Another good weekend behind me

Well the message pretty much says it all. It's a good thing I have my Aunt and Uncle around, or else Germany would have been an utterly dull experience for me. During the last week I mostly just hung around at home watching TV or playing on Pascal's computer. I installed Grand Theft Auto Vice City on his comp and played it a bit. It's an amazing game and deserves all the high praise and grades it has received from the press. But Pascal plays it even more than I do, he's on it all the time. I also downloaded around 400MB worth of Capcom games (cps1 and cps2), as well as some others, and played those too while I was bored. But nothing will ever "top" this weekend, and that pun doesn't become one until the following paragraphs.

Last week my hosts were debating about where to go for the weekend. They just kept making suggestions and I kept on agreeing with everything! I am a very indecisive person, so they were a little annoyed about that. But when my Aunt started to steer towards a shopping day in Munich, I had to voice my opinion: I wanted to see nature! I mean, at home in Waterloo we've got some of the most boringly flat landscape I've ever scene, and I am so close to the Alps that going shopping in a big city somewhere would seem like a waste. So my Uncle suggested why not go to Bavaria and some of Austria to the highest point in Germany, the Zugspitze. And what a great suggestion it was indeed, because 7:00am Saturday morning, that is where we went.

The drive was pretty uneventful. Of course there were some nice scenery here and there, and we also drove through a little village called "Wank", which I thought was pretty funny, although the germans didn't get it. We also took my aunt's mom, so we were 4 in the car. Pascal didn't want to come. We kept driving south and suddenly the landscape began to get more hilly and some hills looked like mini-mountains. Most of them were green though, with huge pine trees growing all over them. There were some pretty cool long tunnels under the mountains as well. After one such long tunnel, we suddenly ended up in Austria.

Austria is very similar to Germany. The only difference I noticed were slightly different licence plates, and the road markers were opposite colours. Also gas was cheaper so we gassed up, but not until the end of the day. When we finally got to the highest mountain in Germany (which is Austria on one side and Germany (Bavaria) on the other), we were dismayed to find out the cable car (gondola thingy) was in repairs and wouldn't be fixed until mid-August. This brought my Aunt to high heights of anger, and she stormed out of the car and demanded from one of the construction workers (amidst signs of "Danger: explosives"), how we could get up to the top. Luckily she came back all happy, saying that on Germany's side there was also a way up. So we had to drive around the mountain to Germany again so we could get up.

The town at the bottom of the mountain, Grainau, had two options to go up: cable car or cogwheel train. We thought the cogwheel train was a cool thing, so we decided upon that. Also, my aunt's mom was a little afraid she would get all dizzy by the speed the cable car would go up. Now the kicker: €43 for a return-trip ticket to the top. My Uncle practically exploded in anger and disagreement, refusing to go up. Even my Aunt and her mom said it was way too much. But I didn't want to give up that fast: I told them that it was worth the price for me, because I have never even seen mountains, and to come this close to going to the top and not going, I wasn't going to do that. They were actually all surprised that I was so pationate about it, and that I didn't care about the price, being a "poor student", so they agreed to go up, as they wouldn't let me go by myself. Unfortunately my Uncle was still mad, so he decided to stay on the bottom while we had our fun.

This whole debating while we should go up or not and the eventual buying of the expensive tickets all happened while the train was getting filled up and ready to go. So we naturally assumed the train would leave without us and frantically rushed to get through the turnstiles to get in. I put my ticket in quickly and the lights flashed green and red. I pushed the bar but it wouldn't budge! So I kept trying and kept getting the flashing lights, so thinking the train was about to leave pushed the bar forward, and with some force applied the bar turned slowly and I got through. Later I found out I had put my ticket in the wrong way, and had not noticed the arrow.

The train actually ended up leaving 10 minutes after we got in, probably to wait for more customers (or suckers I guess). The cogwheel train has several cogged gear thingies running through the middle of it that grip on a special rail in the middle of the track so it can do practically 45° climbing with no issues. It felt pretty much like a roller coaster when it climbs to the highest point of the track, and probably uses the same system, only it takes 35 minutes. As we kept climbing higher and higher we saw a nice lake on the bottom, the Eibsee, which looked pretty nice. One time we had to wait for a train that was coming down, because it is mostly only one track the whole way up, except in certain sections where it splits into 2 to allow trains to pass. About 1/3 through the ride we came to a long tunnel. You could almost go insane in the tunnel, it is about 20 minutes in there and it's dark, with only dim lights in the train to see things. So naturally when we got out of the tunnel, the light at the top was blinding.

Once we got out of the train I put on long pants and a jacket, but that ended up being too much so I put the jacket away and left the pants. The air was so amazing near the top. I was surprised to see only rock, and hardly any snow at all. I guess the warm summer here even took it's toll on the highest point in Germany. There was a restaurant chalet type house there, where I could smell tasty fries, and basically you could walk around anywhere. There was even a small chapel that you could walk over to, and also an 8-seater ski lift seat, that was put out of commision and just there to show how it was before. Or something. But the view was not so good, because we were not at the complete top yet. The only way up was a gondola on a cable, and my Aunt's mom did not want to go on that. So just the two of us went up and from the bottom you couldn't even see the top because there was a cloud in the way!

The gondola ride was really smooth and only took about 3 minutes. Once we got to the very top the air was even better and the view was spectacular once the clouds moved out of the way. There was also an observation deck and restaurants up there, with people everywhere. The cool thing about this though, and the highlight of my trip, was an offshoot area where you could climb and the authorities held no responsibilities if you fell. It was pretty much ladder rungs and a steel cable that helped you get up. There is a cool cross that stands on top of the highest rock there, it is painted gold and has lines coming out the top that make it look like the sun is shining behind it, and that's where I was going. I made my way up carefully, and ended up being in a traffic jam with people wanting to get down! Once I finally made it to the cross, my Aunt took several pictures of me so that I had some proof I was up there. Maybe I will post them on this site one day. That was the coolest experience ever though, being at the very top of Germany.

When we drove home that day, we stopped at a restaurant and wanted to eat outside. But there were so many wasps that we started to complain, except for my Uncle who kept calm and laughed at how we were afraid of little things like that. I ordered water and naturally got carbonated mineral water, and some schnitzels with fries. It was pretty good. Later that night (it was about 10:00pm), we made a short - unnessesary might I add - stop at the Bodensee, the largest lake in Germany. It was useless because we only stayed for a few minutes and then left for home. The only other notable thing that night was stopping at Burger King. What is so strange about that? Well there were huge tvs showing music videos in the corners, people were allowed to smoke in there, and there was an Internet Machine too (a box with a coin-operated computer that lets you surf the net for an hour), which I had never seen before. I also tried their really cheap slurpee-wannabes, which were horrible compared to the Real Deal at 7-11.

So that was my weekend. Well Saturday only but Sunday was so boring it's not worth mentioning. I hope that I get to experience more fun times again this summer. My boss gave me some new work to do so I should be (semi)busy until the end, which is August 22. Woohoo only 3 weeks of work left, and then the last week is at a Christian camp. That should be, um, interesting I assume. No more video games though as far as I can tell, in Germany at least, so I'll miss that. Today it's back to gramma and grampas place, with an overstuffed backpack full of dirty laundry.

-Joranium