Germany

Day 9: May 21, Cologne

At some point we got on the train to Cologne and rode through the scenic Belgian countryside. In Cologne in the shadow of the giant cathedral that we didn't know was called The Dome (it doesn't even have a dome, seriously) we had another embarrassing interaction with some innocent German passerby (wo ist die Dom? Umm it’s right there.) and finally figured out that we were in fact looking for a giant cathedral to meet up with my friend from high school, Laura. She is Romanian/German and is going to medical school at Cologne University so we set up to meet with her and stay with her relatives.

Boy was it nice to have someone to guide us around! We went back to her apartment and made real food for dinner, and we went to a free rock concert at the university with some of her friends. It was pretty fun, I guess; the band was pretty good, I liked a few of their songs at least and for a first real rock concert for me it was an interesting experience. I hope I don’t get lung cancer.

Then we went back to the house we were staying at; the guest house in the backyard of Laura’s fourth cousins, literally. They were very nice and I wished I spoke much more German than I do, especially since the grandfather completely refuses to speak English since “If they come to my country they should learn to speak my language!”

Day 10: Thursday May 22, Cologne

We started out the morning by sleeping later than we meant to, eating some of our hosts’ organic milk and delicious muesli, and heading to the Neumarkt to meet up with the stop on a hop-on hop-off bus tour. There was some confusion on where the stop was and we tried to ask a blind lady for help reading our map (yes that was as awkward as it sounds), but somehow we got onto a bus with an enthusiastic tour guide and we got a nice ride around Cologne. We hopped off at some point and looked at a cool cathedral, St Gereon’s, which was really beautiful. I wished I would have had some sort of guide to tell me about it. We wandered around a bit looking for a place to buy a SIM card for a phone so that we could have a way of communication, but to no avail. At least I got to practice my limited German, which was fun, except I can never remember if “welche” means which or how so that was confusing. Then we hopped back on the bus and made our way to the giant cathedral to actually look at it this time, not just wonder about it.

This is the bus tour's idea of a warning sign.

For old times’ sake we climbed all 500+ steps of the Dome, took a few pictures to say we’d been there, and tried not to get dizzy on the way down. Seriously those steps are really windy. Haha that looks like windy like the wind, but I mean windy like a spiral. It was windy too, and the street performer on a 15-ft unicycle outside couldn’t get his torches to light in order to juggle them while they were on fire. It was really embarrassing for everybody.

Then we had some traditional German food for lunch and went shopping with some nice German girls (although come to think of it Laura really is Romanian and Sarah is from Luxembourg)(also I got some European-style pants which I think are the coolest thing ever)(don’t worry we found a SIM card while we were with them). We stopped by my new favorite store, Primark, which is sort of like Forever 21 except ten times cooler. I wish they would open one in Seattle, the closest one is in Boston. Eventually we got tired and went back to make dinner at Laura’s fourth cousins’ house, then watched Casablanca because none of us had seen it and Hey why not.

Day 11: Friday May 23, Trains and Worms

Friday morning we packed up, said goodbye to Laura, and went off on the train to Worms. It’s a city between Cologne and Stuttgart where the Diet of Worms happened; essentially Martin Luther’s trial where they told him to deny his work and he said, “Here I stand, I cannot deny it, God help me, Amen.” Pretty much all we knew about the town was that it had a Martin Luther monument and the potential for lots of worm-related puns. We came off of the train and started walking, hoping to run into something interesting, and lo and behold we walked right into the Luther Monument! Since that was all we came for we got some lunch and went back on the train to Munich to meet up with our dad. Without too much trouble we met him in the Munich train station, got sort of lost trying to find our hotel, and crashed for the night.

The Luther Memorial

Day 12: Saturday May 24, Berchtesgaden

Saturday morning we had breakfast at the hotel (Cam and I ate at least 4 pastries each) (you gotta do what you gotta do) and we went and picked up Aubrey at the airport. Then we drove off on our way to Berchtesgaden, sometimes called Burgersgarden (I’ve heard it both ways) to practice our yodeling in the Alps. The car GPS took us through back-roads and slightly-too-long route that was very scenic. We stopped in a tiny little town to have some traditional German lunch that included fish, farm duck, baby pig, and deer goulash. The waiter was Very German and we were glad to have my dad with us, who is fluent in Deutsch.

