Berlin

greeeeeeeeeeeeeeetings from austria!!!!!!

i apologize for the amount of time it has taken me to write this post. we have been very busy with school lately and havent had much time to keep up on this. and it gets very tiring. but i am here to write about our last trip which was to berlin, germany.

overall it was a great trip without anything that really went wrong. of course that was because we stayed with a friend of catherine's who did all the planning and hard work for us. so we trained to berlin overnight and her friend met us at the trainstation. that was all the work we had to do. julia (her friend) first took us to her house through a network of different trains which we would have easily got lost on, but it was all second nature to her. so we got to her house after probably about 30-45 mins. after dropping our stuff off we left immediately to go the reichstag building, germany's parliament or the equivelant of our white house. normally to get in and get a tour you have to wait in line for a couple hours and go with a large group, however, julia has a friend who works for one of the political parties there, so we got to bypass the line, get special visitor name passes, and a private tour from someone who worked there. julia's friend spoke near perfect english, and julia herself spoke almost flawless english, which was a nice suprise. to be honest, if i didnt know she was german, i probably wouldnt have guessed it from her accent or lack there of, although she did look very german. anyways, her friend gave us a complete tour of the building which was very cool. probably the coolest part was a section of the building which hadnt been renovated, it was actually just segments of the original walls that hadnt been renovated that had graffiti from russian soldiers still on it, and bulletholes scattered all over the wall. it was really amazing. after the tour we went around to the front of the building where there was a huge field spread out before the building. hitler gave many of his charismatic rallying speeches on a podium above the steps out front, and thousands upon thousands of naze troops had stood to attention on that same field!!! it was basically one of the coolest things ever. so after that we walked around berlin, saw a holocaust memorial which was just a bunch of different sized concrete blocks (refer to the pictures), and saw different parts of the city. julia showed us her law school and different buildings where she studies every day. she also showed us the square where the nazis held their book burnings (indiana jones and the last crusade, we saw the actual place, gonna have to watch it again!). in the middle of the squar there is a glass panel on the ground and underneath is a huge room with empty bookshelves to symbolize all the incredible jewish knowledge that was destroyed. we ended the night by going out to eat, getting ben and jerry's (yes!!!!!!!!), and going out for a drink, before heading back to go to sleep.

the next day after a great breakfast (which i missed cause i slept in) we went right back to touring. we stopped and saw the larose cleaning company's main headquarters. yes that was where my beautiful fiance was created. we then took a train to the berlin wall. the wall was actually much smaller than we had expected, only being about half a foot wide and about 12 ft tall. the entire wall was covered in graffiti, there was not a clean section, but a lot of it had deep racial meaning which we did not understand cause we are ignorant americans, but it was still pretty dang cool. after that we continued our tour by seeing a church that had been bombed during ww2 and was never rebuilt, half the steeple was missing, and is now used mainly as a tourist attraction. after that we did a lot, and i mean a lot, of shopping. too much for my preference but i was with a couple girls, what could i do? although we did get to see a watch which cost 6200.00 euro. that comes to $9069.36 US. yep more than some cars. ill just stick with my $30 wal-mart watch thank you very much. so after the shopping we basically just had lunch and worked our way back to the train to head back to good 'ol gaming. the end.

overall it was a great trip. not having to plan it all out and having everything go smoothly was a great change and the hospitality of julia and her family was incredible. it was a trip that we will not soon forget and our very grateful to have had the oppurtunity to go on. please refer to the pictures for a much better explanation of our trip than what i just gave, they really are amazing. we hope you all are enjoying following us as always. next we will be in rome and assisi for 10 days! we will be sure to take lots of pictures as always and post them as soon as we recover from lost sleep. we hope this finds you all well and we miss and love you dearly. yes, dearly.

auf wiedersehen!

-alden

Salzburg Day Trip (Eagles Nest Flop)

Hey everyone, well this entry should have been written a couple weeks ago now but it has been pretty busy as usual and we are currently in Gaming this weekend because Paris fell through. So we have time on our hands to catch up on blogging and pics. It's been a nice weekend of relaxation for a change so we won't complain even though I had my heart set on Paris. We also tried to book another day trip this weekend to Salzburg to see Sleeping Beauty's castle which is also supposedly spectacular, but it wasn't worth the travel for the time we would be able to spend there. Can't do everything I suppose...We will definitely do Paris another weekend though, God-willing.

So. Once upon a time, a couple weekends ago, Alden, Caleb, and I headed up to Salzburg, leaving about 4:30 am, yuck. We trained to Berchesgaden I think it was called to check out the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's private vacation ranch. However, the farther we headed north, the more snow came down. I had a sinking feeling that traveling up a steep mountain on a bus, in a snowstorm, wouldn't fly. We got there and were told this was true and we learned that only a couple days ago it had closed, and it was absolutely beautiful. It was a real bummer. However, the snow was absolutely gorgeous and so the train ride was pretty fun. I cranked up the Christmas music on my ipod and was a happy pilgrim. :) If you're curious as to what the Eagle's Nest WOULD have looked like, you can look it up online. It's pretty remarkable and supposedly one of the most beautiful locations in the world. Anyways... we headed back to Salzburg, did a tiny bit of shopping, and went to the Augustiner for lunch which Caleb had actually never been to anyways. Afterwards our score of bad luck continued as we missed our train back to Gaming. We ended up taking a train to St. Polten where we thought we could take a taxi for around 50 euro. This was mistaken for the drivers wanted 140 euro!!! ahh! We prepared ourselves for the fact that we needed to find a hostel or spend the night in the train station. We called Katie, one of our RD's, and our luck turned around. She was 10 minutes away!!! Her and a couple friends were driving back from Vienna from the Kalpagian baby's baptism. And so they picked us up and we made it safely home that night. The end.

-catherine*