Europe: part 3

Fussin:

Thinking our alarm would be going off at six to make our 6:51 train, we woke up at 640 in a panic! We both got out of bed, changed and ran to the train station as fast as our little hurt feet could get us to go in order to catch it.  One thing I learned while in Europe, German trains are NEVER late.  Brian and I watched our train pull away as we ran up to it at 6:53.  It was ok because we decided to go ahead and get some breakfast pastries (johannisbeer streusel and Butterbreze). I actually had some time to get my hair brushed before the next train left for Fussen an hour later.  This is the day I discovered the most disgusting thing in Germany..I am sure you have heard of it, it is called carbonated water.  Yes, it is as gross as it sounds.  If you want to try some, just press the soda button at Taco bell and taste what comes out. Its disgusting.  After waiting an hour on our train, the train starts to pull away and down plops two Asian girls who talk NON STOP in Chinese for the 2 hour train ride to Fussen! 

We had fun tho taking pictures out the window :)

When we got to Fussen, we grabbed a bus to take us the half mile to the castles.  I am sure you are thinking, oh ½ mile, we could have walked... No we couldn't have, our feet would have fallen off. We got to the castle area and bought passes to see both castles.   We first saw hohenschwangau.  I was loving this beautiful castle the whole time we were inside and outside of it!  

Brian knew the next castle would be way better.  My thoughts though were, that nothing can beat the bedroom with stars that could be lit from behind and the hanky-panky secret tunnels between the king and queen’s rooms.  

After going through that castle, we hiked up the "40min" trail in 20 minutes, by which time Brian was dying of hunger. We got 2 salami sandwiches called semmel, then continued our hike to the marienbrucke (bridge) which was totally worth it. 

 

We crossed this beautiful bridge, and off to the right of the bridge, the alps, to the left, the beautiful castle.  Of course Brian was right, The 2^nd castle was SO much better than the other castle.  The tour of this castle was awesome (except for those dang Asians in our tour group who talked the whole time and cut us off at every corner of the castle) Inside this castle, we saw his man made cave, his private concert hall with different statue pieces on top of the pillars, the throne room without a throne and a huge chandelier with 1100 candles, and the secret door to his bathroom, that had a padded chamber pot.

After touring this beautiful castle, we headed back on the bus to the train station where a train took off for Munich just 5 minutes later.  When we got back to Munich, we went straight into a schnitzel house to get a bite to eat. It was neat to see that most waiters and waitresses wear dirndl and lederhosen (the formal German attire). After eating some yummy dinner we walked around looking for a Market place that sold delicious German chocolate.  We couldn't find one in the area we were in, so we took the train (s Bahn) to Giesing where Brian served his mission for 6 months and knew exactly where a store was for chocolate.  I have never witnessed with my eyes an adult act like an awestruck kid in a candy store.  He loaded up on way too many treats.  We actually tried to see if the elders were home so Brian could see the apartment he lived.  They weren’t home though, dang. Brian said it was so much fun seeing and smelling Munich and the things he saw and did just 5 years ago.  He kept saying that he was getting these feelings of dread, that he needed to be doing missionary work after all our p-day activities were finished.  He is silly.

Europe: part 2

Munich:

We woke up early this day because of jetlag I am sure. We walked around the area we were in and Brian pointed out his favorite things he saw while on his mission.  While walking around, Brian pointed out where the LDS church was!  Naturally we had to get a picture of him in front of the building. 

We had breakfast at a bakery in the hauptbahnhof (train system in Munich). We grabbed a train to the touristy part of Munich and saw 2 amazing churches (Asam kirche, frauen kirche).  

We also saw the city center marienplatz where the old city hall has the enormous cookoo clock, and the parliament.  We tried to go in, but there was a sign on the door that said that you “must be a member invited by parliament to enter”.  Darn!  Our feet at this point were already soo tired of walking everywhere.  Every once In a while Brian and I would take a tram to ease our feet.  Somehow Brian managed to lose our maps and our schedule for the rest of the trip when we ate at an outdoor café for lunch!  That’s OK though.  We had another one of Brian’s favorite meals there called weisswurst (which is white Sausage) and homemade pretzels. This was right after watching the cookoo clock put on its show. 

