There are some people who are determined to not wear clothes in the great outdoors. There are the people who do naked rock climbing, people who hang out on a nude beach (or play volleyball in the buff on a beach like those I saw once in Greece), people who sky dive nude, dance in the nude, go on cruises in the nude, and, like this German guy I read about, people who prefer to hike in nothing but a good pair of shoes.

Even jail time is not dissuading this German fellow from his naked hiking habits, according this Reuters article. This fellow was put in jail for ten days for in the buff walkabouts, but has vowed that he will continue to hit the trails without clothes even though it is against the law. Perhaps he sees a double standard? Hiking in the nude breaks Germany's indecency laws, although nude beaching it is okay in designated areas.

Interestingly, Germany has a German Nudist Association which is part of the German Sports Association. Nudism can be traced back to Germany as a way to be healthier, so the association fits the idea of fitness. This membership has created an increase in nude hiking love. Nude jogging also has a following, but loping along in just socks and running shoes also lands a fine.

In a way, one could say that if there are nude beaches there could be nude forests and nude mountains for those who like to scale cliffs. Whatever they do, I hope they're using a decent sunscreen.

Elvis is buried in Memphis, right? So what's he doing in the German town of Bad Nauheim?

No, he was not sighted by some bleary-eyed office worker on the way home after too many beers. Bad Nauheim is the place where Elvis did his military duty in the late '50s. The people of this otherwise nondescript town (well, at least the Elvis fans among them) are not so quick to forget their most famous boarder.

A tour around town passes an arch where the photo for one of The King's album covers was taken. There is also the house where he lived, and, for die-hards, the room that he sometimes rented at a local hotel. There is even a story about a beer hall where Elvis allegedly started a brawl.

The people of Bad Nauheim have made Elvis a kind of folk hero, and they are painfully aware that his army days in Germany are viewed as insignificant by fans from other parts of the world. According to local Elvis lore, the Bad Nauheim years were among the happiest in Presley's life. Bad Nauheim will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Presley's arrival in their town later this year.

Barack Obama has come and gone. Here in Berlin, the dust has settled, the public transportation is back running normally and today, the day after Obama's history-making, if not perhaps history-defining, speech, the German media all seem to conclude the same thing: Was that it?

Consider today's Web version of the weekly Die Zeit, which concludes:

"There was the hope for this one great sentence that we would still quote in 40 years" -- read: like Kennedy and Reagan -- "that would make the speech historical. Nobody really heard this sentence."

O.K., fine. It was like that.

But it was a hell of a spectacle. I kept a diary of the day.

I publish it here.

Friday, 10:15 a.m. Central European Time (4:15 a.m. EST)

Predictably, when I sit down to peruse the German papers this morning, Obama is everywhere. The irresponsible tabloid Bild even runs a front page feature of the German politicians that most look like Obama. Other highlights:

• "Barack is here!" screams Bild. "His day in Berlin in a live ticker!"
• The daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung calls Obama a "longed-for savior."
• "Column for victory," Berlin's Tagesspiegel says in the headline of its lead story, a cheeky attempt at prediction masked as a reference to where Obama is to speak, at Berlin's Victory Column
  

Anyway, I'm sure there might be concern about whether this ostensible travel blog is about to veer off into a political one. Let me say I have only a passing interest in what Obama has to say today, since I figure it won't be much.

I'm more interested, culturally, in how Berliners are going to mark this day. Will it be a speech, or a party? Obama is wildly popular here, almost like a -- jeez, I was going to say rock star, but that's so overused.

Here's something better: He's like Michael Ballack, the captain of the German national soccer team. Ballack's pretty huge and he almost led his team to the European Championship last month, which, come to think of it, is the last time there's been this air of anticipation around Berlin.

And, hey: Ballack. Barak. Not bad, huh?

Maybe there'll be some cultural insights today, maybe not. But look at this way: If you were a tourist in Berlin today, you'd probably wander down and see what all of the fuss was about, right?

Now here is one court ruling that pretty much any traveler could get behind.

According to the German news weekly Die Zeit, Germany's Supreme Court, the Bundesgerichtshof, recently ruled that airline passengers traveling home from a holiday are entitled to a full refund of the cost of their trip if their plane crashes or comes close enough to crashing to have caused passengers fear and stress -- thus ruining the relaxation won on said vacation.

Obviously if a plane crashes, more than likely there won't be many refunds to hand out. But it's the latter condition that is interesting here.

I'm not talking a refund of airfare. I'm talking a refund of everything that was spent on the holiday. Many German tourists book vacations through packages that include airfare, so this means they'd be entitled to a refund of the entire package.

Now, a court in the town of Duisburg must decide whether this ruling from the high court has any bearing on a case it is currently hearing involving a German couple whose plane home from Turkey had to make an emergency landing in Istanbul three years ago.

