(Sorry peeps, I am very behind on my blogging because our homework load has been pretty crazy these last few weeks. And I guess it didn’t help that I just wouldn’t stop traveling, so my only time at home, was spent on essays first, and now that they are finally done, I am writing what I can remember from the past month.)
My Belgium weekend was SOO FUNNNN.
It was probably one of my favorite weekends.
I had booked a TopDeck tour. (Originally to Scotland, but it got cancelled, so I booked Belgium instead.)
TopDeck is a tour company for young people. I have one booked for May 2-11 with friends, but I really wanted to go to one on my own. So this was the one.
I had to be in the Generator Hostel at 6:30am on Friday April 10th, so I came up the night before and stayed with my cousin Ales. It was very nice of him to accommodate me, especially since I got there at 11 at night and left at 5:30 in the morning.
On my way to the hostel, I saw a girl walking in the same direction with a big backpack, so I asked her if she was going on the Belgium trip. She was! We started talking. Her name is Cara and she is from Australia.
We got to the hostel, and started chatting with everyone else on the trip. I had been a little scared that the tour would be a bunch of couples, but I was happily surprised that almost everyone came on their own just like me. The group of about 40 of us was about 85% girls, and well, not many boys. It was also about 80% Australians. You couldn’t get away from them! (JK, they were a good time.) There were a couple Kiwi’s (New Zealanders), one English girl, one South African girl, and 4 Americans, including myself.
We got on the bus and drove to Dover. Dover is the main port town to get across the English channel. We stopped there for a few hours to check out the Dover Castle. I didn’t care much about the castle itself, but what was really cool, was the tour they did of the secret tunnel ways underneath the castle. The original tunnel was built during Napoleon times when the English were fighting against him. The tunnels were a secret place for the Navy to meet and strategize. It was basically a secret base. Then during WWII, they added more layers to the tunnel. Now the tunnel was 3 layers deep. On one layer they had the emergency hospital for WWII soldiers. (They had voices playing of a mock operation while we walked through the operating/surgery room. .. pretty sure the mock soldier didn’t survive..) The tunnels were set up the way they were during the war. All the maps were out for the naval strategizing.. anyway, it was a cool tour.
We got to Belgium and had 2 days in Brugge. I LOVE Brugge. We had a walking tour the first day where our TopDeck leader gave us some brief history. The second day we took a Bike tour where a local took us around and explained the sites we saw. It was beautiful.
I definitely enjoyed Belgian waffles and chocolate J
PICTURES WILL COME AFTER I GET BACK
We also went out every night. It was SO fun. We checked out different bars/clubs each night. The first night, was very funny. There were only about 7 of us that stayed out later than everyone else. On our way home, our tour guide was with us. Even though, everyone had plenty to drink, including him, he was still acting as our leader, and tried to get us home. Being the drunk man that he was, he had no idea where he was going, and it took us 45 minutes to take a 10 minute walk. We definitely made the same circle more than once. (What frustrated me a bit was that I knew where to go, but no one would listen to me!) Well, teased him about it a lot afterwards, so it was all in good fun.
The third day was our trip to Brussels. Dan, our leader, gave us a brief tour of the city. We saw and took pictures of the famous “peeing boy” statue. Check him out on Wikipedia if you don’t know what I am talking about, or just enjoy my picture. Apparently, there are many legends to why he is famous. Wikipedia only explains one.
PICTURES
Sadly, the rest of my time in Brussels was kind of wasted. Everyone was pretty tired and we just sad at a pub, enjoyed great Belgian beers and played cards.
I do have to mention Belgian beers though before we move on. Belgium is one of the top beer making countries in the world, so their beers were great. BUT, what I, and many other girls, found excellent were their fruit beers. I had never before tasted anything like them. They were not cider, but they were FRUIT beers. I tried Cherry beer, Raspberry, Apple, Blackcurrant, and Peach. They were all SO delicious. Oh my. I wish we had this kind of stuff at home. The Cherry one seemed to be the biggest because they had cherry beer at almost every pub.
