Sunday, August 27 Our trip to Philadelphia On Tuesday Elis and I made our last city trip -- this time to Philadelphia - “the city of brotherly love”. Although it was a rainy day and also a bit humid, it was perfect for a city trip, since it was not too hot. The drive to Philly was not a problem at all, even though we went by car and not by train as originally planned. (The train ride to Philadelphia would have been too expensive, so we decided to drive there, although the chances of getting lost again were high : ) ) Once arrived in Philly where we immediately found a parking garage for the Mustang, we soon realized that Philly is, as its nickname says, really “the city of brotherly love”. There are incredibly friendly people who are eager to help clueless tourists. All in all, the city is very tourist friendly, even the garbage bins have maps on the top. Although I had borrowed a city guide about Philadelphia from the library some days before, we weren’t really Philly experts, so we decided to take a tour bus (as we had done in Washington D.C. before) and explored the city. It was good that we could hop off/ hop on the bus whenever we wanted to, and the best thing was that it cost just 4 bucks! The only real Philly attraction both of us wanted to see was the famous “Liberty Bell”. The bell was nice, a lot of tourists around it, though : ) and we even got a German leaflet about the bell. The guy there was proud that he had it in German and it was really nice of him, but we wouldn’t have minded getting it in English. However, since he was so proud and so happy about having a German leaflet, we just thanked him and smiled. Then we continued our bus tour around the city. Before I forget, we even had a breakdown (again : )), but this time not by car as many would think, but by bus! Can you believe that? I suppose we have some negative influence on vehicles or whatever.... it's really strange, but also funny, how often something like that already happened to us. However, for us it wasn't a big problem this time -- we just took the next bus that arrived some minutes later. After strolling around, we found an H+M where we spent some time... I got mainly accessories. It was great that we had our "International Student IDs" with us, because all students got 10 % off! and so I saved about 5 dollars!! Since we didn't get the last tour bus anymore that went at 6, we decided to have dinner at McDonald's (what a surprise : ) ) and then we went back to Love Park that is not far from the parking garage where we had parked the Mustang. Unfortunately, it was not so easy to get there, since we took the wrong subway at first and it took us some time to find the right way. But in the end, we luckily arrived and the trip back to Tinton Falls went really smoothly. All in all, Philly is really a nice city with extraordinary friendly people and well worth a visit, but it would take me some more days to get to know the city better. However, I think I can say that NYC is still my favorite city and I hope that I can go there once again before I go back to Austria on Monday.