Monday, August 1, 2011

germany highlights

as we'll be wrapping up our two weeks in germany tomorrow, i figured i'd share a few highlights from our trip so far: 

1) road trip with ann and josh! we spent three days driving around the former east germany with our friends from new zealand, camping in beautiful old dresden, freezing in unsummer-like weather at the buchenwald concentration camp, wondering where the heck everyone was in gorgeous and underrated erfurt, and admiring martin luther for having lived so long in the crap town that is wittemberg. in total we spent about 8 hours on the road, but drove through 5 german states - berlin, brandenburg, sachsen, sachsen-anhalt, and thuringen. that must count for something.


2) cycling through munich. our itinerary only gave us one full day in munich, but at the suggestion of the family friends who we stayed with, we rented bikes and were given a personalized tour of this very pretty (and cyclist-friendly) city. on foot we never would have gotten to the outskirts of the city to see the sunbathers in the english gardens, the still-modern silhouettes of olympic park, or ludwig I's schloss nymphenburg, modelled after versailles. 



3) seeing the south in our bmw. so we paid a fortune to get a last-minute rental car, but scored a free upgrade to a brand-new bmw, which is more-than-a-little fun to drive on the autobahn. from munich we drove down to the bodensee (lake constance), where we ate ice creams on the dock at immenstaad and looked over the lake towards switzerland, and then on to our quaint gasthof accommodation outside of the black forest town of freiburg. the next day we meandered through classic wooden-village-nestled-in-the-hills scenery, sampled schwarzwalder kirschtorte (black forest cake) according to the original recipe and pretended to like cuckoo clocks in triberg, and then found a little pension with an available room right off of the main square in heidelberg. spent a half-day showing bryan around the area where we lived when i was younger, but we couldn't get onto the military base without a military ID so we spent the rest of the day at the very picturesque heidelberg castle. 


tomorrow we'll fly to london, and two days later we'll be back in DC to do...?

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