Switzerland!

Hi dudes,

An update from our trip so far.

We left Mainz a few days ago and caught a train to a town called Heidelberg (still in Germany). I was in charge of finding our way to the town from our hotel but after a few blocks of walking it was discovered that I had taken us in the wrong direction. Al wasn't impressed. As everyone knows, there are varying degrees of wrongness but in this instance I was 100% wrong (as wrong as possible) so we took a 180 degree turn and started heading the other way. After some time walking under Al's leadership, we started to feel that we were once again heading in the wrong direction, so we asked a local. She advised us that we were about 50% wrong so we took a 90 degree turn to the left and continued on. We made a few more wrong turns (usually between 10% and 25% wrongness) but finally made it to town.

I had been told that Heidelberg has the longest mall in the (world? Europe? Germany? Heidelberg? I can't remember), and it was indeed quite long, but mainly filled with clothes shops and Al and I have no room in our bags so are only allowed to spend money on consumables (read: beer and food). Here's a photo of the big mall:

At the end of the mall, Al and I were surprised to see a sweet castle in the distance. We decided to head up and have a look. Here's the castle from a distance:

We walked up the hill (steep as all buggery) and found out that you could just walk around the castle as you wanted and didn't have to pay or anything. Al and I like not paying for stuff so we decided we'd spent the rest of our day here. As usual, Al and I had not done any research into the town we were in so we didn't know alot about the castle, but Al thought he might have learnt about it in school and remembered a few details. For instance, here is the courtyard where they used to play four kings on saturday nights. Of course the rules were different back then, but the game was essentially the same:

There used to be a late night kebab shop to the right hand side of that last photo but it was destroyed in the second world war. And here is a famous Heidelberg bridge, the bridge over troubled water:

There were some sweet lions heads made from stone that lined this castle, and some of them had really bizarre expressions on their faces. Underneath each lion head was a plaque where they used to carve the name of employee of the month (for being a good jester or not dying of dysentery or whatever).

Anyway, enough about the castle. I'll put heaps of photos on facebook if you'd like to have a look. The castle is really cool and I recommend checking it out.

The following morning, Al and I thought we'd head off to Switzerland to stay with some of his family. We thought it'd be best if we grabbed the cheapest train we could find but apparently this is a dumb idea. Picture a five hour train ride with four train changes (most of which only had about 4 minutes to get to the next platform), and no free seats on any train. Dear deutsche bahn, f*#k you. Mind you, this trip still cost us 106 Euro.

Finally we arrived in Zurich, Switzerland. Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland, but not the capital, what sort of bizarre country would think that's a good idea?! The following day, we thought we'd check out the town so we grabbed a tram and headed to the town square. Then we discovered something about Zurich...it is freaking expensive here, man. I saw a hungry jacks meal for the equivalent of $16 AUD! We were hoping for a nice beautiful sunny day to check out the sights, but instead we got this:

Even though the weather was crappy, we found a tourist pamphlet that told us to check out this certain mountain for a sweet view of the city. So, doing what we were told we headed to the mountain by train. It was cold as hell and also foggy, which gave it a sort of creepy vibe, which I hope is captured by the following photo:

Once we got to the top, Al jumped on to the telescope to check out the famous view of the city:

And this is what he saw:

Beautiful eh?!

Anyway, that's it for now. I'll get some more photos up on facebook or another blog when I'm not starving. Time to eat! By the way, it's Al's birthday today! Happy birthday Al.

Bye,

Dan and Al