Anyway, the end of our Brussels experience was quite hysterical, because we lost our tour guide, which wasn’t his fault, but when we found him, he was drunk and wearing a girl’s shirt. He tried to get on the mike and talk to us, but we were all laughing hysterically because he could not make out a sentence without slurring or messing up a word, for example, “I hope you guys had a good day in Brugge..”.. everyone’s all, “We’re in Brussels!” Then he said something that didn’t make sense at all, so he decided to just sit down for a while, which was probably a good idea for him. Ha.
Our last day would have been great except that I had to deal with certain issues that came up. Read about that in the next blog because it has to do more with the next story than this one.
On Monday March 30, my dad and I were off on our road trip. We rented a car, a cute little one, and my dad had booked our hotels.
And we were off
Our first stop was in Würzburg on our way to Rothenberg.
--WURZBURG--
We walked around the city center. It was pretty, but not too big, so we soon went on.
--ROTHENBURG--
Then we kept going to Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Rothenburg was our favorite place of all the places we visited.
The first thing we did was check into our hotel, which was adorable.
Then we went to see the town. It was a very cute little town. We stayed right in the old center with houses from the middle ages. There is a wall surrounding the entire old part of the city. The whole thing is like a castle, but with an entire village inside. It was small enough that we walked around the whole thing that night. Through all the little streets and on the border wall.
The main plaza
Crazy ass tree!
The city wall and the views from it:
One of my favorite things were these “Snowball Cookies” that were everywhere! These cookies are specifically of this city. Like I said, they were EVERYWHERE in this city, but nowhere else on our trip. They are this dry (shortbread-like maybe) cookie that is a flat dough that is crumbled into a ball and fried. Some are have nothing on the inside. But the ones with a filing are really good. The filling must be spread on the flat dough, and then when it is crumpled up into a ball, the filling ends up being woven through inside. I love them.
My dad and I visited the Medieval Crime Museum.
This was a little museum showing how crime was punished in the medieval times. They showed torture devices, which were allowed to be used in court. They showed many masks that people had to wear as punishment, such as an ugly pig facemask, that showed the whole town that you are wearing this because you acted like a pig. Many of the masks had bells on them, so that you would stand out better with your embarrassment. (Bells were a signal of foolishness.) Basically, they wanted to make people feel like idiots for the things they did.
They displayed things like an Iron Cage where they would put people on the street (hanging as a display). Boy, did they love public humiliation in those days.
As you can see, one of the bad crimes, was making bread too small or too big, if you were a baker. Bread needed to be made in one specific size only.
The worst punishment was for a murderer. That makes sense, obviously, but man, was it cruel.
What they did with murders was they took these carriage wheels, they had “wooden blades” on them, meaning that they were not sharp and would not cut through anything. They put these wheels on a carriage, and run over the person many times, over and over again, until all their bones were broken. When the person died of this, they would still keep going to make sure all the bones are surely broken. Then they would take the wheel off and tangle the body all throughout the spikes of the wheel. They would hang this wheel on display in the town for everyone to see.
As cruel as it is, I guess this would make people think twice before committing murder, eh?
The last thing we did on our only night in Rothenberg was go on the Night-watchman tour. I found it online probably an hour before it started.
This tour was great! It was probably my favorite thing I did in my whole stay in Germany. I recommend it to anyone who goes to visit Rothenberg. The guy that did it has been doing that same tour for 18 years. He was great. He told the history of the town very well. It was very funny, and interesting. I liked hearing his history of the city. He was actually dressed as a night-watchman from the 1800’s, and often talked as if it was really his job (i.e. “There used to be six of us.. but now I am the only one left.”) I loved it. It was a great idea to see this guy’s tour.
We spent the night in the best hotel by far on our trip.
Tuesday morning we woke up and left for Munich.
--DACHAU--
On the way we had a stop in Dachau to see the Dachau concentration camp.
This is THE original concentration camp, the first one. All the others were modeled after this one. It was opened in March 1933.
What a depressing thing to see. We had planned on maybe 2 hours there. We ended up spending 5.
