Jena

This saturday and past week I've had the chance to explore more around Jena. On thursday I found a rock climbing place. I'm excited to go there every week and get back in climbing shape. Check it out:

I'm just worried that the other kids will think I'm weird.

Just kidding here's the real rock climbing place:

It's just a bouldering place but it's near our apartment here. It's called Plan B, which doesn't really sound like a climbing place if you ask me. There's another place near downtown that has roped climbing. I'll have to check it out some day. 

Today on saturday we hiked around the hills here in Jena and found the bismarckturm as well as the forstturm which we didn't know existed. Here is a picture of the bismarckturm: 

This tower was built in the hills above Jena around 1900 to celebrate the unification of Germany under Bismarck. As we headed down the hill to town we saw this view of the town.

Jena from the hill. We eventually made it to the town and found a grocery store that sells Cherry coke! I'm really excited about that. We then went to a store called intersport and got some ping pong paddles. The park next to our apartment complex has some tables that we can go play on. I was also finally able to check out the church here. It's an old church and was probably a catholic church at one point. Today it is a lutheran church. Martin Luther lived near here and actually spoke at this church. During the reformation, many catholic churches were ransacked and many opulent things were destroyed. Lutheran churches are known for their plainness and even this church is more opulent than most lutheran churches.

Berchtesgaden

We had Monday off because of Whitsunday (aka the day after Pentecost) which coincided nicely with memorial day in the U.S. We spent the day in Berchtesgaden which is home to the eagle’s nest that was Hitler’s hideaway in the alps. The Eagle’s nest and the buildings below it make up a city that only Hitler and his cronies were able to visit, they didn’t allow anybody else to come to this area. When Justin (another of the BYU students) was researching this area on trip advisor somebody left a comment that only extremists (aka Nazis) or those that are ignorant should come to this place. He probably fears that people come here to memorialize hitler. I choose to see it the other way, that this was their exclusive land but now everyone is allowed to go there and enjoy this beautiful area because of those that served our country. It was a great place to be on memorial day.

We first went to the museum at the bottom that included an underground bunker that the Nazis had built. In this museum I learned that Hitler actually died in a bunker in berlin, I always thought he had died at the eagle’s nest. After the museum we rode buses up to the copper elevator and rode the elevator to the eagle’s nest. We didn’t spend much time inside the building, it’s just a restaurant now and it was looted pretty extensively by the 101^st airborne when they discovered it. They even took the toilet seat. There was snow everywhere up at the eagle’s nest and the snow was hard packed and really icy. You could tell who was accustomed to walking on snow. The people from the middle east were struggling, I was doing okay, and Spencer (a BYU student that served his mission in Finland) was doing just fine. We enjoyed the views, at least the ones that we could see since it was really cloudy. It was beautiful though. Afterwards, we walked drove to the Konigssee which is a really big lake. We walked down to the shore and spent the time just sitting there enjoying nature before driving the 5 hours back to Jena. It was a great weekend and now a week later I think I’m finally fully recovered from it.

The eagle's nest

Edelweiss cross near the eagle's nest

Eagle's nest

the konigssee

Salzburg

The next morning we wanted to go to church. We were able to find a branch near the bus station (we were taking the bus to Salzburg, Austria. You have to have an international license to drive in Austria, which none of us have). First, we had an adventure at the parking garage. I pushed the button and the doors opened up. However, there was another door about a car length in. I was hoping that those doors would open when I got close to them. it took a while before we realized that it was a car elevator. It never started moving so I decided to back up, out of the elevator and that’s when the elevator started moving. As soon as we started moving a felt my stomach lurch. That’s a weird feeling to be in a car going that direction.

We made it to church and then made the bus ride to Austria. We arrived at the palace gardens in Salzburg at the same time as a large sound of music tour. The tour guide explained all the places in the garden that were in the movie which helped because I didn’t recognize any of them. I made sure to get pictures in all of those places though. I’m pretty sure the sound of music is just a tourism advertisement for Salzburg. There were several busses with sound of music tours plastered all over them, at the hostels they show the sound of music every night, and most of the gift store fare was sound of music related.