Then we drove on some windy roads to our little alpine hotel in Berchtesgaden, a very picturesque little German town that looked a lot like Leavenworth. Weird. (That’s funny because Leavenworth is a town in Washington that is supposed to look like a little Bavarian village.) We climbed all the way to the top of Jenner Mountain, which was really a feat for the cable car operator. Too bad it was cloudy so once you got to the top it really wasn't that exciting, just looked like gray mist. But hey, we got to sing “Climb Every Mountain” in the actual Alps, so that was probably worth the whole trip.

Then we got our heads out of the clouds and meandered around an overpriced souvenir street, got some wurst and fries for dinner (I came all the way to Germany for some hot dogs?!) and went back to the hotel to get some sleep.

The hills are alive

Me being a Bollywood star

Day 13: May 25, Four Countries in One!

Today was road trip day and traversed four countries: we started in Berchtesgaden, Germany, drove through Austria to get to Linderhof Palace and Neuschwanstein in Germany, and passed through Switzerland on the drive to Veduz, Liechtenstein, just to say we did. It was a very scenic day and I have like fifty pictures of mountains. I also have an awesome picture that was Switzerland in the foreground and Austria in the background. Yeah. You don’t see that every day.

Linderhof Palace was really cool. There was a Bavarian king in the 1870s, Mad King Ludwig, who was really obsessed with the French King Louis XIV and built some seriously expensive and ornate castles. Seriously, go look up pictures of Linderhof Palace; he used 1 kilo of gold in each room and has chandelier made of pure ivory that is so rare and valuable that they literally can’t even calculate the cost. It was crazy. We also drove by Nesuchwanstein, which Ludwig had built over 17 years, lived in for 172 days before he mysteriously died, and was only ever used to house stolen Nazi art during WWII. It’s also the inspiration for the Disney castle, apparently.

Linderhof Palace

Neuschwanstein

Then we drove to Liechtenstein, which is not nearly as exciting as I thought it would be. We walked down a touristy street with way overpriced souvenirs. They had signs in English, German, and Chinese, and I wondered where this large population of Chinese tourists was coming from that they needed those signs. Then we saw like three groups of Chinese tourists. Oh, there they are.

"Dad, get in the picture!"

"Okay."

There really wasn’t anything to see on the two streets in Liechtenstein so we got back to the car, I hopped out in Switzerland just to say I had been completely neutral for a whole minute of my life, and we were on our way back to Munich. We snuck into a fancy hotel (for real, Dad’s work reserved a two-person room for him but four of us are sleeping here tonight) (don’t tell anyone) (Cam gets the floor)

Day 14: Monday, May 26 

Monday morning Dad went to his work conference on the bottom floor of our hotel (did I mention that was the most swankified hotel I’ve ever seen?)(also I shouldn’t say “our” hotel, the room was only for two people and Cam and I were freeloaders)(it was actually really nerve-racking to sneak by the front desk people so they wouldn’t suspect we were occupying the room beyond capacity)(seriously I felt like a ninja)(where was I going with this)(oh yeah), and Aubrey, Cam, and I headed to the S-bahn to go to Dachau, a former Nazi concentration camp right outside of Munich. That was a sobering experience, and they have done a lovely job with the museum and memorials there. I highly recommend going there, or somewhere like the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., because I think people should have that experience. Then we had lunch at the cafeteria at the museum, which was pretty delicious. Also, make a note; it is very difficult to complain about your feet hurting when you are walking through a former concentration camp.

We got back to the fancy hotel at about 2:45. Let it be noted that both the night before and the morning of I had reminded myself that I should check what time the train to Prague leaves from Munich Hbf, and yet had failed to do so. Hoping we could leave soon, we stopped by the information desk after our morning excursion. The train guy checked his watch and said, “Not until 5.” Cool. It takes at least 6 hours to get to Prague. Guess we’re not going to Czech things out in the city until tomorrow morning (oh hoh hoh I’m hilarious)(no really I am). Also, we could have taken a train at about 1 if we hadn’t dawdled.

Spoiler alert: apparently those trains are notoriously unreliable. It took nearly 7 hours to get to Prague, and we ended up there at midnight and luckily got the last taxi at the train station and mid-voyage we were in the wrong train car and might have been left in Regensberg, Germany, wondering why the train wasn’t moving. That would have been fun.

Nevertheless we (this is just Cam and I at this point) eventually made it to Prague around midnight, found our backpacker’s hostel, bothered the other six people staying in our room, and went to sleep.