They played a 22-minute movie showing videos and pictures of the camp in its Nazi days. Then we walked around the museum, and outside around the camp.
The living conditions were beyond belief there. It is no wonder so many people died in this camp, and not a single person gassed.
Which is something I found strange, by the way. At this specific camp, they made gas chambers (I walked through them) but they never used them, and the video said that we don’t know why. The people they wanted exterminated, they would send to other camps, like Auschwitz. The only people they killed directly were Soviet soldiers, because it was war, and they were the enemy. They were not given a chance to survive. They were just shot as soon as they got to the camp.
With everyone else, they died from the roll call (I’ll explain in a second), from starvation, disease, suicide, or the worst one, medical experiments.
Roll call was something that was done every morning. All the prisoners of the camp would have to line up, in perfect order, with probably about a foot between the person in front of you, behind you and to each side of you.
These prisoners, including old men, would have to stand up straight and not move in the sun where everything for that day was decided. This is where they would pretty much at random, decide if you were going to work a certain job that day, or get sent to the medical experiments, get sent to Auschwitz, or whatever fate they decide for you. These men would have to stand like this for an hour, maybe 2, and some would just fall over. No one was allowed to help another. Many died like this.
It said that the thing the prisoners dreaded most were the medical experiments. As is said somewhere in the museum, this is where “the doctors became murderers.” They held medical experiments to get the information they wanted. For example, how long does a human survive in ice-cold water? Well, the way to find out was to take one of the prisoners, put them in ice-cold water, and record how long before they died. Or there was a 3-serie picture of a man who had something injected into this brain. They wanted to see what kind of effect it would have. The first picture shows him sitting calm. In the second, you can see in his face that he is in terrible pain, and in the last one his mouth is slightly open and his face drooping. He is either dead, or mentally a vegetable from this experiment.
The only non-depressing articles and pictures were of how people helped each other in the camp. They were NOT allowed to do so and risked death every time they did it, but people found ways to help each other anyway.
This is the gas chambers, the entrance to and the inside. It says Brausebad on the front, which means “Shower” and there are fake shower heads on the ceiling, so that people would not try to resist entering.
Sorry to be graphic, but these are the ovens for cremating bodies. They would fit 3 bodies at a time in here. As most of you probably heard, after the numbers of dead bodies started getting huge, they would have to either send them to other places for cremation, or burn them in mass graves.
Going back to living conditions, in the beginning of the camp’s time, sleeping bunks were made like this, where each person had their own sections, and each person even had a little shelf above their head for their personal belongings.
Then as the camp got more and more crowded, they had to remake the bunks to fit more people, and then later do it again. By the end, the bunks looked like this, where there was not even an individual space for a person but instead a long bed that would cram people in. People would sleep with head next to the next ones foot. This is why diseases were so rampant, because people were stuffed into spaces not fit for so many.
Toilets
These are the Jewish memorial, now built on the site, and the Russian memorial for all the soviet soldiers.
Anyway, that’s probably enough depressing stuff.
--MUNICH--
After the camp, we were off to Munich, or Munchen as I know it, because I mostly spoke Russian and heard German in Germany, and that’s how they say it in both languages.
We spent the whole night walking around the center of the city. We probably walked down almost every street. Took pictures and looked around. We had a real Munich/German dinner at an old and big pub/restaurant.
Something I loved was the beer-cola or beer-lemon soda mix that they had at every restaurant and in grocery stores. The legal age to drink alcohol in Germany is 18, but to drink beer (as long as it’s a certain alc% or lower) is allowed at age 16. So this beer-cola thing is very popular for young people. Honestly.. its pretty good J I bought some to take home with me. At the big grocery store, they had many options. They even had a beer-banana mix that I wanted to try, but it didn’t happen.
The next morning was Wednesday April 1st.
We got up pretty early to catch a walking tour. A guy named Jeff took the small group of 5 that showed up (that’s including us), around the city for about 2 hours. He was pretty good with his info. The tour was pretty good, but I didn’t take as much away as from the Night Watchman in Rothenberg. That was a great tour..
