Beer, Sausage and more naked Germans

Lisa infront of the Berlin Wall

After another fantastic night in an airport we arrived in Berlin early in the morning.We took the bus to find our hostel and found it in a charming neighborhood full of erotic stores, strip clubs and Turkish restaurants. Berlin was probably our least favorite city we have been in so far. I guess Nazis, getting completely destroyed by the allies and then communist rule don´t do a lot to make a city nice to look at.

The less than spectacular Berlin Skyline

There were some really cool things there, but you had to sift through a lot of garbage (there was trash everywhere) and communist functional architecture to find it. It was however very interesting historically to see things like Hitlers bunker and the Berlin wall. One thing that is cool about Berlin is that there are a lot of artists there, so there are cool murals on many of the buildings. The best gallery was on a remaining section of the wall. My favorite thing about Berlin was the Curry wurst. (That's not saying a lot as it is just a hot dog with ketchup and curry.)

One of the many Spectacular Prague Skylines

We were not sad to leave Berlin to head to Prague. Prague was very juxtaposed with Berlin, having the most interesting gothic architecture I have ever seen as well as being exceptionally clean. Like Berlin, Prague is steeped in all kinds of bloody history which we learned about on a free city tour that we took one morning. There is a church there with a 600 year old severed arm of a thief hanging over the doorway. Just another fine example of Catholic forgivness. You have to give it to the Catholics though, history is a lot more interesting thanks to them. One thing that was very interesting but haunting was the perfectly preserved Jewish Ghetto. It is one of the few preserved Jewish ghettos in Europe because after Hitler sent all of the Jews from Prague to death camps, he left the ghetto alone to serve as a museum of an extinct race. Now, however, it is the most prosperous part of the city.

 Prague Old town Square at night

Other than just admiring all of the architecture, we had a nice glass of wine in a vineyard at the castle above the city. As usual I dragged Lisa out at night to take pictures. At one point I was on the Charles Bridge (biggest tourist attraction in Prague) laying on the ground at night to get the picture I wanted. For some reason tourists started taking pictures of me! I guess I looked more ridiculous than I thought.

Charels Bridge crowded with tourists even at night

After Prague we continued east to Vienna, Austria to meet some friends that Lisa met at Kali`s wedding (see old blog post). Vienna did not have any sights that took our breath away like Prague, but every single building was beautiful. Georg and Julia (J makes an H and it is not George) were extremely nice and I could see right away why Lisa made friends with them. It was really nice to stay in there apartment where we could feel at home instead of a loud hostel.

Me, Lisa, Julia, Georg

It was also really nice having them be our personal tour guides and to sample a lot of local food with them. We ate Giant Pork shoulders with Beer in a beer garden, Shinken Fleckel (I was told I had to try this, but it tasted like hamburger helper) in a pub, and coffee in the oldest coffee house in Vienna with extremely fancy Victorian interior where you felt you would be kicked our if you slouched. (Not exactly starbucks). We even got to go climbing right in the city center where they built a 100ft climbing wall on the outside of a building.

After three days we were sad to leave our new friends but excited to see another city. We were giving Germany another chance and heading to Munich. We were pleasantly surprised to find Munich much nicer than Berlin. Everything about Munich was Bavarian. This is the Germany of laterhosen and braided blonds serving beer to the masses. Munich had a huge beautiful park just outside the city center with Germans doing what Germans do best; lying in the sun naked. As usual most were 50+ overweight men.

Munich city center

After Munich we headed deeper into Bavaria to a small town called Fussen where the Neuschwanstein (think Disney) castle is. The castle was beautiful and, as expected, completely packed with tourists. We did find though that we could hike an extra five minutes and have a nice picnic high above the tourist all alone with a stunning view of the castle, farms behind it an mountains in front of it. The town of Fussen was also really nice and we were sorry to only stay one day. We did read that there was climbing there and we spent a morning trying to find it but never did. We wern`t too worried tough because next was Innsbruck where we knew we could climb.

Neuschwanstein

To get to Innsbruck we had to take a bus and then two trains. As we got on the last train we commented that the connections went much smoother than we would have expected. Just after this discussion, the conductor came by to check tickets and informed us that we were not in fact heading to Innsbruck, rather the opposite direction back to Munich. After a few hours sitting around a train station in the poring rain we were back on track. Once in Innsbruck things were no smoother. Due to construction the directions to our hostel were wrong. After finally reaching our hostel we went to the store to buy food to cook dinner. Turns out that the store only took cash so after a quick 5k run to the ATM and back we could make dinner. Innsbruck was gorgeous, sitting in a valley between beautiful alps. We read about some great via ferrata above the city and a lot of climbing. Unfortunately it never stopped raining. We did get a few pitches of climbing in and when it started raining again we headed to the local climbing gym (supposed to be one of the best in Europe. It was not as good as any one of the three in Boulder). We also went hiking in the rain and just walked around town. I think we have to put Innsbruck on the list of places to return to someday, hopefully in better weather.

Innsbruck