Weekend 10: Munich, Germany

I can't believe that this was the last full weekend of travel for the summer as we lead into finals this weekend. This weekend was just Mary Margaret and I exploring the wonderful city of Munich! We took an overnight train (per usual) but this time (for the first time all summer) we didn't have couchettes. A couchette is the compartment with 6 beds (3 per side) -- and by beds I mean wooden planks pretty much. But never again will I say something bad about a couchette as we spent this night in a "sleeper car" which is just a compartment. NOTHING remotely related to making sleep possible. I won't even call what we did in that car "sleep" because that would just be a downright lie. We arrived about an hour and a half late in Munich which actually worked out very well for us because that put us there about 9 instead of 7ish and things were actually open when we got there! So we dropped our stuff off at the hostel and checked in which was great since we would head off for the day and not return until about 9 at night!

We grabbed a map and decided to wander towards the Deutsches Museum which is supposedly the largest science and technology museum in the world (welcome to an engineering nerd's dream!) On our way there we stumbled across the Glockenspiel. We hovered around for awhile as it was almost 10 at this point and we assumed it would go off. After 10 AM came and went and the Glockenspiel didn't do it's spiel (pun intended) we consulted my travel book and found that it goes off at 11, 12, and 5. Oops! We kept wandering and found a farmer's market! It reminded me of being at home with my mom -- we went to a bunch last summer around Atlanta. :)

Spices, etc. at the market

Some very strange looking fruits 

Then we finally found the Deutsches Museum and spent almost 5 hours there! It was amazing -- there are 8 floors and about 65 rooms with different themes, etc. Some of the rooms were about physics, ceramics, aeronautics, nanotechnology, and SO much more.

The Museum! and tiny little us in the bottom of the picture excited about the museum 

I found a Siemens sign! 

Just playing with some touch screens :) 

Foucault's pendulum -- it knocks over little blocks with the rotation of the earth. We watched it for about 10 minutes until it knocked over a block 

An organ concert -- one of the things on my summer bucket list -- in the Musical Instruments room!

The photography room -- with a bunch of cameras 

Playing with a camera machine in the exhibit. you're supposed to make your own postcard with your picture and pay for it -- we just played with the machine 

The weaving exhibit -- exercising my PTFE 3720 skills and weaving some twill

A Lego Tower Bridge! 

Playing with a mobius strip in the "math closet"

using the giant compass

After we left the museum we took the subway over to the BMW Welt which is the showroom of a bunch of cars. 

Don't worry Mom, this is probably the only time you'll see me on a motorcycle! 

Me and my new car ;) 

After this we took the subway back into the main area and walked over to the English Garden at which point it promptly started raining so we went to the Hofbräuhaus a bit earlier than planned which was fine with us since we were hungry and tired!

Our glimpse of the English Garden before it started raining

We were a bit overwhelmed upon our entrance to the Hofbräuhaus since it was incredibly packed with zero instruction. Turns out you wander around till you find some open space at a table and sit down. We finally found a spot and soon learned you must flail your hands around until the server in your area notices you are sitting there and would like some assistance. So we arrived, found a spot, flailed our hands, ordered 2 pretzels, 2 liters of radler, and 2 English menus. One great thing about the Hofbräuhaus is that misery loves company. We bonded with the other 2 couples at our table -- one of which was Russian, the other we aren't quite certain -- over the fact that we all needed something and couldn't ever seem to get it! Finally after 30 minutes we got our menus and were able to order something! It was pretty good and definitely a fun experience! 

With our lemonade beer (aka radler) which went quite nicely with our sausage and potato salad dinner. mmm...German food! 

 Liter of radler victory picture! 

After this, we headed back to the hostel for some nice warm showers and an early bedtime since we'd been up and going since 9 with very little sleep. 

