Copyright Warner Brothers

I have been able to avoid this fate for almost 12 years now, but they finally got me. Being a citizen of Germany, I have been studying in the U.S. on student visas for the last decade and even though it has always been a bureaucratic nightmare, associated with significant financial costs, I usually managed to obtain the necessary documents to enter the United States. Until this summer, when the application for my work visa got delayed for reasons that I don’t need to get into here. Long story short, I had to leave the U.S. for three months, organize someone to sublet my apartment on very short notice, find an alternative source of income, new health insurance, cancel my attendance at APSA, etc. I had promised my daughter, who is staying with her mom in Ohio, that we would take at least two road trips during the summer (she wanted to go to New York City. “Why?” I asked. “Lady Liberty” she answered). Canceled. But hey, things could be worse. So, I decided to make the best of it and travel through Europe with Lise Herman, a Ph.D. candidate at LSE. In the next couple of posts I will report from our journey, tell you a bit about the mood in Europe, and touch some of the issues that the people, and especially the younger generation, are concerned or not concerned about. Our trip started in Paris, from where we went to Aix-en-Provence in the South of France, then Cologne and Berlin, Budapest, and finally London. Travelling is a fun but time-consuming enterprise, and like some of you I even have a bit of a private life. Accordingly, I am a bit behind on my travel blog but will catch up in the next couple of days. Let the European Vacation begin (and by the way, in Germany the movie’s title was changed to “Help, the Amis are coming,” “Amis” being short for Americans).