Fussen

This weekend we took our first trip! It started out amazing, and ended in disaster. We are NOT having good luck with transportation so far. We travelled to Fusen which is right near the Alps along the border of Switzerland to visit two castles. The ALPS!!! To see CASTLES!!! I’ve decided that I want my own castle.

It was about a 4 hour train ride (we had to take 4 different trains but it was super cheap since we got a group pass…like $6 each to go anywhere all day long). There are 2 castles right beside each other, since as legend has it, this King Ludwig guy was crazy and he kept taking people’s money and building castles all over the place. The more famous of the two, Schloss (castle) Neuschwanstein didn’t get finished inside because the King died, but it’s actually the castle that Disney modeled their castle after. Yep…that castle you see in all the movie previews and in commercials for Disney Land….I’ve been to the original!! We had to hike about half an hour up a mountain to get to it. The other castle, Schloss Hohenschwangau is less impressive on the outside, but we got to tour the inside of that one, it was pretty cool. The king and queen slept in different rooms on different floors, and the King’s room had paintings of naked women all over the walls. Go figure. And then of course there was a secret passage way to the Queens room…

The trip back turned into a total nightmare!! We got stranded at a train station in this tiny town about halfway between Fussen and Stuttgart for TWO HOURS in the freeezziing cold!!! What is that stereotype we have about the Germans being very particular, especially about always being on time? Omg I thought we were all going to die out there. No, I exaggerate. It was freakin cold, and we were all vibrating from shivering so hard, our muscles hurt from being so tight from chill for so long, but we made the absolute best of it :) Nothing ever gave me any clue that I’d be spending two hours kicking around ice balls like a soccer ball, and huddling and singing backstreet boys and spice girls songs to try to keep warm and entertain ourselves. Yep, and dispite our bad choice of songs in (at least on my part) totally off-key voices, I think we inspired a few people that night. There was a group of German girls and a big group of Chinese people also stranded that night, who all started singing after we did :P It really could have been a lot worse, at least the company was good :)