After Shain's class we bolted to catch our 6:15 train. We made it and started our 3 train journey to the small German town of Heidelberg. We made all our connections including the one that was only 5 minutes. While on the final train an old woman stopped to ask us where we were going-we told her Heidelberg and she told us to hold onto our hearts, when we asked what she meant she sang the song "I lost my heart in Heidelberg" it was very, very nice. On the last train I realized (this is at about 11:20) that reception at the hostel was only open until 12:00 am. So I called the hostel to let them know about our late arrival. The woman who answered exclaimed, "why didn't you call me earlier" and I told her our train was late (shhh...) she then didn't say anything-by the way thank you woman for bumping up my phone bill (blame the German hostess Mom and Dad). She finally informed me she would wait for us. We arrived at Heidelberg station and got on a bus, about 20 minutes to our Hostel. We got off the bus and easily found the hostel which was all locked up. We knocked a couple times and eventually a woman came out and said, "oh you called me" I said yes and I was so sorry we were late (it was 12:04) she said I must go catch my bus, but made a call-looking up to one of the higher windows, hung up after about 5 minutes and said "he will be here in 2 minutes" then ran down the street. We stood outside for about another 5-8 minutes and then a man who had clearly been asleep and quickly thrown clothes on came down. He was very nice though and directed us to our hostel "300 m from here" so we walked toward it but passed an open Kebab shop and decided to stop as we were all hungry. So we sat for about a half an hour eating falafel then found our hostel. We split into two groups of 3-as we had booked 2 3 bed rooms. My room went in and discovered it was nice and clean and quite large. Shortly after however, the other three came in and informed us as they had tried to enter the room they discovered it was already occupied-so they walked the 300m back to the lobby and found some method of communicating with the slumbering man again and got the right room.
I woke up the next morning and went for a run through Heidelberg which was very nice! It has a nice balance of old and new and everywhere I went was very very pretty. After the run (and a shower don't worry) we went down to the cafe where the hostel offered free breakfast which was called "Drugstore" - though your guess is as good as mine as to why. But I had a coffee (that was almost normally sized) and an apple tort called "cake." The cafe was very nice, it seemed surprisingly local with older gentlemen playing chess (despite the early morning) and the waitress greeting people she knew. After storing our bags we walked up to Heidelberg Castle which despite the fog was a great view of the little city and we went to the pharmacy museum-which is housed in Heidelberg castle-again your guess is as good as mine (just kidding I asked and it's because there was space). We also saw the largest wine barrel ever-slightly unimpressive until we realized that that was just a large one and in the next room was the real world's largest wine barrel-now this was quite large. After that we decided due to the weather to catch a train to Munich.
We arrived in Munich and after some very skilled detective work figured out how to get to our hostel. When we got off the subway though it seemed very, very suburban. We started walking in the direction of the hostel and onto a street with only houses-not to mention all of this was in snow and wintry mix and I in my optimistic packing state had only packed moccasins as footwear-oops. So we found the house with the right number which seemed to be a preschool. Then we noticed a staircase leading downward that had the rest of the address and an arrow pointing down. A man greeted us and we checked into his very nicely decorated basement. The room was very nice, 2 large beds and a large foldout couch. Seemingly the only other person staying there was an old rather large man who liked to walk to the shower in only a towel. We did have some problems with the shower the first day-it wouldn't get past freezing, which meant I wasn't particularly clean in Munich, but it resolved itself the next day. Then we got ready and went to dinner at the Hofbräuhaus for dinner. I enjoyed some lovely white veal sausage and the dark beer in the size that it was served-a liter (don't worry Mom I only had the one). Served with the sausage was a pretzel and some really really good sweet mustard. After sitting and hanging out we went to a discoteque called something Japanese (apparently our favorite theme). And danced the night away. We woke up the next morning in time to catch the cuckoo clock show in the main square of Munich at noon-later described as Europe's second most overrated tourist attraction-though I'm sure before TV was invented it was quite nice... We grabbed a quick breakfast and went to meet our free walking tour. Our tour guide ended up being this British bloke who was really really funny and a little drunk (no really I saw the beer). But he was really funny making jokes the whole time and at one point grabbing me in a headlock and softly ramming my head into a wall. We stopped to get a hot drink after 3 hours of being in the literally freezing cold, then stopped unsuccessfully at a couple souvenir shops looking for key chains for our new set of keys. Then we tried a new Beer Garden for Dinner. This one was obviously more local than the other-and apparently very popular as we couldn't really get a seat without a reservations, so they sat us between the two bathroom doors separate from all the action. However with frequent requests we managed to be moved to the main hall. I had pork sausage and potato pancakes (though slightly different from latkes) which were all very very good. We ended up staying there for almost 5 hours. We decided to leave when the rather aged man-nicknamed Bob after Grace's grandfather-begin getting a little to touchy with Melissa. Then half of us (including myself) went home and the other 3 went dancing.
