Bre's European Travels: Trip to Bavaria!

Well I am trying to get better at updating, but there is so much that has happened in the past week that it's going to be hard to keep this blog entry short! And I have lots of great pictures to share, too!

Last Wednesday, me and a few members of my family left for a short trip to south Germany, or, Bavaria. My host dad had to go there for work and took the rest of us with us, it was perfect! After getting up early to make the 4 hour drive, we dropped my host dad off at his work and made our way to the Neuschwanstein Castle. This region of Bavaria is absolutely beautiful. It's very hilly, with the German Alps right there on the boarder to Austria. This area is very typical German. When you think of something as being German, you are probably thinking of Bavaria. All of the old farm houses and small towns make it so picturesque, especially with the mountains in the background.

Anyways- back to the Neuschwanstein.The castle was built in 1869 by King Ludwig II on the side of a mountain. The view from the castle is stunning, overlooking all the small towns and valley below. And Neushwanstein is the model castle for Disney! I can see why. It's the perfect castle, with a renaissance style of decoration and design. Only 16 rooms in the whole castle are complete because construction on the rest of the castle stopped after the King died. But we got to take a tour of the 16 completed rooms. I was bummed that you couldn't take any pictures inside the castle, but I guess that is understanding considering everything is original, and I think nothing had even been moved from it's original place! So these are just pictures from the outside of the castle. It was so much fun going there to see this castle though. It is so famous and it's so beautiful!

The following day, Thursday, we got up early again to drive about an hour and a half to go a little further south east, into the German Alps, to a small town. There are a bunch of small villages, but none of them are connected. There's lots of farm space between each village, where all of the cows have bells hanging from their necks, and old farm houses with beautiful flowers hanging from the windowsills. It was seriously like out of a fairy tale book!!! (That's how I felt in the Neuschwanstein, too). We purchased tickets to take a train up the highest peak in Germany, called Zugspitze. The train actually only took us up to this point on the mountain with a nice lookout over the Alps, but then we had to take a gondola car up to the very highest point. It was absolutely stunning. It's hard to even put words to how amazing this experience was. It was breathtaking! You can see 4 different countries from here: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy. We were so blessed to be there on a clear day, too... I could have spent the whole day there just starring out onto the mountains!

After a really fun mini trip, a friend of mine who is on the same program, studying in Switzerland, came to visit for the weekend. She got in Friday night, so we spent the rest of the night catching up and talking all about our adventures. Saturday we walked around down-town Frankfurt. We took an elevator up one of the sky scrappers to get a great view of the city- completely different from the view from the top of a mountain! I really enjoyed that view, as well. Then we had a nice relaxing lunch and walked around the Palmengartens (a botanical garden).We didn't feel like we were in Europe anymore- more like the rain forest! That night we went to an American football game.... haha. Enough said. It was so funny watching American football in Europe. Definitely not as big of a sport here as it is in the U.S.!! But it was so much fun. We had a really great time and it was the closest thing to like being back home.

I could have definitely written more about each day, but I think this brief version will have to be enough. Plus, I think the pictures are more worth seeing than reading what I wrote! Enjoy :)