Salzburg - Austria

We had one more night without accommodation sorted and enough on our rail pass to get somewhere and back for our flight home. We both decided to go to Salzburg in Austria on the German border as it was only a two hour train ride, and in another country. This was only for a night but we made the most of it and had a good look around the birthplace of Mozart. Very small little city (pop. 450,000) with a lot of character, a highlight of the trip for me. Our first thing to check out was the Hohensalzburg Fortress, one of the largest medieval fortresses preserved from the middle ages. This was awesome and so were the views of city and the Northern Limestone Alps in the background. Spent the night in a hotel which was well needed after some freezing nights in our sleeping bags and tents. The next day we chilled out and did a bit more exploring on foot, catching the Mirabell gardens. Cheers Salzburg, we had a lovely time.

After hauling back to Munich on the train for our flight back to London we were told our Lufthansa flight was overbooked and they were looking for volunteers who would be compensated. We decided to see what it was all about. It would have been a flight to London via Frankfurt three hours later than our original plus 250 euros each in cash. We both decided to try our luck and see what happened. Turned out a few people didn’t turn up so we weren’t needed to get some free money. Oh well worth a laugh.

Hope all is well back home and the tears are drying up over the rugby. xoxo

A bit of an upgrade from a tent and an airbed
The view from the fortress was amazing
I see snow
Serenity
Damn, I forgot my togs

Kim: Just taller than a gnome


The fortress is not what it used to be, here is a photo of a baddie who got inside
Statue of Mozart
Low five
!

WoW

Munich - Oktoberfest!

Amazing, absolutely amazing. Lots of beer, pretzels, pork and Germans, everything needed for a top weekend. After a morning of rain in Munich we checked into our classy, yet slightly damp campsite. Kimmy and I jumped on to the train from Berlin after having a wonderful few days soaking up the capital and who could forget Dresden. We only arrived at the campground in the late afternoon so why not get right into it at the festival grounds. Our campground, which was by the zoo in Munich, was about a 15min free bus trip from the Oktoberfest grounds. We were like little kids as we jumped off the bus and saw all the carnival rides everywhere, there was any and every kind of roller coaster or ride. I am however as many know, a big girls blouse so decided to get some silly hats and crack into the beer instead. Great first night, we met some German girls on their hens night and Kimmy was in fine form at the Lowenbrau beer hall.

Day 2: Saturday. Beautiful weather on this day, not that we were too concerned as our hangovers were top priority. Slowly, and I mean dead slowly, made our way back to the festival for some more fun. We could not believe how busy today was, very hard to move let alone purchase a beverage. After trying for ages to get into numerous beer tents (they are more like houses the size of football fields) at about 4pm we found that they were not letting anyone else into the halls due to them bursting at the seams. Undeterred we stood outside the Paulaner tent hoping a bone would be thrown in our thirsty direction. Bingo. With a fair few people pushing around out the front, a young buck broke away from the pack to make a run for the amber pastures of Paulaner. When this hero tried for a gap, the three security guards put all their attention to stopping him and away from me grabbing Kim and pushing us over the advantage line. We were in! Beer time! But another challenge was to find a seat, as the bar wenches only come past and serve people who are seated and you can’t line up to buy your own. We sat next to a group of unknowns to get one beer and ended up chatting with them for the rest of the night. A wicked day.

Day 3: Sunday. The hangover fairy came to visit us during the night and sprinkled her magic to make way for a day avoiding the festival and checking out the city. Saw the sights, which I am glad we made time for. Oktoberfest was great and we will most likely be back next year.
Tents and airbeds all set up for our arrival
This was as close as I would go to this ride

Silly hats
This lion would keep drinking his beer, roar 'Lowenbrau', then wag his tail
Crowds on the middle Saturday
I'm happy now
Our random Germans/Italians we were drinking with

Germans in their traditional wears
Inside the Lowenbrau beer hall
I'm getting there
Oh Matt you're all class


The view from the ferris wheel. Carnival rides to the right of the strip, about a dozen beer halls to the left

Dresden

Up we got for an early start to the day so that we could get onto the train for a day trip to Dresden. It only took about 2 hours on the train and we were there.

