"_______, 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.