Ready to Hope: October 2008

I'm finding that my weekends are kind of a God send here. Not that I don't love hanging out with the two little Angels all week but having a nice long break and getting out of the house for a while is unbelievably rejuvenating.

Friday night Rachel and I decided to go out on the town to a bar that we just recently discovered, called Scott's. We were planning on having a chill, early night but it turned out they were having their Oktoberfest celebration so we decided to indulge and split a stein and then before we knew it we were upstairs tearing up the dance floor to such American classics as Cotton-eyed-joe and Grease lightning and when we requested normal American dance songs the DJ replied by saying "sorry, I can only play party music"...interesting.

Saturday, Rachel and I took a day trip to Trier (as in New Trier) which is actually the oldest town in Germany. We spent the whole day exploring the city, seeing the sights, and doing some shopping. There were actually some really cool Roman ruins and cathedrals and the weather was beautiful so the day turned out to be a total success. Here are some pictoral highlights...

I don't even know where to start, Germany was a complete roller coaster.

I left Luxembourg at about 10:30 on Friday and took two trains to get to Mannheim, which I was a little nervous (considering my ability to get lost in a phone booth) but despite the fact that everything was written in German I actually made in to Mannheim and my friend, Alex was waiting for me as soon as I got off the train, it worked out great and it was so good to see a familiar face! We first went back to his apartment and dropped of my stuff then quickly headed to Frankfurt to make it to the concert. We took this super nice train to get to Germany which I later coined the "future trains" because they were unbelievable, like all the doors were automatic and opened on there own, the seats were super lush and I basically felt like i was in the Jetsons. We made it to the concert about an hour before it started, waited in line for a but and eventually made it inside where we enjoyed an evening of musical perfection, Jason was just as incredible as I remembered and let me just say, Germans love him almost as much as me, so I was in good company. After the concert we decided to just stay in Frankfurt so we found a really nice hostel and spent the night there.

On Saturday we got an early start and headed back to Mannheim around 10:00 where we got changed and then headed out to Heidelberg, one of Alex's favorite towns. We were both pretty hungry by the time we got there so we got lunch at a really cute Irish restaurant and then continued exploring the city. The highlight of Heidelberg was getting to go up to the castle at the top of the city. We paid about 2 euro and got to walk explore the whole thing which was awesome! After the castle we headed for the train station to make it to our next destination, Stuttgart. When we arrived in Stuttgart we basically just followed the masses of people and we arrived at this crazy carnival/beer festival thing. We walked around for a while, taking it all in then had some beer and I got to indulge in some "hot american pizza"- according to the sign. We then met up with another one of my friends from Hope, Chad (who I haven't seen in like three years and is stationed in Germany with the Navy) so that was really fun! Then we got in to one of the beer tents after a really random stroke luck and did some dancing on tables with all the crazy germans, it was a lot of fun! Then we headed back to the train station and somehow ended up missing our train which led to a kind of unfortunate series of events but everything worked itself out and we made it home safe and sound a mere ten hours later.

I spent the whole train ride back to Luxembourg sleeping and got home at about 8:00 pm on Sunday night. Overall, I had a great weekend and loved Germany! It was so much fun to be in a new place and I am already looking forward to my next trip!

Here are some pics of the highlights of the weekend:

This is the first train station I went through in Germany, in a city called Koblenz, I was there for about an hour so I explored the city a but and when I was heading back I noticed this castle right behind the station, so pretty!