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Published: September 7th 2008
Somewhere Between Pisa and Munich
Our beds for the night. Josh has already settled in.Ahh, once again I am stuck with a foreign keyboard that I can't switch to English, so I apologize for any spelling/grammar errors and lack of detail, I may not be very patient with it.
As I mentioned in my last entry, Josh and I went to Pisa from Rome. Pisa was not my favorite - the town was
very touristy, mostly uninteresting to us besides from the tower and nearby churches, and for the first time in Europe I thought the town seemed dirty. I was told that a lot of big cities were dirty, but never really had that impression anyzwhere until Pisa. The Leaning Tower was cool, along with the other Field of Miracles buildings, and it was very entertaining to watch the rows of people all taking the same picture of holding up the tower. We elected to not be typical tourists and instead took our pictures pushing it over. We had pretty much an entire day in Pisa, but I would have been alright with just a couple of hours.
We took a night train from Pisa to Munich, which will probably be one of the most memorable experiences of the trip. When we
checked online we were told that reservations were optional. Since we're college students we figured we would save our money and skip reserving... bad idea. We asked where we could sit with no reservations and were told we had to be in the first two cars. Apparently everyone else thought they could skip reserving too, because the cars were literally overflowing. People were sleeping in the hallway using backpacks for pillows, or just standing up, apparently resigned to not sleeping. Deciding we weren't nearly tired enough to fall asleep like that yet, and with nowhere else to go, we went and sat in the dining car for a fez hours, until we were kicked out so they could close. Then we headed back to the first two cars, looked around, and realized the only area free for sleeping was some of the floor in the bike storage room. I actually slept pretty well considering it was a rock hard floor and had less than a foot of clearance on all sides due to the bikes surrounding me. We have some pretty funny pictures of our "beds" where the only thing visible are feet sticking out fro, the bikes.
Amazingly
Munich
Olympic Park by day. I got to Munich with about 4 hours of sleep and only a few spots of bike-chain grease on me, but we thought we would function best with maybe a little more and slept a few hours in the train station. Then I gave Josh a mini-tour of Munich, which included a trip out to Olympic Park (during the day this time) where we had a really cool view of the whole city. I really like Munich - it feels a lot s,aller than it is and it is much cleaner/nicer than I would expect. The highlight of our day in Munich was definitely the evening, when we went on a guided tour of German dining. It was very informative, entertaining, and delicious. Some of the other people on the tour were very cool too, including a brother and sister from Philadelphia who were originally from Ukraine. It was fun to talk to them about differences between Europe and America (like how the McDonald's over here are actually pretty good places to eat) and about Ukraine. After our tour it was back onto another night train - zith reservations this time.
We had a 3 hour layover in Koln,
Munich
View of the city from Olympic Park. I didn't take too many photos of Munich the second time around. which I was actually OK with as it let me see my favorite cathdral again. We are definitely getting very adept at sleeping in train stations, though. Now we are in Brussels, Belgium, and everything is closed. Honestly, the city pretty much shuts down completely on Sundays I guess. We aren't allowed to check in to our hostel until 3, so after walking the mostly empty streets for a while we decided to just sit at the hostel and wait until we could check in. Hopefully we can still find some sights to see this afternoon, and maybe grab some waffles, fries, and chocolate. I'll have to let you know if we have any success. Luckily it's almost 3, so now I think it's time to check in and get a shower.
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Katie
non-member comment
We're loving these these blogs, Josh! Thanks so much for letting us in on it all. We're enjoying every one. Can't wait to see the pictures...cathedrals, castles AND greasy bicycles! It all sounds amazing! Extreeeeemly amazing! Keep it up...