Sunday, we took a 2 hour train out to Fussen where we caught another bus that took us to the start of the hiking trails to Neuschwanstein Castle. This is the castle that Walt Disney supposedly modeled Cinderella's castle after. On the train ride we listened to a couple kids play a game of (from what I deciphered) "Raz-va-SHIT" which I believed to be a form of rock-paper-scissors that I found to be absolutely hysterical. We made it there and got off the train onto the bus with all the other tourists. We waited in a line to get tickets into the castle until a tour guide told us that the next tour would be about 4 pm. It was 11 AM. We opted to not go on the tour inside the castle and instead grabbed some lunch, hiked about 40 minutes up to the castle, walked around inside (the courtyard) as much as we could, walked over to Marienbrucke which is a bridge that provides a stunning view of the castle. 

Me and Neuschwanstein Castle 

the castle from Marienbrucke 

One thing that we've witnessed in Europe is what one can only describe as glamour shots in front of various monuments. Not even mentioning the European smile (what I refer to as the I-look-pissed-to-be-here smile), we've seen a good amount of seductive posing, etc. in front of said monuments. We decided to have a little shoot of our own. Here's a particular gem of Mary Margaret from our shoot on the bridge: 

After we hiked back down towards the castle, we stopped for some hot chocolate, and opted for the horse drawn carriage ride down the mountain. We were going to do that up the mountain but decided to hike since we wouldn't be going inside the castle anymore. We took the bus back to the train station (again with all the other tourists) but this train ride turned out to be quite fun for us! We found a study abroad program from LSU and it's an engineering program! There are 13 of them and they go on factory tours, etc. while taking various classes in 5 weeks. The faculty leading the program are a German teacher who guides the 6 other history students and an Industrial Engineering professor who guides the 13 engineering students! So we ended up chatting with them the whole 2 hour ride and then they invited us to join them for dinner where they were meeting up with the history students. It was a lot of fun and I'm really glad we met them! They were headed off to catch a train to a nearby town where they're staying for the next 2 weeks and we still had 3 hours to kill before our train so we started wandering around and stumbled upon a movie theater. We decided to go inside and see if they had anything in English -- they did! An Australian film called "A Few Best Men" which was like a combination of Bridesmaids and the Hangover. It was really funny and I finally got to see a movie! 

Me and my seat! They actually give you a row and seat number

We're excited for the movie!

The movie got out in a perfect amount of time to get back to the train station, grab our bags from the luggage lockers where we'd stored our stuff that morning, and onto our train. Thankfully we had couchettes this time and I slept quite soundly on our way back to Metz! Now it's dead week which is filled with lots of finals studying. But good news -- I'm satisfied with my MSE grade so I get to exempt which takes my finals count down to 2! AND they're on separate days! This weekend I'm hoping to take a day trip to Luxembourg so hopefully I'll get to post about that soon too! 

I can't believe my time at GTL is coming to a close -- it's been such a great summer but I can't wait to see what the last few days have in store for me :) 

Weekend 9: Interlaken, Switzerland

I would first like to apologize for my delay in posting this but I am proud to say I have finally finished my 2 tests of "hell week" here at GTL and SURVIVED! Nothing welcomes you back from a weekend away like an ECE and MSE test? Now I can finally tell you all about what is quite possibly the best weekend yet: Interlaken, Switzerland!

We caught a series of regional trains and after a couple delays, layovers, etc. we arrived in Interlaken around midnight. We caught a taxi to get to our hostel which is in a town 20 minutes outside Interlaken called Iseltwald. Midnight taxi means roller coaster in this case as we made it there in 15 minutes max. and then we learned just how expensive Switzerland can be -- that 15 minute ride? 45 francs. (swiss franc to dollar conversion? about 1:1) We assumed he was ripping us off as we were 5 college students with backpacks. Turns out we got a deal -- some companies charge 60-80 depending on the number of passengers. WOW! With our late night arrival we did our best not to disrupt our fellow hostel-mates [semi-unsuccessfully as one girl on the top bunk grumpily said, "you don't need to worry about getting your stuff stolen!!" when one of our group members quietly whispered whether she should lock the door or not].

Then we woke up and found this:

Is that not the most beautiful view ever? 