The couple's plane malfunctioned shortly after taking off from Antalya. The couple says the plane's door almost opened, pieces of the cabin's ceiling starting coming down and the plane had to do a corkscrew landing in Istanbul.

The couple was on a two week Turkish vacation -- some say Turkey is Germany's 17th state -- from a German packager called Alltours.

Alltours gave the couple around $430 for the delay they suffered. The couple sued for their entire package to be refunded, saying they lost all the peace and rest they'd built up during their two weeks by the pool.

The Duisburg court must decide whether the couple really thought they were going to die, which could bring the matter in line with the high court's ruling.

But there are a few questions that go unanswered in the article, including why the high court bothered to rule on this in the first place. Had another lawsuit like this reached it? And also, isn't this a stupid ruling? I mean, what if the packager was from the U.S. or U.K.? Can a German court compel a foreign company to pay up?

What if you weren't on a package, and didn't keep receipts?

However, it's a nice thought, isn't it? Imagine coming home from the Caribbean or Disney or what have you, hitting unusually bad turbulence, maybe even making an emergency landing of sufficient drama and getting the cost of your vacation refunded because you now feel, you tell people, so frazzled it's like you never went on vacation at all!

10 tips for smarter flying

Madame Tussauds, the world's most overpriced, not to say overrated, tourist attraction, is bucking popular sentiment in Germany and elsewhere by vowing to return a wax statue of Adolf Hitler to its newest museum in Berlin as soon as possible.

I posted last week about a protester who managed to rip the head off the wax statue just minutes after Madame Tussauds officially opened to the public last Saturday.

The museum tells German media that it is working quick to reattach the head, after which it will return the statue to its place in the museum, a display that showed a replica of Hitler's underground Berlin bunker during the final days of WWII.

"Despite the incident, Madame Tussauds will again show the wax figure of Adolf Hitler in the exhibition. Madame Tussauds is apolitical and neither comments on nor judges the people shown in the exhibition or what they did in the course of their life," the museum tells the German news magazine Der Spiegel.

The Hitler statue has generated controversy since the museum announced its initial inclusion in the Berlin museum, alongside the likes of other German speaking notables like Boris Becker, Angela Merkel and Albert Einstein.

Not only is it in bad taste to immortalize the architect of millions of deaths in wax, protesters say, but the very location of the museum on Berlin's posh Unter den Linden, near the Brandenburg Gate, means that the small Hitler exhibit is a stone's throw from Berlin's three-year-old Memorial to the Murder Jews of Europe, a massive sea of gray stone less than a two block walk away.

The Hitler display at Tussauds cost about $300,000. No word yet whether the museum is planning heightened security around it when it returns.

Originally the statue was to be positioned next to a wax likeness of Winston Churchill. However, the museum decided to isolate the Hitler statue in a different area of the museum, behind both a desk and a set of ropes to keep neo Nazis from posing for pictures next to it.

A German man waited patiently in line yesterday for the grand opening of Madame Tussauds' latest museum in Berlin. He was the second person in the building. What did he do?

He promptly ran to the wax statue of Adolf Hitler on display and ripped off his head, shouting three times as he did, "Never war again!"

Germany's national tabloid Bild has the whole story today (sorry, it's in German), and it's pretty funny.

A man authorities are only calling "Frank L.", from the Berlin neighborhood of Kruezberg (where I live!) tussled with and injured several security guards on his way to bringing down the Hitler display. Witnesses say he was fanatical and determined.

His girlfriend, who was there, said only, "I am proud of what he did. He was really angry for days about this display. He is a quiet, loving person."

Police arrested Frank and questioned him, but eventually let him go. He told police that he simply objected to the proximity of the Hitler display to the city's Jewish museum (though, in reality, they are not that close: Tussauds is near the Brandenburg Gate, while the Jewish museum is more than a 30 minute walk away).

The Hitler display at Madame Tussauds has been a subject of controversy in Germany for months, with most concluding that the man who wreaked havoc on a good chunk of the world does not deserve to be immortalized in wax for deep-pocketed tourists to gawk at. In many ways, the controversy is not such a surprise in a country that still takes all matters relating to WWII seriously and that has officially outlawed naming boys Adolf.

Predictably, the German press today mocked the attack. On its German Web site, the major news magazine Der Spiegel said, "Finally a Hitler assassination that worked!"

The Hitler display at Tussauds cost about $300,000 and right now museum officials are debating whether to replace the display, which originally depicted Hitler at work at his desk.

Reaction today among museum goers was mixed.

Bild quotes one tourist from the German city of Mannheim saying, "Hitler belongs to our history. That's why I would have liked to see him."

Another tourist says bluntly, in a nod to Germany's past greatness in tennis, "Hitler? I want to see Boris Becker!"

