Europe: part 1

Brian and I had talked about it for so long.  We wanted to visit his mission so badly!  We waited to purchase our tickets until we knew where Mom and Dad were going on their mission.  When the day came that they opened their call, we knew we were so smart to buy our tickets after they read their call to Athens, Greece.  Being college students, however, made it really REALLY hard for us to cough up the money to fly all the way to Europe.  We looked and looked for weeks for the cheapest tickets to go to Europe.  Late one night, about 11pm, Brian and I found the cheapest tickets we had set our eyes on.  Delta, flying into Munich, Germany and flying out of Rome, Italy.

Preparation:

Brian and I are so smart that we decided the weekend before we left we would stay up late and slowly change to Europe time.  Brian was good about staying up late.  I just quit and went to bed whenever I wanted, first night’s sleep was from 3 am to 5pm the next day.  Bring it on Marky Parky.  Anyway, it was pretty fun to try and stay up as late as we could to make the transition a little easier when we got to Germany.  Brian did not want to waste any time sleeping in his stompin grounds.  We got to the airport and hopped on our 3 hour flight to Atlanta where I slept the entire way and Brian fought with the air blower thing to get his overheated body a little air.  We had a short layover and got on our flight to Munich.  I fell asleep again for a couple hours then woke up watching movies all the way until we landed in Germany. 

Munich Germany:

We redeemed our train passes at the Munich airport which we could use to travel for 10 days in 3 countries Germany Austria and Italy.  We went down some stairs in the airport and hopped on a train that was sitting there waiting to depart to Central station in Munich.  We hopped on that train and 1 minute later, we were on our way to the Center of Munich!  Brian looked out the window excitedly as he saw his mission field.

 We got to our hostel and dropped our crud off and washed our faces, then headed out to Dachau. Side note, we looked up the weather for the time we would be in Europe, every day was in the 70s except the first day in Munich where it would be much lower, like 45 degrees.  We left our hostel and hit the trains again.  We got to the concentration camp after paying for a bus to get us out to Dachau.  We walked around the camp in the miserable cold.  It was raining and windy.  We didn’t care though. We went into one of the barracks there and saw where the Jews were forced to sleep, go to the bathroom, shower, etc.  We listened in on some group tours and heard that one barrack would be fit to hold 200 people, and by the end of the war, there were up to 2000 Jews in one barrack.

 We also saw the crematory where Jews were taken to the “supposed” showers, then gassed to death, then cremated in the next room.  Looking around the concentration camp made me kind of sick especially because of my wet feet.

 We left there, hopped on a Train to Ulm. It was supposedly a 1 train trip. We got to a town called Notartz where the conductor came on the loud speaker and spoke jibberish.  Brian, who understood the jibberish, said that we needed to get off the train onto a new train and that there was some kind of emergency.  Later on this train, we were kicked off the train and were told to get onto a bus to get to Ulm. The long bus ride finally came to an end, but then we had to get off the bus onto our final train into Ulm. Although we changed trains and busses like 4 times, we were falling asleep the whole time. When we got to Ulm, we took off for the tallest cathedral in the world where we hiked 768 steps to top.

As we were hiking the never ending stairs, a church bell rang and scared us silly.  We reached the top and we were able to look over the city of Ulm, which was beautiful.

      Yes, I spotted an Ikea way up there and it made me really happy.  When we descended down the spiral stairs, I realized how out of shape I was as my legs shook.  I steadied them and was able to get down the staircase.  That night, we had a doner for dinner which is one of Brian’s favorite foods that he had in Germany. We ran back to the train station and hopped on a fast train that got us to Central station in Munich in just under an hour.  We got back to our hostel to check in and the woman at the desk said we owed her everything for the rooms.  We knew though that we paid online through Priceline for this hostel.  Brian was smart and brought all receipts for the hostels we were staying at.  As it turns out, Priceline just ran our card then took the charge off so the hostel in Munich would know that they could run that card when we actually arrived.  After working everything out, we got to our room and hit our pillows instantly.