good German) how much some fruit cost. However, when the answer was returned, it was received with blank stares and confused faces. Amusing.