We made it out of that creepy Limburg casino and all the way to Rothenburg. The trip was interesting and involved us getting on the wrong train once, getting separated as a result, almost missing connections, and Krista being an idiot and forgetting to take the battery charger (and adapters) out of the wall when leaving Limburg. So now I need to buy more AAs for my camera. I think we can live without the voltage adapter and Keith has another plug adapter. I’m still mad I left that stuff behind though. Those rechargable batteries aren’t cheap!
Rothenburg has been awesome. We stayed at the hostel (which was recommended by Rick Steves). Rick Steves was absolutely right about this town. By day, it’s crawling with obnoxious American and Japanese tourists shopping for leiderhosen and sampling schneeballs. But at night it’s much more quite and interesting.
Scheeballs are available on every street in this town. They are a long strip of pastry that’s been deep fried. It has a semi-crunchy texture similar to a fried won ton. It’s curled into a ball shape and coated with sugar, powdered sugar, chocolate, glaze, or just about anything else you can think of. Rick Steves thinks scheeballs are a penance food meant to remind the young generation of how hard their ancestors had it. Keith and I had a sugar coated one and we thought it was pretty tasty!
Last night we explored the town after dark, when most of the tourists were gone. We looked in shop windows (many of which sell lame souvenirs and/or an epic array of swords, knives, daggers and Swiss army knives). We found one shop that sells honest-to-God antiques! In their window was a bunch of old jewelry, locks with skeleton keys, kaiser hats, and mementos from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. While looking in one of these windows, some jerk upstairs decided to water their window box and didn’t feel a need to worry about whether there were people standing under the window. We got dirty plant water dripped on our heads! Keith wondered how to say “jerk” in German. We probably should have been warned by the next plant box over that suddenly began dripping only moments before we got wet.
We went to a park outside of the city walls (by the way, this is a walled city established in the 10th century). At the park we watched the stars (and the bats, there seem to be a lot of them here) while listening to German teenagers being loud and silly nearby.
Americans have an international reputation for being loud, which is bad for me because I’m loud even by American standards. But we’ve heard some pretty loud Germans around here so it’s not just us! One German man we passed on the road even farted real loud. He was chastised by women who were nearby (well about 15 feet away from him where they still heard the fart clear as a bell). Although we couldn’t understand the conversation, Keith and I were cracking up laughing as the women and the man yelled back and forth.
Today, we’re planning to head to Fussen, which is the closest town to the Neuschwanstein castle.