 It was really relaxing sitting in the shade of the buildings eating lunch together.  After lunch, we went to Schloss nymphenburg, which is a beautiful castle on the outskirts of Munich.   

We sat on the bench mainly while we were there.  Our feet were on fire from walking so much!  Then we took a train over to the Olympiaturm where we were able to ride to the top of this Giant tower and look out at the beautiful city of Munich!   

Brian loved it.  We headed home after that because of exhaustion.  We rested up for a half hour, then decided to make one last quick trip out to get money out of an ATM a few blocks away in karlsplatz stachus. We saw lots of poliezi surrounding a bunch of people dressed in black.  We asked around and found out the people in the middle that were gated off were the neo-nazis. Lots of people gathered outside the police and began shouting and chanting insults and stuff at the neo-nazis.  There were probably about 60 nazis, 100 poliezi, and 200 people watching/yelling.  Finally we returned home gimping from our aching feet and went to sleep.

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.

The dark side of helping others

I love hesring peoples wonderful stories about helping a lonely person in need. Everyone expresses the amazing feeling they have after handing a granola bar to a homeless person outside their car window. Even the occasional coat is handed to one who needs the warmth moreso than you. How about giving someone a ride to wherever they need to go? That sounds pretty Christ-like to me. Honestly, I am not very good at giving things up nor taking time out of my busy schedule to take a person where they need to go or giving money to someone out the window and thinking.. Are you going to use this for drugs? I have wanted to be better and love those experiences shared with me about helping someone in need, but .... Why is the other side of the story never told? Well I am here to tell you, sometimes these amazing spiritual experiences are watching the spirit leave as you have a drunken homeless guy enter your car. As you probably know, Brian is in love with knives. We have about 11 total knives in our car alone. One under the drivers seat is a machete. Anyone who has ridden in the back seat of our car can vouch for me and let you know that yes, in fact, there is a machete under there. Tonight, Brian and I went shopping for groceries and when we were loading up our car, a man who looked confused and mentally challenged came up to us telling us that he needed a dollar or two to help get him back to slc. We don't have cash, we have cards. We sent him on his way. Brian asked if there was something more that we could do and I said we could give him a banana! We drove over to the other side of the parking lot to get to the homeless man. We handed him the banana and he asked for a ride. You give a mouse a cookie, right? Brian said sure and I told Brian as I was getting out of the car to let him in..grab the machete. I got out and we let him in our car. We began to drive and Brian asked if the guy had been drinking. right then it hit me what the smell on him was..he was completely wasted. The man got incredibly....TICKED off at Brian's question. He said we needed to mind our own business. My stomach dropped and all I could think about was that this crazy guy has access to knives back there. I am going to die! He was talking about how he was going to call a lawyer and how he wanted to take this to the next level..whatever that meant. Somehow after Brian apologized we got to talking and the guy told us he was a millionaire and works for ozzy Osborne. He was chomping loudly on his banana and chatting it up with us thanking us so much for giving him a ride. After a mile down the road we asked why he was up in Provo and he was like I don't know it's weird here. It's funny here. I don't like it here. Mutterings and mumblings within the sentences. We were turning the corner to where he wanted us To go when Brian asked if he had run into any Mormons around Provo. wrong question dearie! The guy hit the seat and put his hands on his face like he was totally upset and on the verge of tears. He looked up at me and He started cussing and yelling saying something about being in a place that is populated 99.9 percent of everyone around here is Mormon. He started yelling that he wanted out of the car and wanted to get out of there. he was totally freaking out. Brian pulled over and all I could think about was how he had his face on the other side of the seat right where the knife laid. As soon as Brian pulled over I jumped out of the car and he was muttering and cussing about Mormons and wanting OUT RIGHT NOW. He ran out of the car yelling at us and muttering and yelling. Needless to say..I was scared for my life tonight. I was mad that we would even consider taking someone down the road two miles. Brian did make me feel a lot better when I told him I was terrified about the knife being in reaching distance of that guy. He smiled and grabbed the machete that was rightly his knees the whole time. He said he got my back! Lol the point of this story is..helping ones in need is great, but there are occasionally totally freaky stories where the dude yells at you and wants to kill you cuz you mentioned Mormons. Be careful when you help others. I learned that I am happy to be cautious anytime I try to help someone. The end