Before our journey we each bought a special 170-hour rail pass from Deutsche Bahn. This pass allows us to hop on any DB train from midnight July 8 to 7:00 a.m. July 16.
After leaving an 8 a.m. class early, we caught a train towards Braunschweig. We arrived in Braunschweig Hauptbahnhof to find an awesome site--Mountain Dew in Germany. Apparently, there is MD in northern Germany, but not southern. Boo.
After our Mountain Dew-induced delirium wore off, we hopped on a train to Wolfenbuettel in an attempt to visit the Jaegermeister factory. We did, indeed, visit the factory only to find out that one has to schedule a tour ahead of time. The receptionist was nice, though, giving us each a Jaeger sticker, sunglasses, lanyard, and blinky-thing. I call the visit a success based on the gifts.
After catching a couple more trains, we arrived in Hamburg, took a train then bus to our hostel, and got settled in. Due to the intense heat, we all took showers, and Steve proceeded to misplace the locker key. None of our stuff was in the locker at the time, so it wasn't a big deal in our six-person room.
It being early evening in Hamburg, we ate and then walked down the infamous Reeperbahn, Hamburg's red-light district. While it wasn't exactly family-friendly, I assure you (especially you, Mom) that it wasn't as bad as I'm sure many would assume. A fun fact about the Reeperbahn is that the Beatles got their start there, playing in Indra Musikclub and Kaiserkeller. We stopped by both places (though they were both dead, and we didn't go in) as well as Beatlesplatz where I did my best George-impression.
Saturday, we attempted to go the Ballinstadt Emigration Museum. Before leaving for here, my aunt Sharon gave me a bit of info on the German part of my mom's side of the family, the Schoemehl's. I had a good feeling that Peter Schoemehl, the one to come over from Germany, left through Hamburg Harbor. Sadly, I was unable to check the passenger lists as the museum attempted to charge us 12 euros instead of the expected 4 euros. Oh well...
We walked around the Altstadt a bit before catching a train to Berlin. The train ride was a bit warm. I'm not sure the ICE trains have that great of air-conditioning. We arrived in Berlin around 3, found our hostel after a train/subway ride, and went out to explore a bit of Berlin. We eventually ended up finding the International FIFA Fan Fest in Berlin and watched the third-place Germany-Uruguay game with about 100k-200k Germans. It was quite fun, though I couldn't help but think how crazy it would have been if Germany would have been in the final. Drat.
Sunday we joined a free walking city tour at 11 a.m. The company that runs the free tour is Sandemans NewEurope which does tours in other European cities, and I highly recommended it. Our guide was quite knowledgeable and worked on a purely tips-only basis. Some interesting facts from the trip:
--The Reichstag, Germany's house of parliament, has a glass dome above it that is free to the public to walk through and look down on the parliament. This signifies that the people come first.
--There's a lot of controversy surrounding the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, but the most controversial is the fact that the memorial has an anti-graffiti coating that just happens to be made by the same company that made Zyklon-B, the gas used at concentration camps.
--The former Nazi Luftwaffe headquarters became the first Soviet government building after WWII and is now the tax office for Berlin.
--Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory atop the Brandenburg Gate, looks directly at the French embassy after it was recovered from the Louvre after Napolean's defeat.
--Berlin's city motto translates to "Poor but sexy". The city is nice but will tell you up front that it has no money. The city is, get this, 67...billion euros in debt. Yes, that's a "b" on that "illion".
The tour really reignited my love of history (I really thought about being a history major.). I really liked the tour and would definitely go on one of the (not-free) more in-depth tours that are offered if I had more time.
Being exhausted by the four-hour walking tour in temperatures roughly between Mercury and Hades, the three of us bought slushies at the Hauptbahnhof before taking a nap at the hostel, which I should talk about before I forget. Both of our hostels in Hamburg and Berlin lacked air conditioning as we expected. This led to three long, hot nights with little sleep. Our hostel in Berlin also lacked much privacy in the shower room, being one step up from the gym showers of Sullivan High School. Each shower was covered by one curtain that began approximately 2 1/2 feet above the floor, or in other words, just low enough to be legal for TV-viewing.
After our nap, we went to the East Side Gallery, Berlin's largest "section" of the Wall. I say "section" because the East Side Gallery is a remake of the original wall. The city did, however, pay the original artists to redo their original wall paintings which is very cool. We then found a restaurant to watch the final and eat at. In the words of our friend Oscar, Go-ah Spain!
We caught the 8:32 train back to Karlsruhe on Monday. We barely made the train and didn't have time to grab breakfast before the five-hour ride. This was the beginning of a whole host of problems with our journey back. First, the train was full, so we all sat on the floor between seating sections. No big deal. Before too long, though, our train apparently developed some mechanical failure, and we were forced to switch trains in some little station. We hopped on the next train to Frankfurt. No big deal. Well, no big deal except the train was full before becoming even more full with the addition of riders from our original train.
Standing this time between the seating sections, we were slowly cooked on our two-hour ride to Frankfurt. Remember how I said that I wasn't sure the A/C on ICE trains is very good? Scratch that. It's awful. We did meet a nice Canadian girl from Vancouver named Geneva, though, that helped pass the time and situation with conversation.
We finally arrived in Frankfurt, medium to slightly medium-well. Luckily, a large group of our fellow sardines exited the train which allowed us to find seats for our "30-minute" ride to Mannheim before switching to a train to Karlsruhe. Our "30-minute" train ride turned into about a "2-hour" train ride because our train had to switch tracks and wait at another station for half an hour. Little did we know at the time, but apparently, there had been a "personal accident" (read: suicide) further up the track. Needless to say, we weren't as pissed when we heard about the reason for the delay.
Finally, our Odyssey was over as we arrived in Karlsruhe around 4:30, or three hours after schedule. Luckily, none of us had anything else planned for the day.
Welp, that's all for now. Until next time, Alles Gute.
You give an outstanding overview of your excursions. :) I envy you, you know.
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