For those of you that don't know, Interlaken is often known as the adventure capital of Europe. Why, you ask? Because you can hang glide, skydive, canyon, raft, hike, and more. Our group opted to make Saturday our adventure day with each of us doing our own thing. Kate and Jeff went on an 8 hour (high-adrenaline) canyoning, Kristen went on a day trip to Lausanne and Bern, Alex went skydiving, and I opted for the slightly less intense 6 hour canyoning trip! Canyoning is like hiking in a river through a canyon while jumping off rocks, repelling, and ziplining to get around the various obstacles in a canyon. For example, how do you get into a canyon? Easy; repel 150 feet into it. Not sure how to get down the 50 foot waterfall? How about a zipline across the canyon dropping you into the pool below? It was without a doubt the most wonderful experience of my entire life. I slid down rock slides, slipped on rocks hiking through the water (and got a pretty sweet bruise to boot), jumped off of waterfalls, and so much more. I only got nervous once when I jumped 30 feet off a cliff and had to clear about 10 feet of rock. Although apparently I had a right to be nervous -- my friends watching said I almost didn't! But I'm still alive to tell the tale! 

Each person has a helmet with a name so they don't have to learn our real names and it makes it easier for them to make the video so they can tell who each person is. Mine was wizard :)

Then we all met back at the hostel and had a great dinner at the restaurant across the street (on the lake) from our hostel. It was delicious -- salad with spring rolls! 

Sunday Kristen, Kate, and I decided to sleep in a bit and spend the day exploring Interlaken. We rode a ferry from Iseltwald to Interlaken and it offered some beautiful views of the lake we were staying on. 

view of the lake from the ferry

 It only takes about 20 minutes to walk from one train station to the other on either end of Interlaken but we had such a relaxing, leisurely day we didn't even make it to the other side! We found a Chinese restaurant (something we haven't eaten in 10 weeks) and it was absolutely delicious. Then we wandered around a went souvenir shopping (swiss army knives and chocolate!), window shopped, and stopped at a park/green space to watch some hang gliders land.

Me and Interlaken! 

Then we decided to go ride a tram up to Harder Kulm for a great view of the town! It was gorgeous from up there but we saw off to our right that rain was approaching. It made for a really cool picture though (see below)

The incline up the mountain for the tram! Hope the breaks are working fine :)

The rain off to the right over the lake-- cool, right?

Me on the suspended platform at the top of Harder Kulm

Then it rained on our tram ride down so we kind of missed the view on the way down. But it made up for it completely when we got to the bottom and found this: 

A rainbow over the river!!! 

Then we had dinner and met back up with Jeff and Alex who had gone hiking for the day! Monday we wanted to take advantage of the kayaks available at our hostel so we woke up early to go kayaking on the lake. Then we came in, caught the ferry into town, grabbed lunch, and took some regional trains back to Metz. It was such an adventurous, relaxing, fantastically beautiful weekend. :) 

Weekend 8: Prague, Czech Republic

Classes were cancelled on Friday because the Tour de France was ending in Metz. It was really cool to get to watch! and hard to take pictures of because they were moving so fast: 

Attempt 1: fail. 

Attempt #2! Better this time -- still blurry but at least I got all of them!

Then we came back to GTL to get our bags, went downtown and had some dinner, and found a really unique art performance on our way to the train station. It involved a guy hanging from a bell suspended from a crane and a tribe of people carrying fire wearing weird outfits. When he rang the bell they froze on the platforms they were standing on and then they would unfreeze when he laughed. I've decided one theme from this summer is "lost in translation"... 

The tribe of fire people

The guy hanging from the bell suspended from the crane. who controls the frozen-ness of the fire people tribe. Let me know if you follow what's going on -- cause I don't...

Then we made our way to the train station to catch our overnight train to Munich. Then we caught a Deutsche Bahn bus from Munich to Prague. We arrived around noon, found our hostel -- where they upgraded us to a 3 person private room with a balcony! It was AWESOME (including chocolates on the pillows, slippers, and shampoo provided in the shower. coolest hostel ever. We spent the rest of the afternoon grabbing lunch and exploring Prague while we waited for the rest of our group to arrive. 

Cute sign we found -- Happy Prague :) 

Charles Bridge

Me rubbing everything on the Charles Bridge (pretty sure this brings me love or loyalty?) 

