When in Rome...

Rome. Is. Awesome.

-the end.

I know every city in Europe is full of history. You can feel it in every cobblestone. But there's something about Rome that is almost overwhelming.

"That's where Julius Caesar stood. That's where Nero lived. That's where gladiators fought. This building has been here in some form for 2000 years."

On our first night in town, we checked into our apartment (a slightly awkward arrangement in which we had one bedroom and a couple had the other room and there was only one bathroom) and then we went straight out for dinner. We've had a problem with forgetting to eat on the days we travel...oops. after a quick calzone meal, we tried to get back into the apartment. Tried.

So I apparently am key-impaired. The door is one of those typical European ones, where the handle doesn't turn--you use the key to unlock and push the door open. Only it wouldn't unlock or open. For half an hour. We asked the owner for help, and she and her awesome husband came over. Of course it took them about 4 seconds to open the dumb thing. Since then, I always practice opening doors, like a small child...

The next day, we slept a little late and went to the colosseum. I love the colosseum. It's way smaller than it used to be, but it's still huge. It had this strange quality that makes it feel only large until you glance across the arena and see how tiny the people are over there are. Standing there and imagining what it would've been like to experience the colosseum during the games. Well, you know, without that whole people killing eachother thing.

We found ourselves a part of a tour group that had some great info, and afterwards they offered a "free" tour of the forum. The guide we had there was a British guy named Alex. If you ever go to Rome, get his info from me, because he's brilliant and knows everything about ancient Rome. He has worked at the Louvre, now he works at the Vatican. No big deal, right? At the end of the forum tour he offered everyone a morning or night walk through the "Secrets of Rome" the next day. It was expensive, but we like learning and Alex was a great guide, so we went reserved spots for the next evening.

The following morning we headed to the Vatican. I'm not Catholic, but I love the museums there. I'm pretty sure I hurt my neck looking at all of the ceilings. It's amazing. The Sistine Chapel, you guys. The rooms filled with statues. We wondered what would happen if all the museums in the world agreed to give the owner countries back all their art...so much art has been stolen or "borrowed" from its home over the centuries.

It takes hours to walk through the museums. I think we did it in about 3 hours, and that's not including the ginormous line out front.

By the time we got out of the museums, checked out the basilica, got pizza for lunch, and headed back to the metro, it was almost 4. The days go by so quickly here. I know it's because we are always headed somewhere, but I wish I could slow time down. I want to be here forever.

The night tour was spectacular. The monuments in Paris and Rome are lit from the bottom at night, so everything is bathed in golden light. It's like a dream. We went in a few churches, stopped in a few stinky alleyways....gazed slack-jawed more than a few times. Glass coffins, false ceilings, illusions. You know, typical awesome things.

And then it was done. No matter what city we go to (well, except for Milan), I wish we could be there/here longer. I could spend months in Paris and Rome. Years. Germany feels like it was so long ago, but I could spend years there, too.

"_______, it's What's for Dinner"

This post begins with a mystery. Let's call that mystery "What did we have for dinner in Stuttgart?"

We got on the train leaving Füssen just fine, if you don't count the part where the train wasn't labeled and we spent about ten minutes thinking that maybe, possibly, probably it was the right train, but our paranoia said BUT WHAT IF IT'S NOT, a feeling that should be familiar to anyone who has traveled on European trains. Steph declared it was right, so we stayed.

Everything was going great until our final connection between Buchloe and Stuttgart just....sort of...stopped. This would've been just fine if we'd had any idea why the train was stopped, but all we understood was that there was a delay, they were very sorry, and there was free coffee and tea in the cafe car.

We were supposed to arrive in Stuttgart at 19:56, but we were well past 20:00 when Steph went to the cafe to try to find out what was going on. The two people she talked to couldn't remember the right vocabulary to describe what was going on, so all we found out was that it wasn't an emergency with the train. (It was very reassuring. Ha.) When the train finally started moving, we'd been stopped almost an hour and a half.

About 20 minutes later we passed a massive fire and a half dozen fire trucks on the side of the tracks--obviously the emergency that wasn't as emergency. I had a funny moment when I said, "Weird. It smells like smoke, but not normal smoke. What is it?" Well, duh. Burning German trees would smell different from burning Colorado trees. It smelled nice, which is probably a bad thing to say. True, though.

By the time we got to Stuttgart, it was almost 21:00. We had a bag of soup for an easy dinner, so we bought bread at a bakery in the train station and then headed out. We stood waiting for the bus for five minutes before I realized we were supposed to be getting on the U bahn...which was under us.

