Bavaria

After Salzburg, we spent a few days in Munich.  We also visited Dachau concentration camp while we were there, which was the first concentration camp and meant to be a model for future camps.  It was a very solemn and contemplative place to think about some of the darkest parts of human history.

Holocaust victims read the promise "Work makes you free" as they enter the camp.

This is a memorial to the victims of Dachau.  In the background you can see some of the reconstructed barracks.

We craned our necks along with the other tourists to see the glockenspiel do its thing.  This is a view of the Rathaus (or town hall) from Marienplatz square in Munich.

As this was only about a week before the olympics started, we thought it would be fun to see the Munich Olympic park from the 1972 olympics.

In Munich, home of Oktoberfest, everything has something to do with beer.  It is laced throughout their history.  The beers are very large here also.  We were told that in the Hofbrauhaus, maybe the most famous beer hall in the world, they only have one size of beer.  If you order a 1-liter beer, they will smile and bring you one.  If you order a 1/2 liter beer, they will laugh at you and then bring you a 1-liter beer.  They even have a beer purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, that was instated in the 1500s to ensure higher quality beer.

The High Life in Vienna

We are way behind on blog posts.  We haven't found many opportunities to move photos off the camera's memory chip (and we've been too busy enjoying Europe!).  So we finally have a chance to post some pictures.  We were in Vienna a couple weeks ago, here are some of the things we saw.

You can't go to Vienna without hearing some classical music.  We saw the Vienna Mozart Orchestra in the historic opera house.  They played a medley of Mozart music, and they also dressed the part.

We had standing room tickets only, but we read that you are free to search for better seats.  Here's a view from the amazing box seats Shawna found us!

St. Stephen's Cathedral in the center of Vienna's old town.

Nice pic of the pipe organ inside St. Stephens.



We had to try sacher torte, a chocolate cake invented in Vienna.  We bought some at a fancy chocolate store and they wrapped the cake up in so many boxes I thought I would never find it.



In Vienna, citizens like to enjoy the best of life, be it food, music, etc.  This seems to extend even to their Toilets.  This is the "Vienna Opera Toilet, with Music!"

Salzburg

We visited Salzburg, Austria for a couple of days.  It is a beautiful town established near salt mines (hence the name) with a castle that has never been taken by force.  Here are some of the sights we saw.

Tasting Austrian brews at the Stiegl brewery.

"The hills are alive...", this is sound of music country.

Lake and house from the Sound of Music. We took a SOM bus tour.

Picturesque countryside outside of Salzburg.

View of Salzburg and Salzburg castle from the Mirabell gardens. (I think this is about where our friends Jett and Kelly got engaged)

Breztel und Bier, Bitte!

Check out the size of this pretzel we got in Vienna, and that is no small beer glass either!  Actually, it is not beer, but radler, a mix of beer and fruit soda.  It's a little bit more refreshing when you're moving around a lot.

Strolling through Ljubljana

(We haven't had any chances to post for a while, this is from a few days back)

After leaving Italy we crossed the border into Slovenia and it felt like I was in a whole new world, with lush greenery, fresh air, mountain lakes, and most importantly cooler weather. We made our way to Ljubljana (lee-oob-lee-on-a), Slovenia. We enjoyed a full, restful day of strolling the small city, going to a local bakery (which we went to again today), walking to a park where I was able to get some cute pictures of a squirrel, and eating at the local market. It's nice to slow down and reflect on the journey. As I write this now we are traveling by train to Vienna, Austria. Marty and I were just talking about how relaxing it is to ride on the trains with our own cabin in first class (as he plays his new Slovenian puzzle game).

 

 

We climbed a small pyramid we found along the road

Slight Change of Plans

Our flexible schedule has proved invaluable recently as we've had to adjust our travel plans a couple times.  We left Rome on Wednesday, planning to stop in Venice for about 5 hours, take a canal cruise, and see St. mark's square.  Unfortunately, the bus we wanted to take to Slovenia was all booked.  Our only option for getting to Ljubljana, Slovenia that night was to take a series of trains and forgo our Venice excursion, so we settled for a view of the grand canal from the train station.

Quick View of the Grand Canal

Our plan in Slovenia was to spend a four days there, with two days devoted to climbing Triglav, Slovenia's highest peak and national symbol.  The president of Slovenia has even declared that every Slovenian citizen should make a point to climb Triglav so we thought it would be fun.  Then we were going to take it easy at a Croatian beach for a couple days.  However, after just spending 4 days walking around in the heat of Rome, we really didn't want to climb a mountain, or go to a warm beach!  Instead, we scratched Triglav and Croatia.  We still stayed in Slovenia for a couple days, but this extra time allowed us to enjoy Ljubljana a bit more, add some slack to our schedule, and most importantly, add Krakow, Poland back into our schedule!

Triglav, Slovenia's National Symbol

Italy Photos

Cinque Terre Town 1 - Monterosso

Cinque Terre Town 5 - Riomaggiore (this is the street we stayed on)

Brief stop in Pisa

Ponte Vecchio bridge over Arno river

Yummy gelato - no day in Italy is complete without a cup

Italian Chaos

We've transitioned from more orderly northern Europe to less orderly southern Europe.  In Italy, it's not really expected that everything happens on time so you just have to try and embrace the chaos.  While in the north none of our trains were more than a minute late, but our first train in Italy was 20 minutes late and our second one was 40 minutes late.  It works well for people who are habitually late.  =)

The language barrier can of course contribute to the chaos as well.  We've tried to make use of some essential Italian phrases, and everyone here helps us out a lot by translating to English.  Yesterday we were taking a break at the Roman forum, sitting in the shade.  A man tried to explain something to me a couple times in Italian, but I couldn't understand so I said "inglese, per favore?". He then said while pointing to the roof above us, "the pigeons, they will poop on your head!"  So as you can see, we get by one way or another.