We eventually made our way into the old city and wanted to check out the biggest cathedral, the dom zu Salzburg. As we got to the front of it there was a huge crowd awaiting somebody to come out. I first thought it was the pope. I could see a tv screen outside that showed people walking down the aisle with banners. It turns out that is how they celebrate Pentecost in Salzburg by dressing in their traditional clothes, holding two swords, and marching. I liked the guys that had fox fur on their caps. I would like to be one of those guys. After the large parade exited from the cathedral the large group of people in front made their way into the cathedral. We snuck in to take a look (on the way out we realized they were taking tickets at the entrance) and they were pretty much having a youth rock concert in the cathedral with cool lighting effects throughout the cathedral. We took some pictures and slipped out of the cathedral.

Then we headed over to another cathedral where we heard a lot of noise but we first had to walk through a cemetery to get there. While there we walked to a crypt that a saint had died in and was made a crypt in 477 AD, that’s really old. This other cathedral had people parading out of it as well. When we walked inside there was a choir singing which sounded great with the acoustics.

We spent the rest of the day walking around the fortress on top of the hill. What’s amazing about the fortress is that there has been a dwelling in that location since around 100 AD and had been slowly expanded over the next couple millennia to become the fortress that we see today. Today we walked about 13.5 miles. We took the bus back to Munich, got there around 10 PM and then had to drive an hour and half to our hostel in Berchtesgaden, the home of the eagle’s nest.

Salzburg gardens with fortress in the background

Sound of music fountain

Sound of music tunnel

Pentecost parade. check out the guy with fox fur

pentecost parade

The first church with the rock concert

The cemetery

The ancient crypt

The second church with the choir at the bottom

 

overlooking salzburg. That church in the middle is the dom zu salzburg. The first church we went to.

Overlooking salzburg

Neuschwanstein and Munich

I forgot to mention that on the way to Munich we drove on the autobahn. This road has areas with a speed limit (usually around 120 kph) and areas with no speed limit. The challenging thing about driving on the autobahn is just the huge variance in speed between the three lanes. Most places we went there were only three lanes. In the right lane you had the semis and buses going about 60 mph. We usually stayed in the middle lane going about 100 mph and the people in the left lane would pass us as if we were standing still. You would just be trucking along at 100 mph and a nice audi or bmw or a crappy old car would just go flying by. You had to really check the left lane and the speed of the cars before you decided to pass anybody.

So anyways, we woke up early on Saturday morning to get to neuschwanstein. We were still an hour and a half away and wanted to get there by 8 (the ticket booth opens at 8 and the first tour is at 9). We were a little late (we got there at 8:30) but there was nobody in line and hardly any cars in the parking lot. It was great. I highly recommend renting a car and going early. As we were leaving around noon, we passed the ticket booth and the line wrapped around all the queue markers and then extended for another block and a half down the road.

That castle is beautiful. It rained on us the whole time which helped everything really cool surrounded by the clouds. The lady working in the gift shop at the gate house asked where we were from. When we responded Utah, she got kind of excited and asked if we were mormon. It turns out that she has family that is Mormon that lives in salt lake. It’s a small Mormon world. While we were talking to her a lady came up speaking Spanish and asking where to go. I was able to use my Spanish with a lady from Spain, that was fun. I guess after I started talking to her the lady working in the gift shop got all excited and asked the other byu people if I learned Spanish on my mission. Also, this was really the first time that I’ve been around americans outside of our group. It was kind of weird hearing so much English.

We toured the castle and they rushed us through, I guess you have to in order to deal with all of those crowds. It was cool to see but they wouldn’t let us take pictures. Afterwards we hiked up to the bridge in order to take more pictures. That bridge was a little rickety. The boards making up the bridge moved up and down when you walked on them and there were at least 500 people on the bridge. We tried our luck and it lasted another day. After the lower castle we were a little castled out and decided to head to munich for the rest of the day.