The next morning we woke up to discover one of our "dancers" was missing. I woke up about 8:30 (a couple of us wanted to try and get an early start to see Dashau concentration camp) unfortunately we spent most of the morning worrying that our fallen warrior had actually fallen somewhere and was in the hospital. So we frantically tried to find someone who knew the lost's number (he had just gotten a new phone) as well as the numbers for the Munich Police and Hospitals. Eventually we got a hold of our prodigal friend who eventually turned up around 11 am limiting our activities for the day (though I suppose the fact that everybody was healthy and safe was good too...) So we headed back into Munich with all of our luggage (we figured that since we were trying to leave by 2 that paying for storage wasn't worth it-and peaked into a church that was all white on the inside-very cool (mass was going on too...) then we wandered around looking for something to eat (which due to everything always being closed on Sundays wasn't easy-haven't these people heard of Sunday brunch??) By the time we settled on something and ate it outside it was time to catch our train to Interlaken.
Our first (of three) trains arrived in Munich on the late side-15+ minutes which was great because our scheduled "layover" was 12, we were lucky enough-with the help of our conductor Wilhelm to make it in about 4 minutes before our next train was scheduled to leave. So all 6 of us took off running through the train station to our next train-the long one, 3 hours-however this was some kind of make shift commuter trolly type train that was already overcrowded by the time we arrived, so we squeezed our way onto it and ended up sort of sitting on the floor and standing-which was especially helpful as we were trying to read our hundreds of pages of homework while on the trains... We made it to our final train into Interlaken and were late enough that we had to take taxis to our hostel because the bus had stopped running and we were staying outside of the city. We got to the hostel and the hostess had upgraded us to two four person rooms instead of the 7 that we booked (she didn't know why we booked a 7 even though we tried to explain it was because there were 7 of us) The rooms we got though overlooked the lake and it was some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever seen.
The next morning I woke up and went for a run (yeah baby!!) and basically ran down the same street a couple of times to avoid going to far uphill but it was so beautiful I didn't mind. Then we had our free breakfast, 2 pieces of bread, butter, jelly, a piece of swiss cheese and two small pieces of what was called salami but looked questionable (though it tasted fine in my opinion, I was one of the few brave enough to try it). We caught the bus into Interlaken and Zunaira signed up to go paragliding. But, (despite the fact that the company didn't contact her) we managed to find out paragliding had to be cancelled due to high winds. So we decided to go to where the paragliding took off which was supposed to be beautiful, but our free bus ticket only got us half way so we decided not to. We ended up just walking around Interlaken for a while and catching an earlier (thankfully uneventful) train back to Geneva. After dropping our stuff off at the cite we did our grocery shopping for the week-at a much better store, and then had some dinner and skyped with Jen and Lauren!
Germany (at least southwest Germany) was interesting because it was very Americanized, it was the first place where I saw people wearing uggs and carrying around starbucks, and in one place you could find a San Francisco company, a starbucks, McDonalds and Burger King all next to each other. Yet, despite the Americanization-and this was probably because we were tourists-the reality of what happened there 70 years ago was still hovering over us like a dark cloud. For example, Germans don't really fly the German flag. The whole time we were there I saw one and it was flying over the royal residence. It was interesting having spent all month in France, where they are very resistant to American influence and then going to SW Germany where it is almost overly Americanized.
Today I'm thankful for skype!
Today I am also thankful that Barry is hooking us up with a coffee maker
Finally I'm thankful that my showers are finally getting me clean and I've returned from the French stereotype of cleanliness back to good ol' American standards
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