Pictures of Munich
Then my dad and I spent a few hours doing laundry, halfway through a 2 week trip, it is definitely needed..
Our dinner
At 530, we were in the main square again for another tour. This tour was going to be awesome. It was the Beer and Brewery tour. It was supposed to last 4 hours, would teach us of the brewing process and included 3 drinks at 3 different places. When we got there, we were the only ones, and the guy said that he can only do it if there are at least 5 people.
So we asked him where he was going to take us. The first one happened to be the place where we ate the night before, and we visited the other two that night on our own, one of them being a place that served Augustiner, which is the local’s favorite (according to Jeff) of the 6 beers that are brewed in Munich. The other place we went to was Hofbrauhaus, or HB, which is a very famous brewery and restaurant. The place is huge.
Boy do I love big pretzels, and I am finally happy to say that I like beer. I’ve been waiting a long time until it came true. What’s funny is that I didn’t acquire the taste from drinking beer, really, but drinking English cider. The cider here, as I’ve said before, is strong, in taste and sometimes in alcohol content. Drinking cider for 2 months in England, and then trying a sip of my dad’s beer in Germany, made me realize.. wow.. I like this all the sudden. Nice. Now maybe I’ll finally join the beer club at Pete’s when I get back home J
On Thursday the 2nd of April we left Munich to head to Fussen.
On the way we had 3 stops.
1 – Garmisch-Partenkirchen was a cute little ski town. It held the 1936 Winter Olympics and will bid to do it again in 2018.
2 – Oberammergau was about 5 minutes away, and we stopped there because my dad heard of how pretty the houses were there. A lot of the houses are painted with stories, pictures, or designs on them. I had ice cream there.
3 – Our third stop was at Linderhof castle. This was one of the palaces Ludwig II, king of Bavaria (a state of Germany) built for himself. These few days that I spent in Bavaria, I heard a lot about this Ludwig character. He built himself 6 castles/palaces until he ran out of money and also died mysteriously.
We got a tour of the castle as well as the garden and cave.
After all those stops on the road, we reached our destination, Fussen. In Fussen, we stayed at a little hotel village. It was pretty cute, a whole area of a bunch of hotels. It was walking distance into town from there. We walked into town and explored on our own. We finally had Kebabs for dinner (something we saw a million times already.. they’re EVERYWHERE! .. but hadn’t tried yet).Kebab doesn’t mean “shish-kebab” here like we think. It’s meat and salad in a pocket of bread. It’s HUGE and quite amazing. (It is very similar to the Lebanese place I love in London.)
--FUSSEN--
Fussen was a very cute town with stone roads (as all the other city centers), cute streets, and pretty castles and homes.
The next day was Friday the 3rd of April. This was castle day. We went to visit the 2 Fussen castles, which are more like palaces since kings lived there in the 1800’s in style without the ancient need to fight off foreigners with arrows and knights.
They are both Ludwig’s castles. One was his dad’s, when he was king, and Ludwig grew up there in the summers, and the other he built himself, although it was never finished because he died before it was completed.
And a picture of a poster.. my dad is so clever.. (or he thinks so anyway)
By this time I was a little sick of castles. On Saturday the 4th, we drove back to Mainz. On the way we stopped in Heidelberg where we stopped at .. well.. another castle..
This is a view of Heidelberg
A giant keg
And the ruins of a castle (I gotta stretch before a good handstand)
We spend the last 2 days with the fam. On Sunday we went to Frankfurt. I didn’t really get to see much though because all the stores were closed, and I was really tired by then. On Monday we mostly spent the day in Mainz. I tried to find souvenirs, not successfully, and we went to a public zoo in the park.
This is the weird garages they have
That’s pretty much it. I’m sorry, I’m sure I’d have a lot more interesting information if I had been able to write this blog right after it happened, but that was not meant to be. I almost missed my flight home.. is that interesting? I was the last one on the plane.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I will try to post another couple blogs in the next 2 days because after that I LEAVE for 3 weeks in Europe where I wont have my laptop with me.