One of my favorite things to do when traveling abroad is stop at the local grocery store for a quick browse. Usually it's a quaint reproduction of the mega markets I'm used to back home, with funky products and even funkier labels that seem quite strange to the passing foreigner.

But the METRO group in Germany are going for a different feel with their Future Store market, where shoppers are greeted by a rolling robot and mobile phones are used to make purchases. The BBC's Steve Rosenberg recently stopped in the Future Store and brought back this video of his experience.

The Future Store, with its "intelligent" meat freezer and automatic wine-tasting machine (which limits you to 6 small samples, naturally) all seems a bit convoluted and dated, like someone designed it based on what they thought the year 2000 would be like back in 1984.

For example, customers must have software installed on their cell phone in order to scan a product they wish to purchase. The phone stores all the scans, then displays a final barcode when the shopping is done. That barcode is then fed into an ATM-like machine that's used to pay. Wouldn't it make more sense to have an "intelligent" shopping cart that either scans the items automatically, or has a manual scanner built in? The use of a cell phone here seems redundant, and adds an extra layer of special technology that limits who can shop at the store.

The most advanced grocery store on the planet (according to the Germans, at least) is located in Rheinberg, Germany if you're up for a visit.

Between several other vacations, high summer airline prices and the ridiculous Euro/Dollar exchange rate, I am sadly not heading to Europe this summer. But even though I haven't been able to make it "across the pond," I have been vicariously soaking up some European culture through this year's Euro 2008 soccer championships. Today marks the final between Spain and Germany of what has been another tournament of surprising upsets and nail-biting finishes.

Pish-posh, what's this about "soccer" you say? Actually, I don't know a whole lot about European soccer either. Yes, I know a few of the popular club teams like FC Barcelona and Manchester United, but I'm fairly clueless about the day-to-day standings and players. Why then, should anyone bother watching? Because European soccer is more than just a simple sporting event - it's a defining aspect of European cultural identity. Ask your typical European citizen to tell you about their favorite team or best soccer experience and you're bound to get an enthusiastic answer.

So if you're near a television today, crack open a nice cold Hefeweizen and switch over to ABC around 2:30 EST for the big event. Next summer when you're in Munich you'll be swapping Euro 2008 stories with the locals in no time.

It's that time when Germans dust off their national colors and fly them proudly.

It's because of the 2008 European soccer championships, which you could argue is the biggest soccer tournament in the world next to the World Cup.

The last time you would have seen so many German flags flying was back in 2006, when the country hosted the World Cup. My friend Marc Heydenreich reminded me the other day how important soccer is to Germans, in light of the schuld, or guilt, the country still confronts over WWII. "It's really the only time when it's OK for us to be proud of our country," he said.

However, if you've been in Berlin recently, you've noticed that there is another flag almost as ubiquitous as Germany's black, red and yellow. Turkey's dominates many of the buildings in some of the city's best known neighborhoods.

Turkish immigrants here also seem to be using Euro 2008 to demonstrate national pride, and with good reason. The Turkish team is having a hell of a tournament run, having snatched two huge wins, one against the Czech Republic and the other against Croatia, when it looked like they were heading home.

These days there seem to be two home teams in Berlin. The evenings when Turkey has won have become just as rowdy as those following German victories, with cars filling the streets draped in the country's red flag, honking through the morning's small hours.

It's a useful sight for those traveling here, a reminder that Turks are Germany's largest ethnic minority group, with more than 1.5 million living nationwide. In Berlin, they're particularly concentrated in the neighborhoods of Neukoelln and Kreuzberg.

I live in Kreuzberg, not really in the Turkish part but it's still been crazy here the last two times Turkey has won.

Tomorrow? It's the start of the semifinal round and Turkey is set to play...Germany.

So, Berlin stands to see a celebration no matter who wins. I can't say the police will be looking forward to it, though, as some here think there could be trouble between the two groups either way. Let's hope not.

The French and the Germans have a long, complicated diplomatic history. Aside from the fierce hostilities that took place during World War I and World War II, the two countries frequently bicker over disputed boundaries, in particular the Alsace-Lorraine region. Though tensions have cooled noticeably in recent years, it looks as though a new "international incident" involving garden gnomes (?!) is once again stirring tensions.

According to Metro UK, a sneaky gentleman from France has been charged with stealing around 170 of the statues on both sides of the French-German border. Although the motivation for the crime has puzzled French authorities, some have speculated that it may be part of the work of a shadowy organization known as the Garden Gnome Liberation Front. At the very least, it seems to be only one in a long string of gnome-targeted attacks.

Could this be part of some vast international gnome conspiracy to topple the world order? I don't think we'll ever know for sure, though I have my suspicions that Travelocity's annoying gnome mascot (or at least a clever marketing department) is somehow involved. Stay tuned.