On our way, Mckenna realized that there was a really cool rococo church about 5 minutes out of our way in Wies so we stopped. It doesn’t look too impressive from the outside but I remember being shocked as I walked inside. It’s impossible to do it justice in pictures but I tried my best. When we got to munich we paid a euro to go to the top of the st peterskirche tower. After climbing about 20 stories of stairs we got to stand on a balcony wrapping around the tower that was packed with about 200 people. The crowd wasn’t moving too quickly (mostly not at all) around the balcony so we ducked out after half a rotation. I wouldn’t really recommend this excursion unless you want to pay money for a great calf workout. We stopped by the marienplatz and the fraunkirche that has the devils footprint. According to the legend the architect tricked the devil into thinking there were no windows in the chapel (you can’t see any from where the footprint is because of the pillars) but since there actually were windows he was tricked and couldn’t enter the chapel so he stomped around and made this footprint. That’s the gist I got from Wikipedia. There’s probably a better source somewhere. We made sure to watch the bells chime at the marienplatz and see the clock do its dance.

By this time we were getting a little hungry so we headed over to the hofbrauhaus (apparently a world famous restaurant that I didn’t know about, I’m not as well cultured as I thought). However, the restaurant (a bar really) was completely full. To get a seat you just muscle your way in and find an empty table. You have to be very close to the table when it vacates because there were huge crowds roaming through all the aisles hunting for a table. We gave up after a while and headed over to the English gardens. We got to see a surfer riding the wave in the river there. There was only one, probably because it was raining (again). We headed back to the hofbrauhaus but again, no luck. We looked for restaurants close by but they were all amazingly expensive. I guess that’s what happens when they’re surrounded by rolex and tiffany stores. We headed to our hotel and after checking in, finally found a place to eat. When we finished and got back to the hotel it was again around midnight.

Proof the camera doesn't matter. I took this picture on my phone as an afterthought as I was leaving the bridge and it's better than all of the pictures from my nice camera.

The castle on the way up. Everybody was making fun of me because it took me a long time to see it.

At the castle wall

The not-so-rickety bridge after all

Two castles. Ray you can stay in the yellow guest house below when you come visit our new apartment.

Check out that gut.

The castle that was actually lived in

Wies pilgrimage church. This town was just a little farm town, no real city center, but with a really nice church. How would it be if this was your weekly chapel?

Inside the Wies church

The organ in the Wies church.

St peterskirche. this is the church where we climbed to the top of the tower.

Frauenkirche. the church with the devil's footprint. As you can see all the side windows are blocked from view. The main window you can see would have been blocked by a high gothic altar.

The devil's footprint:

In a version of the legend, the devil made a deal with the builder to finance construction of the church on the condition that it contain no windows. The clever builder, however, tricked the devil by positioning columns so that the windows were not visible from the spot where the devil stood in the foyer. When the devil discovered that he had been tricked, he could not enter the already consecrated church. The devil could only stand in the foyer and stomp his foot furiously, which left the dark footprint that remains visible in the church's entrance today.

Baroque church in munich

City surfing.

I was trying to get a picture of the two ducklings but this duck wanted to fight me.

Nuremberg

                This past weekend was a three day weekend because of Pentecost on Sunday. Monday is called Whitsunday and it’s a national holiday. We decided that we wanted to leave early on Friday (around 4) in order to get the most out of our weekend. We also ended up renting a car since the bus ride to munich was 8 hours, while just driving there is only three hours. The only problem was that the car rental companies in Jena either had smart cars or luxury BMW’s. We needed a car for four people but didn’t want to pay a ton of money. We discovered that there were affordable cars over in Erfurt, 40 miles away.

