No times at all just the New York Times

I am back from the castle and wine-tasting excursion pictures of which (and of all future adventures) can now be found by clicking right here. Good times in the 900 year old building. Good times with 6 glasses of wine. Good times in a charter bus on the Autobahn.
I was asked today why I don't ever hang out with the other Americans. If anyone has an articulate, easily comprehensible answer as to why I don't wanna go running around on a three day bender in a foreign city with a bunch of Chaches and Tiffs, I would very much appreciate your letting me steal it. The long, not-easily-conveyable-through-ESL-vocabulary-without-sounding- like-a-big-douche answer, of course, is that I am not that kind of American. I am not here on a vacation. I'm not here to force my whacking great American personality on everyone within 50 feet of me. I'm trying to get inside a different culture, a similar, but still decidedly different culture. I don't think the way to do that is to get embarrassingly drunk every night or dedicate the next time months to macking as many foreign ladies as time and physical prowess will allow. This is, as far as I'm concerned an anthropological exercise. I'm trying to be a fly on the wall, not a fly in the soup. I'm being mean though and over-generalizing, which is not fair. I have interacted with some of the other Amis somewhat, but the great majority of them came in a group from their university and seem to be sticking with that. Of course I'm not the most out-going person anyway... It's really terribly complicated, I'm afraid. It's not that I categorically dismiss them because they're Americans. They're just always clustered together in such a big mass. I'm really a one-on-one/ small groups kind of guy. And I don't want to make it sound like I'm on some secret mission or anything, but such a big group of Americans sort of insulates you from any kind of "culture" that you may come across. Furthermore, precious few of them get my jokes, and none of them really seems to appreciate the great joy I take in the small pleasure of things like hearing 15 year old Top 40 American radio in German bars or the simple fact that you could get away with naming a sandwich a "Chicken Mythic". Here again, I'm trying not to generalize, because I do want to say that most of them have been really friendly one-on-one, it's just that one-on-one is a pretty rare occurrence among them. Anyway, I suppose you can see that this simple little question has sent me into a spiral of maladjusted existential crisis, which sitting in front of a computer at 4:30am certainly doesn't serve to ameliorate. Thus, I'll head to bed. The weekends are the worst at this point, because there's precious little structure, and thus not a lot of opportunity to meet people. The weather tomorrow is supposed to be lovely. I will enjoy it in hopes of lifting my spirits.