Rome is an amazing place to be, with so much history and ruins constantly surrounding you.  Yesterday we saw the Colosseum and walked through the Roman forum.  The scale of it is incredible and to think that they built it in only 10 years.  Many of the other places we've seen took much longer, such as Notre Dame, which took 200 years to complete.  The original floor of the colosseum is gone, leaving visitors with a peak into the maze of tunnels they used to bring wild animals and gladiators up to the colosseum floor.  Though much of the top level is gone, in ancient times they even had a fabric they could stretch across the colosseum sky to create a covered arena for shade.  We were wishing that the stadium cover was still functional as we've had temperatures here in the mid 30s and any shade is a welcome reprieve.

After a walk through the Roman forum, we visited the Pantheon, one of the most well preserved and architecturally impressive buildings from ancient Roman times.  The dome is a staggering 150 feet across.  You can see the extensive use of arches embedded throughout the walls for additional support.  An area this great was not spanned again without support for nearly 2000 years.  And as Rick Steves says, this building holds the greatest Roman column, the beam of sunlight coming through the ceiling, representing God.

Trajan's Market - notice the clever use of an arch turned on its side to push against the huge rock face they excavated

Italian Renaissance

Sometimes it feels like so much has happened in the span of a day. Yesterday, we woke up in the Cinque Terre and caught a train to Pisa. We stayed a few hours in Pisa, long enough to climb the leaning tower, see the ruins of some Roman baths, and eat an Italian sandwich. Then we hopped on another train for Florence, birthplace of the Renaissance. Before the end of the day in Florence, we had marveled at Michaelangelo's David, climbed Brunelleschi's dome atop the Duomo cathedral, strolled to the Palazzo Vecchio with statues of a few of the ninja turtle artists on the way, and ate another amazing Italian dinner just a block away from the Arno river. I shouldn't forget that there was at least one Gelato stop in there too, as we always plan for in Italy.

Today, it was on to Rome after trying some pasta and pecorino cheese at the mercato centrale. We could definitely have spent more time in Florence, but since this is a highlights of Europe trip we'll have to come back another time. We have several days to stay put in Rome, so look forward to more posts about Rome later, arrivederci.

(sorry, no pictures this time because we haven't had a chance to download them from the camera.)

Two days in the Cinque Terre

The Cinque Terre was beautiful. There are five towns that are lined up together. We stayed in the town that was farthest south, Riomaggiore (1st town). There's a picture of it below (not ours, just one we downloaded from the internet for convenience). We settled into our apartment and enjoyed a swim. It was very refreshing after a days journey on train coming from Lausanne, Switzerland. We also took a train to the farthest north town Monterosso (5th town). This is where we had our first taste of Gelato, and of course it was wonderful. Below our apartment they had a band celebrating the 4th of July for all of the Americans (no fireworks though). The next morning we got up early to walk to various towns. We left our town and walked to Manarola (2nd town). We weren't able to walk to next town due to a landslide last October so we took the train to Corniglia (3rd town). We actually went to go find a bakery that a family told us about but when we got there the building was destroyed form the landslide. After looking for our dessert we continued on our walk. It was a great view but so hot! We decide to take a swim in Vernazza (4th town). We caught a boat back to our apartment and I took a nap. We are not used to all of this sun and it wears us out. After, we went to a nice Italian dinner and enjoyed gnocchi and stuffed ravioli.

Amazing Views in the Swiss Alps

After spending a fun but busy week in London and Paris, I think we were probably ready for a slower change of pace for a couple days, and that was what we found in Gimmelwald, Switzerland. Nestled high in the Alps in the heart of Switzerland, this village is only accessible by a cable car or gondola ride into the mountains. Throughout our journey to Gimmelwald (train + bus + cable car), we saw the most breathtaking sights: scenic mountain backgrounds, glacier-fed lakes, Swiss village chalets, 200 meter waterfalls off sheer cliff faces.

When we reached Gimmelwald, we were fortunate to have our own room in a small B&B. Below is the view from our bedroom window. Outside we had a panorama of the surrounding mountains. We had dinner at the only restaurant in this town of about 100 people, which included a plate of local meats, cheeses, and pickles and a malted wheat beer from a local brewery. Later that evening, we sat on the porch of our B&B with a bottle of wine, taking it all in, it was really a fantastic place.

More to come on this later, but we're now in the Cinque Terre, Italy, enjoying the Ligurian sea. Happy 4th of July USA!

The loudest snorer in the world!

If you tell me you've heard a worse snorer than the one in our room tonight, I will not believe you. I would not even think it is humanly possible to snore this loud if I hadn't heard it. Indeed I tried to snore as loud to wake him up and couldn't match him.

One of the downsides of living on the cheap in hostels is that you sometimes end up with a lot of roommates. Shawna and I thought we were pretty lucky when we got a room in Lausanne with only 3 beds in it, 2 of them assigned to us. The third bed was even empty the first night, but tonight a new guest sowed up at 2 am. By 3, we knew we weren't going to get much more sleep.

We've tried a number of things to wake this guy up (this may sound mean, but someone with this big of a snoring problem should not stay in hostels): clearing throats, walking around in flip flops, turning the hallway light on and off, playing every iPhone alarm ringtone on high volume, singing, clapping, even recording his snore and playing it back to him! Each attempt only results in waking him up for precisely 3 seconds before he falls asleep again and promptly returns to snoring. We've both got our headphones on now, let's see if we can drown out the noise.