I really liked Dresden, it's a small city, 488,000 population. We left the main station and went for a walk to find the city centre which wasn't hard, just a matter of walking towards the tall church tops. Although we did make a detour past an H&M so that i could buy a warm jacket...Yes, it was a cold yuck day and my normal jumper wasn't good enough, and besides I'll need one for London soon as well (that was my excuse to Matt). I will admit that this jacket saved me a few times on this trip! Anyway... We continued to walk and found some really amazing buildings. The thing that got me was that Dresden was severely damaged in Feb 1945 due to carpet bombing in WWII and has also recently been through flooding, yet here it was looking amazing even in the bad weather! The highlights included:
The Market place & shops, there were cute alleys and roads with shops, cafe and restaurants on cobbled roads.
The Frauenkirche Church, This protestant church is known as the Stone Bell and was built between 1726 to 1743. It was destroyed in 1945 and has only recently been reconstructed 60years after the end of the war. What is cool is that they used a large amount of the old sandstone fragments retrieved from the rubble to rebuild it.
The Zwinger, this was my favourite, the building is built in a square around a huge courtyard of fountains and grass. You can walk to the top of the building and the view down is very cool.
The Catholic Hofkirche Church, and the current cathedral of Dresden are buildings of amazing architecture, most of which has had to be rebuilt or refurbished.
The German sausage, oh yeah this was really good, we saw this caravan shop in the middle of a square and wondered why there were so many people constantly around it just for a "hot dog", so we had to try it. Now we know why, the sausages were so good! and to make it better we ate it while looking over the Elbe River. Good food, good view, great times!
The Beer, Yes we did end up in a pub, but that was because it started to rain and we wanted to stay as dry as possible. We tried the Pils and the Oktoberfest Augestiner beer, both very nice.

After the pub, we braved the rain, it wasn't too bad, and headed back over the Elbe towards the station. We did get a bit wet so decided to have dinner inside the station to dry off a bit before we got back onto the train.

We really enjoyed our day of Dresden and again would recommend everyone to go there!

Next adventure....Munchen and the Oktoberfest!!!

The Frauenkirche Church

One of the cute market alleys, and my nice warm jacket!

We sat under the trees looking towards the Elbe River to eat our lunch

Matt saying Hi to the guards of this walk way



The Catholic church and Cathedral

The Zwinger, my favourite building



Matty getting wetter and the pub we went to in the background



Rain is not going to stop us!!

Night night Matty, asleep on the train

Berlin

Day 1: Well here we are ready to go on our first European Holiday, heading to Germany for a week…. The first day was spent on travelling. We caught the tube to Heathrow to catch the flight to Munich at 9.30am, then caught the Munich S-Bahn (their train system) to the Central station, then onto the German Rail on a really nice and comfortable train for a 5 hour trip to Berlin. The weather was really good and the views from the train were lovely! After a few games of cards, reading and staring out the window we were in Berlin. We decided to catch a taxi to our hotel and that is when we realised that we were actually in another country…taxi driver couldn’t speak English and driving on the wrong side of the road (I kept thinking we were going to crash!). Our hotel was really wicked, thanks to Matty’s work we got really great rates! We spent that night in our room after having a small walk around our hotel at 10pm looking for a bottle of wine to celebrate.

