Say Hi to Heidelberg

I forgot to ask for WiFi last night, and the desk closes at 7pm, (actually it not only closes but all staff leave the building) so this post is a bit late, unfortunately.  And here I thought I was going to be all caught up.

First of all, here are the pictures from Amsterdam, not captioned, and with crummy pictures included, because I just don't have time to do it AGAIN.



And at the end will be the pictures from our second day in Amsterdam, from Luxembourg, and also from today.

Today we had yet another lazy sort of day, if you can call traveling across three countries lazy.  We woke up and made our way to the train station after some drama wherein I went ahead and lost our packet of bus tickets.  In fact, today was not the best day for public transit, as we'll see shortly.

We took the train to Metz, France.  While en route, we noticed that the hotel we are staying in tonight (not in Metz) has a check in time between 5 and 7 pm, and we were expecting to arrive around 9.  So, we had to cancel our plans for a day trip to the French village where my dad used to live in military housing when he was a kid.  We hope to be able to go back later in the week when we come back up this way.

From August 11 Heidelberg

In Metz, we discovered the world's greatest garden.  Outside of the train station, they had planted a display in honour of International Year of the Forest (which is 2011, in case you didn't know.  I am actually surprised that I didn't know, as I live in a forestry town, but whatever).  It was a garden dedicated to forests worldwide.  They had boreal forests and tropical forests and everything in between.  They even had a section on deforestation, which looked like it had just suffered a forest fire.

From August 11 Heidelberg

After we ate lunch in the forest in Metz, we boarded a train for Saarbrucken.  From Saaurbrucken, we took a train to Mannheim, in which we accidentally booked ourselves into first class.  We are pretty sure that our Eurail passes are only supposed to work for second class, but no one said anything, so we had a pretty comfortable ride.First class is a lot like second class, but with nicer seats.  Also some wooden paneling.

From Mannheim we caught a train to Heidelberg.  This was pretty stressful as we are now in Germany, and not a one of us speaks German.  I can muddle through French, and everywhere else we have been has put English or French on all of their signs, but Germany often just doesn't (the nerve!)

We managed to find the right stop thanks to a fellow traveller who I suspect was an American or Canadian on exchange, and embarked on our great Heidelberg adventure.  I have a book that has interactions for which bus we need to take, what the stops are, when it leaves, how much to pay, etc (the very same book I lost in London, some might recall).  So, I knew we were taking bus #33.  So, after we had bought our tickets, we saw bus 33 sitting in a bay, so we took off and boarded it.  In our excitement, we forgot that usually busses go more than one direction, and we had taken 33 in the exact wrong direction.

Luckily, we had a transit map of Heidelberg, and with some fancy maneuvering, managed to board a tram and connect with the correct bus.  It was, however an extremely unpleasant experience.  The tram was very hot, and we actually got trapped on the tram by an abundance of babies, and missed our stop.  Everything was fine in the end, because bus schedules look the same in any language, and so we managed to sort out where we had to be.

From August 11 Heidelberg

Eventually, we got to the right bus stop, and followed my directions, which told us that we needed to walk down a back alley, then go down more back alleys until we arrived at a certain door that had a somewhat sketchy sign over the door which said "rooms" (and some German that I assume was the same.) 

Now, were a bit worried about this hotel as it is a pension hotel which after our experience in Amsterdam we take to mean Hostel. No one in the group particularly liked that "hotel" as we slept in bunk beds and had our bathroom (or WC as we all seemed to have started calling it) outside of our room. As we are sleeping two nights in Heidelberg a similar or worse room was not ideal. However, our room turned out to be quite nice.

We have a separate room from my parents, nice big closets, a table and art on the walls.  Also the room is quite spacious and on the first floor, which marks the first time we don't have to haul things up and down stairs.  This makes us quite excited.

This evening, we explored Heidelberg's old town (Altestadt) and it is pretty amazing.  Predictably, it has a square, which is immediately next to our hotel (just down the sketchy back alley) but this square is a market square, so it is surrounded on all sides by cute little shops.  Chris bought a hat, which he is very excited about, and got stung by a wasp, which he is less excited about.

From August 11 Heidelberg

We also wandered across the old bridge (Altebrucke) and took a walk by the river, which afforded us an excellent view of the castle we are going to visit tomorrow.  (Heck yeah, castles!) Tomorrow is also one of the first days in a very long time (if ever) we can sleep in so it's going to be fun all around.

Something which I have been remiss to mention is that although I usually use the first person singular while writing the blog, and most of the keystrokes are mine, the blog and pictures are written by both Darcy and I.  She sits next to me while I write, and adds her own insights, thoughts and phrasings (all of which are awesome and amazing, though she wouldn't say so herself, as she is as humble as she is beautiful, which is very).  Some parts I specifically delineate as Darcy if it's important that you know, but usually it's just both of us. 

That is all for us tonight; Gutentag!