In last week's

column, I gave you my impressions of Amsterdam, the first city my wife

and I (still sounds funny) visited on our honeymoon.

After two days

in Amsterdam we traveled by train to Koblenz, Germany. The train ride

lasted about four hours and we saw a lot of cow country. It looked an

awful lot like America's cow country, but the cows mooed in German.

When we arrived

in Koblenz, Sabine's aunt picked us up and took us to her hotel. It was

about 10 minutes outside of the Altstadt, which literally means old city.

The Altstadt is surrounded by a wall and houses many incredibly old buildings.

Koblenz is on both the Rhein and Mosel rivers and the two rivers merge

at what is known as the Deutsche Ecke. If you travel to Ehrenbreitstein,

which is a fortress above the city, and the light is just right, you can

see the two distinct colors of the rivers merging into one.

Sabine and

I visited some of her relatives in the afternoons and then went into the

Altstadt at night for dinner and drinks. Though there wasn't as much variety

as Amsterdam, we still had excellent food. We also found ourselves visiting

an Internet cafe our first night in town, so we could e-mail our families

and so I could see how the Braves and Red Sox were doing. Thanks to technology,

these days you're never too far from home.

During our

stay in Koblenz we took day trips to nearby castles. We visited Marksburg

Castle in Braubach, which was just a short way down the Rhein. Our tour

guide looked like a female version of Gilligan and spoke a rapid form

of German. Having taken German in high school and college, I understood

20 percent of the tour, while Sabine translated the rest for me.

Perhaps the

most interesting thing about Marksburg Castle, other than the fact that

much of it is built into the side of a mountain, was that Japan wanted

to purchase it, move it stone by stone and rebuild it in Japan. Since

the owners of Marksburg declined, Japan built a replica, which is nowhere

near a mountain and, from what we were told, looks really out of place.

The other castle

we visited during our stay in Germany was Burg Eltz, which was off the

Mosel river. This castle was much more elaborate than Marksburg and had

many paintings and tapestries from the 15th and 16th centuries. Again,

our tour guide spoke a fast form of German, though by this point I was

shaking the rust off and could understand about 40 percent of what he

was saying. It also helped that I had descriptions of each room in English.

Other than

our day trips to the castles and our nightly jaunts into the Altstadt,

our time in Koblenz was spent visiting with relatives. On Saturday, many

of her relatives who couldn't make it stateside for the wedding gathered

at the hotel for dinner and a video of the wedding. Sabine's family surprised

us by coming over for the party, which was really good.

Sabine's brother,

Rob, is like me. He can understand a lot of German, but has trouble speaking

it. Our brains translate the German to English and then have to think

about how to translate our English answers back into German. By that point,

people have moved on in the conversation. Rob and I talked a lot at the

party.

After Koblenz

we headed