Day 2: We woke up to rain and clouds. Not cool! But we weren’t ganna let that get us down. We had breakfast and went for a wonder around Berlin city. Our hotel was just off the Kurfűrstedamm (K’damm to the locals)– a famous strolling and shopping venue of the western city. So we wondered up this road to the Zoologischer Garten area and we spotted our first awesome building, the ruins of the memorial church named the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtnis-Kirche. This church was built in 1895 and was then severely damaged by the bombings in 1943. Instead of fully refurbishing the church, they have left it as it was for a silent reminder of the horrors of the war. We carried on walking through a huge park called the Tiergarten. It is a massive garden park (494 acres) and we found a cool little secret garden in the middle of it. By this stage we had probably walked about 5km but we kept going and found the Brandenburger Tor – This Gate is Berlin’s most famous sight, were many powerful people have marched through. It also was just on the border of East and West Berlin on the East side when the Berlin Wall went up in the 60’s.
We kept walking down the Unter den Linden to go to the Famous Pergamon Museum. Now this was pretty cool!!… We put on our Audio guides and did the tour through the museum seeing parts of the original Pergamon Alter that dates back to 160BC; the Market Gates of Miletus, over 16m high; the original Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way into Babylon; the Temple of Athena and a lot more!
From here we went started to make our way back home and came across the Holocaust-Denkmal, a new memorial officially called the “Memorial to the killed Jews of Europe” completed in 2005 it comprises of a random number (about 1000) dark grey concrete blocks of varying heights up to 2m high covering a huge square field. People can walk in between them all and you can certainly loose each other, isn’t that right Matt! :)
Then back on the U-Bahn, back to the hotel, or so we thought….Yes I got us a little lost, it does get tricky when all the names are these long German names and all look the same. But it worked out well as we came out to find lots of restaurants around us, so we decided to stay here for dinner. We found one that had English in the menu and looked good. As it was, our waiter spoke English really well and we ended up choosing off a true German Menu, designed for the weeks of the Oktoberfest. The waiter had to explain everything to us, as we had no idea. Matty got a big bone of tender pork with sauerkraut and potatoes, and I got the same with German styled chicken. Man they were good, huge, yummy meals and we slept well on full tummies after a long but great day.

Day 3: After a good sleep we woke up early again to have breakie and get to the walking tour that kicked off at 10am from Zoo-Garten. Our guide was an Aussie named Kurk, which was cool because he told things as they were and we could also understand him. Apparently Berlin is cheap-as to live, with the average person paying 200-290Euros a month for a good flat. Now that is cheap! Reason being because Berlin has a decreasing population due to 20-30% unemployment (the government says its only about 15%, but they would). Crazy, because it really would be an awesome place to live.
Anyway…We stated the tour at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Church, then onto the S-Bahn to East Berlin at museum island, and the Berlin Cathedral which looks Catholic but is actually protestant, built in early 1900’s and recently refurbished. Only one bomb hit it in the war, but it was hit by lots of bullets from the Russians after the war. We moved onto seeing where a famous palace is being rebuilt and a few more sights, along the way learning all about WWII and the Cold War. We followed onto seeing the Berlin Wall and Check Point Charlie, and hearing about some funny attempts of people trying to get themselves and their families into West Berlin. We saw were Hitler’s bunker used to be and where he committed suicide; it is now a car park surrounded by new buildings. Of course there is no memorial for him as this could cause some major problems. Then onto the old Nazi HQ (now the tax office), the Jewish memorial and the Brandenburg Gates. We ended the tour at the Reichstag – the famous parliament building. What an awesome day!! We both really enjoyed the 4 hour tour and would highly recommend it to anyone.
For the afternoon we wondered around a bit more, going past a huge Chocolate shop (mmm German choc is good!) and enjoyed the weather. We chilled out that evening making dinner in our room and just relaxing knowing we still had a few more early mornings and busy days ahead of us.

Berlin was cool, we will definitely try and go back as there is still so much that we did not see.

Sorry for this being such a long post, but there was just so much to tell you.
Hope this finds you all well.

Love K & M
x o x o x o x o
The Kaiser-Wilhlem church. Only the front tower of the original church is still standing
You can see how damaged the church was from the war
Inside the Pergamon museum, see the Alter's frieze along the wall The Goddess Athena in the Pergamon Alter frieze, built from 160 BC. They used to be in colour but they are so old now the colour has gone
The original Ishtar Gate and...
the Processional Way (180m long) into Babylon – Built in the 6th century BC, during the reign of Nebuchadnezer II
The Berlin Cathedral and a cool fountain
The Holocaust Memorial. See what i mean about how easy you can loose people in there!
The Brandenburg Tor

Chocolate version of the Reichstag... NO don't eat it Matty!
The actual Reichstag. This is were we ended our tour
AMPLE MAN!! The red and Green men on traffic lights are these funky guys. If you saw them you knew you were in East Berlin, but now they are stating to take over all of Berlin