So I’m playing catch up here and last I wrote we were headed into Mongolia from China…

After spending four days in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, if you’re going to visit Mongolia, spend at least a couple weeks and get out of the capital.  Downtown Ulaanbaatar was full of dreary, gray neo-communist architecture with peeling paint, metal and mud.  The outskirts are studded with one room canvas tent homes, called gers, a reminder that most Mongolians once wheeled their homes on the backs of carts as they scouted grass for their herds.  These days many of the city’s one million residents are former nomads struggling to make ends meet as they adjust to living in one place.

Everything is spread far apart in Mongolia, so four days isn’t enough time to visit the mountains or desert.  We heard stories from other travelers returning from the Gobi and others who had camped on the steppes.  It is beautiful and wild out there.  So few tourists let alone people, roads shifting with the sand, no crops, no power, only sunrises and large expanses of land – if you really want to go off the path, Mongolia is the place to do it.

In the city we visited an excellent museum on Mongolian art.  The detail in the painting was really impressive.

Crime is high in Ulaanbaatar. A friend of ours was robbed twice in the same day outside our guesthouse. I caught a guy as he was reaching into my pocket, but even if he had made it he would have ended up with nothing more than a fistful of dirty tissues.

Mongolian food is not good, not good at all, especially for non-meat eaters.  Nomads don’t have the chance to plant crops, so the traditional diet includes meat dumplings and fermented milk.  One night we broke down ordered pizza. Then it came with mare’s milk cheese, which just doesn’t taste right (sweet and fatty).

The cheese was a sign – our time in Asia had come to an end and it was on to Germany, land of beer, bread and cheese and beer that tastes like bread that is best consumed with cheese.  I’m not going to lie – the amount of cheese and bread that I’ve had in the past couple weeks is not normal.  The amount of beer is another story…

So I’ll sum up the week and a half in Germany very quickly: beer.

Rob’s good friend since college, Neil, joined up with us the day after we arrived in Berlin. The three of us spent a few days walking around the city (with beers, because that is totally normal in Germany) and saw the Berlin Wall transformed into an artist’s gallery, the famous gates of the City, the German history museum, and some great cafes and bars.

We couchsurfed with a longtime East Berlin resident who recounted the story of the day the Wall came down.  We met up with another couchsurfing host who led us through some of the City’s funky neighborhoods.  Berlin was such a great, liveable city.  It is my new favorite town in Europe.

After Berlin it was on to Bamberg, home of the smoked beer, where we visited nine breweries in two days.  On the first day, we started tasting at 10 a.m. and we weren’t alone in the brewery.  There were groups of 60 and 70 year old Germans who had brought picnic breakfasts and were playing cards.

To date – my favorite beer to date is the Speziale Keller Rachbrau. The strongest version of smoked beer tastes like bacon.  That was a little much.

Bamberg is a beautiful, perfectly preserved town that missed out on the bombing during the war.  It was cute and quiet and we met a very nice German friend who works at the university and met up with us each evening.

Next was Koln (Cologne to us Americans).  A large-ish city famous for its Kolsch.  It’s also known for the largest German cathedral, which was pretty nice too.  Kolsch in Koln is way better than Kolsch outside Koln, where it can taste flat and doesn’t have the same creamy head. Across the river is Dusseldorf, where we drank Alt beer.  Alt beer tastes like bread and is much hoppier and darker than the beer from its rival city.

After Dusseldorf, we left Germany for Amsterdam and have been here about three days.  This afternoon we rode bikes along the water and in the countryside and it was scenic and peaceful.  We’ve been drinking Belgian beers here, gearing up for our next stop.  I’ve had my first chocolates with ganache here.  (Germany loves its marzipan, but the chocolates weren’t as great as the beer). I’m ready for Belgian chocolate and the beer is Rob’s favorite…

Neil leaves us in the morning and Rob and I take the bus to Brussels…

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