Saturday, December 29, 2012

Swapping seats and the tide of humanity

Up in the dark again so we could leave the flat at 7.30am.  Everything fitted but it tested my packing skills and means we cannot buy anything else unless we buy another bag.  Grabbed a coffee and bread roll at the little bakery at the station and jumped on the train to Bensheim.  At Bensheim we connectd with the Frankfurt to Salzburg train that went via Munich. Seat selection is an art  have yet to master.  You can reserve seats or you can hop on and find a seat that has not been reserved.  The train was pretty full and since we needed 3 together it proved to be a bit of an ordeal.  We found a set of seats that were not reserved till Stuttgart and plonked ourselves down.  The train stopped at Heidelberg and Lauren noticed a couple of people get out of seats that were marked as being reserved from Frankfurt all the way through to Austria. She figured that if they were now empty, then the original person who reserved them was not on the train so we upped and moved.  Luckily we managed to stay put all the way through to Munich.

Our hotel is only a couple of blocks from the Hauptbahnhof (Main train station) but appears to be situated in Little Istanbul.  Clean & comfortable and they were able to change our room to one with a 3rd bed so Lauren can be with us rather than having to get another room.

We arrived about lunch time, checked in and then we wandered in towards ‘town’ and into the shopping strip.  Talk about crowds … David Jones on Boxing Day has nothing on this.. the plaza (Marienplatz) is probably about 50m wide and pedestrian only – it was literally wall to wall people as far as you could see… and to make matters worse they drive AND walk on the other side to us so navigating it proved to be a bit of a challenge. 

We just sort of wandered round, got ourselves orientated with the city had a late lunch at a little Café just round the corner from the main market.  Back at the hotel we checked emails etc .. there was a lovely one from Christof (Lauren’s host dad) letting her/us know that she had 2 weeks holidays rather than the couple of days we originally thought.  Seems she had been missing her parents more than she had let on and Christof & Nadja decided a couple of weeks of parent time was just what she needed.

Dinner in a little Schnitzel & Chicken House and a bit more of a wander .. much nicer now without the crowds. 

We also rang Tony’s dad and wished him a Happy 80th Birthday

No comments:

Post a Comment