Fun street musicians on the bridge -- reminded me of the south! 

Once our group arrived we had dinner at a delicious pizza place recommended by our hostel and stopped at a beer garden/restaurant on the river looking at the Charles Bridge and Prague lit up at night. So pretty! We befriended some German guys and chatted with them for about 2 hours. 

Sunday morning we woke up for a walking tour led by our hostel. It was about 3 1/2 hours and was a GREAT way to see a ton of the city. Our tour guide was from Michigan and is teaching English there -- he knew a TON about Prague. I learned a lot during those 3 hours!

Astronomical tower from the side in the Old Town Square

Tyn Church  -- the towers are different sizes designed to represent Adam and Eve

Astronomical clock -- the skeleton (death) rings the bell which starts the whole clock going. A statue on the left looking into a mirror (vanity) shakes his head while another guy shakes his money bag (greed) while another statue shakes his head playing a guitar of sorts (lust -- luring all the ladies with his song). All the while the 12 Apostles stroll by the open windows. Pretty impressive for an old clock if you ask me!

These were the golden bear doors. When they didn't have street names they used to identify homes based on the decorations -- this has 2 bears. But the alchemists put in something in the concrete that when you're there at night and take a picture -- the bears show up and glow gold! Also, they're different sizes to represent ursa major and ursa minor. So if you're facing the door, you're facing north!

Cemetery of the Jewish quarter. Because they were confined to live in one area, they also had to bury their dead in one area. See how packed the grave stones are; the bodies are also 12 deep in some places. 

After our walking tour we went to a great vegetarian restaurant recommended by our guide! I had a delicious salad and hummus with pumpkin oil. SO GOOD! Then we went to the other side of the Charles Bridge to see the castle and a monastery up on the hill. The monastery brews their own beer so we stopped at that beer garden for a break after hiking up the hill. It offered a beautiful view (seriously, on the info guide a spot was labeled "beautiful view"). We also stopped at the Lennon wall (thanks to a great suggestion from my friend Daniele who studied abroad in Prague last year!). It was really cool and a great spot for pictures!

Me and the castle in the background on the Charles Bridge 

"Beautiful view" from the monastery

Me and the Lennon Wall -- in 1980, they were communist and western music was banned. So when someone painted his face on the wall after he was shot, it was an act of defiance. Ever since then, people have been graffiti-ing over and over it! 

The poem from Invictus painted on the Lennon wall

Sunday night we went to a pub crawl also hosted by our hostel. It started off at the bar in the ground floor of our hostel. Then we went to a bar that we just kept going further down the stairs with every turn. I read about it in my Let's Go Europe book where it is described as an Alice in Wonderland experience -- that's an understatement. Then we went to a bar called Propaganda which was decorated with communist propaganda. Can't say it was my favorite...especially when the power went out! We waited outside for the last few minutes of that stop on the pub crawl. Then we went to a couple more bars and a 24 hour burrito place!! I had tortilla chips for the first time in NINE weeks! However after some awful directions from the pub crawl guides, we got lost in Prague and ended up a 45 minute walk away from our hostel. It was taxi time. Since we went to sleep late and didn't have to catch our bus until 4 pm, we slept in! 

Monday was a leisure day. We went to a bagel place (again recommended by our hostel's map -- great work hostel map! every place we ate this weekend was recommended by them and fantastic). That's right everyone, A BAGEL! another thing I haven't eaten in a long time. We spent the day wandering Prague and souvenir shopping. We spent our last bit of time back in the Old Town Square where we climbed the Astronomical Clock tower to see it in action one more time -- this time from the top with great views of the city! 

Old Town Square -- how cute! 

Me and the Tyn Church 

Crowds gathered to watch the clock 

We didn't get to see the clock in action this time but we saw the trumpet guy play! Off every tower in Prague on the hour they play this song from every side of the tower. Really cool! 

Then it was time to catch our bus to Munich. We got a quick dinner in Munich of pretzel (yum!) and a salad before our overnight train. We arrived at 6:30 this morning before class! After 4 days of class, I'll head off to Interlaken this weekend to go canyoning! Can't wait to write about that :)