The hostel was a chain business, and we'd gotten their cheapest room: a mixed dorm. This is where the amusing part started. So. If you ever want to get the best, travel with my sisters. Apparently everyone just wants to make them happy.

We walked into the dorm room (three bunk beds and two regular twin beds side-by-side) and immediately, Bri and Steph were offered the best beds from the guys inside. Seriously, I've never seen guys move so fast. The guy who was on one of the regular twin beds leapt off it to give it to Bri, and one guy gave me his comforter (not sure where mine had gone...). We struggled through putting sheets on the beds (I'd like to talk to the person who dried those fitted sheets to the size of a baby crib. Jerk). At 22:00, we were so hungry we didn't even care that it was past dinner: Steph and I asked our dorm mates where the kitchen was.

They laughed at us.  "Do you have bowls?" No... "Do you have a pot?" No... "How are you going to make soup?" SHEER DETERMINATION, PEOPLE.

Turns out that sheer determination doesn't work if the kitchen is closed. And the bar wasn't making food. So we headed back up to the room with an even better plan for dinner.

Bread? Check.
Meat? You mean two bags of beef jerky? Oh, so many checks.

I think we worried the other people in the room with how eagerly we ate our awesome dinner.

A Crazy King's Castle

Füssen is a small, relatively unknown town so far south in Germany that it's practically in Austria. We got there by flying into itsy bitsy Friedrichshafen airport, then taking trains through Bavaria.

I wish we had known to stay longer in Füssen, or that area at the least. It was beautiful and quaint. Everything looks like it belongs in a fairy tale. The "downtown" area of Füssen looks like Belle's town in Beauty and the Beast. Every building is painted a different pastel color, the streets are well-worn cobblestones, and there are colorful shutters on every window.

My first visit to Germany (in 2008) was to Berlin. I thought I'd "been to Germany". Ha. Berlin has massive streets and felt like a generic city--I wasn't terribly impressed. But Füssen. Ermahgerd, Füssen! The people are generous and nice. If you un-focus your ears (kind of like letting your eyes fall out of focus), German totally sounds like sexy English gibberish. Or Sims-speak, but better.

The nearby castle that Füssen is famous for isn't actually in Füssen. It's in Hohenshwangau, about ten minutes toward the towering Alps if you grab a car or bus. We got packed into a bus with a heck ton of Asian tourists--you know you're going to a popular destination if there's a flood of Asians around you.

In Hohenshwangau, i learned that Germans are really nice about you appealing German to them. And if you happen to, say, form a somewhat logical sentence, they think you speak German. I asked the ticket lady for three tickets for three people, and she started giving all these instructions in German....I know my face looked awesome because once she looked at it, she stopped herself and asked what language I'd prefer. We skipped Schlöss Hohenshwangau and the kings museum, which ended up being a really good thing. You see....there's no supremely easy way to get up to the tour area for Neuschwanstein. Either you climb a mountain, pay 6€ for a horse-drawn carriage, or pay 1,80€ for a shuttle bus.

Our tour wasn't supposed to start for over an hour, so we wandered past the town center to the lake, took pictures, wandered some more, then headed back to the horse carriage line (because CASTLE, people)....and realized that with the line in front of us and the total of one carriage on it's way down the mountain, we were going to miss our tour.

Missing the tour meant buying tickets and waiting all over again, and we didn't really have time for that because we had a 16:06 train to Stuttgart to catch. We walked over to the shuttle bus line...which was packed with about three busloads' worth of tourists and no bus in sight. We had 40 minutes to get to the castle, but the bus would essentially get us there 5 minutes too late. So, we did what any sensible Colorado girl would do: hike the mile up the mountain.

Everyone we had talked to said it takes 30 minutes to hike just to where the horse carriage drops you off (although "hike" is generous...the path is a paved road, really is just that it's super steep). THEN, there's still a 15-minute hike to get to the courtyard where tours begin. With all that in mind, we essentially ran up the mountain.

We arrived in the courtyard with 7 minutes to spare. It almost killed Briele and Steph and I felt gross with sweat, but we made our tour. Of course, the first thing they had us do was walk up a few flights of staircases. It was a good day for exercise.

Neuschwanstein castle was the inspiration for Disney's Sleeping Beauty castle. It's tall and skinny, with all white and gray stone with huge turrets. Everything about the outside screams YOU ARE IN A FAIRY TALE. But what I loved about the inside was that it just felt like a big house. Wood and plush fabrics create a cozy, almost cabin-like feel. It's designed with hallways around the rooms in the center, so as you walk down the hall you can either look out over the valley (gorgeous) or into the rooms of the castle (homey).

