Saturday, April 16, 2011

Berlin and Salzburg

Right before, a whole lot of... stuff went down with one of my roommates. Unfortunately she was sent home. We still went to Berlin but we were not able to see a whole lot. I think my favorite part was the Berlin train station. It was huge! We did hit up some of the main tourist spots though like the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and kinda passed by the Jewish Memorial. The next day we took a bus tour which was nice and then I did some souvenir shopping.
The next weekend we stayed home. The girls who work on the Vilseck side of the Grafenwoehr training post came over for the weekend and we were able to go out to the bars to celebrate one of their 21 birthdays. Then back to work.
The next weekend we hadn't really planned anything very well. It wasn't until the night before at like 11 that we decided to go to Salzburg. We got really lucky too. It was only 20 euro round trip for the three of us to go. Plus we got like the last three beds at a hostel in the whole city. We went to the travel agency there first, which was good because we never would have been able to book our beds if we hadn't. After that we went to our hostel, paid, and came back into the main part of the city. We got dinner at this cute little place where we could sit outside and drink some red wine :) After that we basically just walked around the main part of the city. It was so pretty. I fell in love as soon as I could see the city from the train and it was even better up close. We got halfway to the fortress and took a bunch of pictures up there and then turned around because we didn't want to walk the rest of the way when we didn't know if the fortress would even be open that late. We hung out a little more out in the city and then went back to our hostel. The next day we walked around a different part of the city and were able to see the awesome park/garden where part of the Do Re Mi song from the "Sound of Music" was filmed. It was so pretty and the flowers were like arranged in patterns it was so cool. Off to the side a little was this little circle with statues of little people or something that were really funny looking. We took a bus tour after that which was just ok. It was one of those "hop on hop off" ones but since it wasn't the tourist season there wasn't another bus to hop on if we hopped off ours. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get a whole lot of good pictures because of this. Everything had to be taken from our spots on the bus. The good thing though was that it was an amazingly beautiful day. Everything was clear and green and gorgeous. We got off the bus tour at the main station and had lunch at this little expensive restaurant there which was just ok then hung out till it was time to catch our train home.