The beginning of a great trip.... Well I started out at 6:30 a.m. the morning of the day I began my journey across the ocean. I left Austin at 8:45 a.m. to start a 5 hour overlay in DFW. What started as a 5 hour overlay, got shortened very quickly. Our connecting flight to Chicago was delayed 45 minutes due to bad weather which would have made us miss our flight to Germany and we would have had to stay the night in Chicago, which is no fun. So I decided to be adventurous and we got on a direct flight to Germany with the knowledge that there was a very good chance that my bags would not arrive because they only had 40 minutes to find them and switch them. Lucky enough, we got to Germany and my bags did too!!
We started in Heidelberg, which I fell in love with, the weather was very cold and wet and right off the back we had trouble finding our Hostel. The first day in Heidelberg we basically spent at old city center and viewed the shops. It's so beautiful here all of the building have gorgeous architecture. We went to the castle which was so beautiful!! It's pretty awesome to say that you have touched
something from the 12th century. We also went to student prison which was interesting. This was the place where students were held for minor infarctions such as duelling, they were starved for three days and only fed bread and water
and they lived in these tiny rooms with wooden beds and were very dark. All of the walls were covered in portraits of the different prisoners including them drawn with these goofy little hats that you can still see the boys wear today if they belong to different fraternities.
I noticed that the streets are very tiny here but that is because all of the cars here or just about all of them are so tiny. Another funny thing that is so different from the states is that people have the right away, all of the cars yield to you!!! Unlike in the states where if you don't pay attention you can get run over. Heidelberg turned out to be a great place to start out, but then the adventure really began. We were supposed to catch a train to Bonn and be there by 8:42 p.m.
We went to the train station at 6:00 p.m. just to make sure we could reserve a seat on the train to make sure we wouldn't be late. We noticed that the number on our tickets didn't match the number on the screen so we asked two different help desk people where we needed to be at two different times throughout our wait and they both said the same platform. So like obedient little tourists, we listened
and and after about a thirty minute train ride to a place that I can't even pronounce, half asleep already, the conductor comes to us (we were the only ones left on the train) to tell us that the train terminated here. After 3 trains, 2 buses, 1 subway and 5 hours, we made it to Bonn at 11:30 p.m. or something near then and made it to our dorms and into bed by 12:42 a.m. Needless to say in all of our travels, we somehow forgot to eat and had been without food since noon that day. The next morning we woke up starving and thought we would attempt to find some food by taking the subway to the City Centre in Bonn.
Well that turned into an epic failure and after about an hour or so of walking aimlessly we decided to give up and head back to the dorm. By 3 p.m. we still hadn't eaten anything, so we were going on 27 hours without food, and we finally got to eat!!! This was the start of our adventures in Germany, on the bright side, we saw much more than Germany specifically the South part, that we hadn't planned
on seeing. Got to love the scenic detours. So by the first day of my arrival, I already failed at trying not to get lost, imagine that!!!
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