King Ludwig, the guy who designed and built the castle, may or may not have been crazy. He actually built a bunch of castles--Neuschwanstein is simply the most famous. Just before he turned 40, the court declared him insane and arrested him. A little while later, he died in really mysterious circumstances.

If there's anything that helps prove he really had lost a few marbles, it's his bed chamber at the castle. Not gonna lie, it was pretty cool. Intense, but cool. Imagine every aspect of Gothic architecture and design shrunk down into a space about 20 feet square. I wish we'd been allowed to take pictures. He literally topped his bed with an itsy bitsy Gothic cathedral (or castle, it was kinda hard to tell). Towers, buttresses, pokey details...the whole thing. He was definitely a nerd. Gothic bed. Gothic chairs. Gothic carvings. Gothic ceiling. AND he had a grotto built just outside his bedroom. That's right. A GROTTO. As in, an actual cave with actual stone walls. Just so he could end a particularly stressful day by saying, "If anyone needs me, I'll be in my grotto."

He had to have been a little off. He wanted to live like "the kings of old", but it's almost like he went for the look of that kind of King and then forget about the rest of it. While visiting another castle, he saw a beautiful singing/performance room that he later replicated in Neuschwanstein. Except he didn't design the acoustics for performances. He just liked the look of the room. Kind of like buying a bottle of wine for the look of the label, but never actually drinking it.

So, that was the awesome castle. We rode the horse-drawn carriage back down the mountain because it was closer than the bus (Bri was nearly dead by then) and only 3€ to go down. We even had time to stop at a restaurant for lunch (mmm bratwurst and fries) before we caught a bus back to Füssen.

German Trains and Punctuality

As Stephanie says, "German Trains and Punctuality is an overstatement." They definitely have a...creative way of thinking about transfer times and how 30 seconds is enough time to descend a train, find out which platform you need to be on, run to it, run back to the info board to check it's the right train, run into the train, watch the doors close, freak out that you got on the wrong train, and resign yourself to the fact that this train is possibly not going the direction you want to.

That pretty much sums up the five hours (ish) it took to get from Friedrichshafen to Füssen. And we had to switch trains four times. Once, we got off and thought we had missed our stop because our next train wasn't on the platform in Kaufbeuren, then realized our train had been 70 seconds late...and we'd missed our connection.

Thankfully the direction wasn't an odd one, and another train came a while later.  We arrived in Füssen with a couple of hours of daylight left.

In case you were wondering,  Füssen is THE CUTEST EVER.

EVER. 

(it's so cute it needs its own post)

Concerning Airports and the People in Them

I've always enjoyed flying. I love walking between gates and guessing where everyone is going. I love the feeling of the plane taking off, when the g-forces push you into the chair.

I don't, however, love babies on planes. Or, for that matter, men who apparently can't sit still and therefore slam themselves back and forth in their chairs. Sir. This is not a rollercoaster.

Briele's and my flight to London, besides the crazed baby and the dude who seemed determined to get my dinner all over my lap, went really well. Our layover in JFK proved that I've been spoiled with DIA. Would it kill New York to have a couple of bathrooms that both have working stall locks AND unclogged toilets?

We were supposed to meet Stephanie in Victoria Station, so after we melted in the sauna that was customs for non-EU passports, I went into business mode to find the Tube entrance. Of course, this meant that I went so much into business mode that I walked right past Steph in the arrivals area. Oops. I promise I missed her. I just didn't *see* her.

We decided to skip a hostel for the night, since it's kind of ridiculous to pay £17 per person when you have a 6:30 flight out of a new airport.

Speaking of new airports, Gatwick is....tiny. we couldn't go through security until 4 a.m., and we got there around 10:30 p.m. Sooooo what do you do when you're at an airport 6+ hours early? You curl up with 40 other people in a waiting area overlooking the lobby. And then you pretend to be able to sleep.

It was kind of like letting a chair put you in an awkward yoga position, then falling asleep because you couldn't do anything else. But you didn't wake up feeling relaxed...you woke up feeling like a year of your life had been sucked out through your spine.

The final airport we arrived in was in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Our flight was half an hour early. If you want to see something amusing, drop a plane-full of people into an airport with about four total check-in desks, then give them no one to pick them up and no trains for an hour.

Hint: even the expression for "Da heck am I supposed to do now?" is pretty much internationally recognized.

And then....we encountered trains.