Munich! One of my favorite places so far. I found that the people there were really nice. We had to make a stopover in Frankfurt to get there, and I don't remember if it was this or the train from Amsterdam, but on one of these adventures I decided that I wanted Burger King. Apparently the people who work at said Burger King don't understand that they work at a train station, and people don't have time to sit around and wait all day. Literally, the slowest people i've ever seen. This is a FAST food restaurant people! I almost missed the train, but thankfully, I didn't. I did have some trouble finding the platform again, and I did a lot of running, but I made it ok. On the 8 hour train ride there was a very interesting woman from the US. (She was from the midwest, don't remember exactly which state.) I had opted out of bringing my ipod with me on the trip so I had nothing to occupy my time, and so I naturally listened to the people speaking in English. There was a German woman and a man from Iraq sitting with her. Most of her comments were true, but slightly off, and all of them were bashing America, which made me really angry. I was really proud of myself for ignoring her and keeping my mouth shut, because it wasn't my battle. (Thank you mom.) Well, then Keith stopped listening to music, and he decided to ask her what she meant by a few things. It turned into an interesting conversation, with everything from politics to food to painting to religion. And more. I didn't really like her very much. Her opinions were very strong, and she stated them as fact, but I think she did learn a lot while she was there. For one, the Iraqi guy said that he didn't want the soldiers to leave, because it would be chaos. She thought they hated them over there. She was right about the media not giving us this information, but if you ask a soldier how it is, or if you search for the information you seek, you can find it. At the end of the journey she said her daughter was like me. She said we both had red hair and blue eyes. I just smiled. I do not have red hair. For anyone who is wondering, I have blonde hair, strawberry blonde if you want to count the red tint, but I have never in my life had red hair. Rant over. We met Scott's uncle's college roommate/best friend right outside of Munich. He let us stay at his place for the two nights we were there, which was incredibly nice of him. It felt really good to be with a family, sleep in a nice bed, and his wife gave us a great breakfast each morning. (They also had a bathtub.) We all got to call home as well, because their phone still has it's American number, so the calls are "local". Scott did get some sad family news that night, so please pray for them as they struggle through this hard time. He decided to stay and finish the trip though, and we did have a good time the next day. And that is all of the preliminaries, now to the fun part!

In the morning we got to sleep in, which was really nice. We missed our first train, because of a few issues on the metro (i.e. um...i think we're going the wrong way...is that our stop we just passed?). This did allow some people to get coffee, and we got on the train to Fussen, (Bavaria) Germany. Here we toured the Castle Neushwanstein, which means New Swan Stone. King Luwig was having it built, and he loved swans. He dedicated this fairytale castle to the works of a famous opera writer. Unfortunately the King was killed before it was completed, hence the tour was only 16 rooms, but it felt like 5. The castle was pretty, but a bit disappointing. I had hoped for more history. In typical adventurous fashion, we hiked up to "Mary's Bridge" and then I took off up another trail. The guys took it a step further and literally took off UP another trail, to the top of the mountain. This was totally worth it. The views were indredible, and we found a geocashing box. I loved being up in the Alps, it was so peaceful. I wish we could have stayed longer and explored, but daylight was fading and we needed to get back to town. We quickly walked around the outside of the other castle, Hoshwangau (not sure about the spelling on this one) and then hopped back on the train through the lovely countryside. Round trip, I saw lots of deer and bunnies, and a few other animals. If you know me, this should excite you because I always miss these types of things. I'm going to pause and post a few pictures now, and then finish up in another post. First, here is the best meal i've had so far; the sauerkraut is amazing.