 The only way we could get to Erfurt was through a ride share site since the train drivers are on strike (again). We used the website to find a nice geeky looking guy because we figured he would be the safest, his name was Jens. However, to leave Jena by 4 we would need to leave to Erfurt around 2:30. My advisor didn’t come into work on Friday because he was doing a statistics work shop at another university but he left me with 60 plates of seeds to germinate (with 60 seeds per plate, that’s 3,600 seeds!) In the two previous days it had taken us about 4 hour to get it done together. In order to finish by 2:30 I decided to go in early Friday morning. I woke up at 2:30 am the next morning and worked through the whole day in order to finish by 2:30 pm (this included a 2 hour lab meeting which I wasn’t too happy about but got a nice nap out of it). We met Jens at the nearest bus stop and he drove us to Erfurt on the autobahn. At one point we were going 180 kph (112 mph) in his tiny car and I thought we were going to die. However, we made it to Erfurt safely and were able to get the car, go back to jena and pick up the other two BYU students and head out on our way.

On the way to munich we stopped in Nuremberg and walked around the town. There’s a cool castle in Nuremberg that’s been around for about 1,000 years. It’s also where Albrecht Durer (a famous painter) is from. We spent way too much time at Nuremberg so we didn’t get to our hotel near munich until midnight (a common theme for the rest of the trip). 

Brats and sauerkraut in Nuremberg.

Entering Nuremberg

The view from the castle

The castle keep

Church

This morning I went to the branch here in Jena. There are about 20-30 members. It was all in German, but the branch mission leader translated for us over the headsets. I really want to learn German and I’m learning a little bit over time but not fast enough. The branch president is a senior missionary from Orem, Elder Ybarra, and one of the missionaries is from Pleasant Grove. One of the BYU interns here with me has a brother in the Frankfurt mission (the mission that covers Jena… for now, it’s transitioning to the Berlin mission) that the missionary knew (one missionary is from the Frankfurt mission and the other is from the berlin mission). The ward meets at a building in the downtown area on the second floor of a building. Here’s a picture of the entrance.

Somebody made an altar in our apartment complex. There are a lot of people from India here, I assume it was one of them.

The church sign

A different church sign. That's right church starts at 10 and ends at noon, 2 hours, the church is more true here.

The church from the sidewalk.

Berlin!

On Saturday we took the bus to Berlin. The bus was cheap, 23 euro for a round trip. Our first stop was Charlottenburg palace where the Prussian emperors lived. After that we went to a Bundesliga soccer game. Hertha Berlin (ranked 11) played Frankfurt (ranked 13), needless to say it was an important game that had a big impact on the championship rankings. I got a coke (which cost as much as the beer) and a pretzel, I also ended up getting a jersey. They were on sale for 30 euro, normally 85, how could I resist?! It’s the end of the season so they’re trying to get rid of them.

Hertha Berlin plays in the Olympiastadion which is where the 1936 summer Olympics were held. It’s the place where Jesse Owens won four gold medals and kind of ruined the image of Aryan supremacy. It was cool to be sitting in that stadium where so much history took place. I could almost picture Hitler sitting across the stadium in the special seats.

The game was an ok game, but the fans were amazing! At the start of the game they were announcing the players and the whole stadium was yelling and singing in unison, I got chills. The whole game they were singing, waving their flags, and drumming. It was an amazing atmosphere. The other team was relegated to their corner section but had a coordinated flag waving routine that looked sweet (I’ll try and post some movies). After half-time the Frankfurt side lit a bunch of fireworks, the fly in the air kind that pop, smoke bombs, and flares. It was very interesting. I think that Berlin and Frankfurt have some kind of rivalry, the play was pretty rough with 5 yellow cards in 60 minutes (we had to leave early to catch the bus home) and the fans were going crazy yelling and singing at each other. The only player I knew on the team was John Brooks, the American that scored the winning goal against Ghana in the last world cup. The game ended in a 0-0 tie.

The one annoying thing is that there are no rules against smoking in the stadium. I think I second-hand smoked a couple packs at the game.

The videos aren't working right now. I'll try and fix that later.

Charlottenburg Palace and grounds

I got a pretzel

This is right next to the stadium and was where the olympic swimming events were held.

The fans made an amazing environment.

Sweet flag waving.

The olympiastadion!