At Home in Germany

After our brush with Royal German Architecture in Füssen, Christine and I decided to check out some more german architecture, but of the more medieval, commonfolk kind. We left our cozy modern hostel in Augsburg and headed north to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a town that due to economic circumstances in the past was never modernized and therefore has a perfectly preserved `altstadt' (old town) that looks like it comes straight out of a medieval movie set! As soon as you pass through the gate of the brick wall that encircles the entire altstadt it's like you've been transported through time to old Germany. Of course Christine and I were not able to enjoy this first encounter as much as we would have liked because we once again were searching for our hostel and it took us awhile but we finally found it. The hostel building we stayed in was located in the altstadt and was really cool. It was about 500 years old and had really cool windows peeking out from under the roof. At one point it had been a mill of some kind. After we got settled in there we did some exploring (this time without our heavy bags on our backs!) and found many interesting nooks and crannies in the town. There were bakeries galore which is soooooo dangerous for us Derksen girls with the sweet tooths! We of course had to taste some authentic german baking! After satisfying our need for sugar we made our way over to the Criminal Museum to check out the history of medieval crime and punishment. Quite an interesting place! The museum explained that back in the middle ages laws regarding crimes were pretty basic and the punishments for crime were pretty cut and dried too. If you're arguing loudly with your neighbor in public, you both get strapped into an attached neck brace until you can get along. If snooping around in other people's business and blabbing it all over town is your game, you get to wear a metal shame mask that has a ridiculous face on it reflecting your indiscretion so the townspeople can mock you accordingly or if you found church to be a little too boring and fall asleep or even decide not to show up, you're sentenced to wear a huge and heavy rosary bead around your neck while locked up in the town pillory. My favourite one was if you were caught being drunk and disorderly, you get to walk around town wearing a 'drunk tank' (a big barrel) so that you'll be shamed out of doing it again! A lot of the punishments back then were of that nature, public humiliation was the main tool to keeping the peace in medieval times. A lot of what we saw was kind of funny, but they also took some forms of punishment to the extreme. The more grotesque punishments were for the criminals that were into major crimes like murder, rape, etc and I probably don't need to get into it here but just imagine a lot of spikes, stretching and bone crushing wheel throws. So after that fun filled afternoon at the museum Christine and I had a little Chinese dinner (very german I know!) and considered seeing a german puppet theatre show but decided the 8 Euro entrance fee was not worth it. We took a walk to the town garden instead and good some nice shots of the town as the sun was setting. The next day we went to a german Christmas store and surrounded ourselves in the Christmas spirit for a little while. I've always wanted to come to Germany during the Christmas season because I love their traditions at that time of year so I guess visiting the store is the closest I'm going to get for now! We left Rothenburg that afternoon and headed to Frankfurt to visit my second cousin Olga who I haven't seen in 5 years since she came to Winnipeg in 2002. We had some troubles getting ahold of her when we arrived though, a phone number mixup, so we didn't actually meet with her the first evening and ended up staying at a hostel near the Railway station. But Olga tracked us down and called us at the hostel so that the next day we finally did get together! It's been very nice visiting with her. She's got her own apartment just outside Frankfurt and it's been nice to be at a 'home' at not at a hostel! She showed us around Frankfurt we walked along the Main River, went to a film history museum and had some amazing ice cream! She also took us to her Bible study group last night which was nice because we haven't been to church at all since we left home. Today Christine and just chilled at her apartment while she was at work and are making a home cooked meal...it's been awhile! Then tomorrow we are taking a train up the Rhine Valley to Paderborn to visit some more relatives on the weekend. Should be good!

Fairy Tale Castle

So our day today was quite excellent! I was finally able to visit the Schloß Neuschwanstein in southern Germany, something I've dreamed of doing since the last time I was in Germany 9 years ago when I was not able to get out to see it. Originally we had wanted to visit the Castle on a day trip from our week in Austria because it is relatively close (almost on the Austrian border), but because there were no direct train routes there from Innsbruck we were not able to. So on our way up through Germany we took special care to include this stop in our plans because I didn't want to miss this 'Fairy Tale' Castle that I have seen hundreds of pictures of but never seen with my own eyes. It was quite worth it and definately lived up to the hype. It was built fairly recently, between 1868-1886, so it was in much better shape than a lot of the other tourist sites we've been visiting lately which was a nice change. It was built by the last King of Bavaria, King Ludwig II, and unfortunately was never finished due to his untimely death in 1886. Because of his unexpected death at a relatively young age they never completed his vision of the entire castle, which is too bad, because what they did finish was quite magnificent. You would never guess by looking at the plain exterior of the castle, the amazing murals, colours, carvings and such that lie within it. It was quite beautiful, it's a shame the King never really got to enjoy it. He was a huge fan of Richard Wagner, an opera writer, and therefore dedicated this castle to his works. Most of the murals painted on the many interior walls of the castle depicted scenes from his many operas. The King even had an artificial cave incorporated into a castle hallway to resemble a scene from an opera, it was quite realistic! The location of the castle is quite magnificent as well. It sits on a large hill overlooking the bavarian plains to the north and is closed in on the south side by the even larger Tyrolean Alps. There are two alpine lakes within view of the castle, as is the Hohenschwangau castle where the King's parents originally had lived. I could not get over the view from the castle windows as we toured through the place, so amazingly beautiful! What an ideal spot! My favoursite feature of the Castle was the washbasin in the King's bedroom. It of course was shaped like a swan (one of the King's favourite animals stemming from an opera) but the water coming out of it came straight off a nearby mountain stream, so it was constantly running (but not anymore unfortunately). Very cool though, I'd love to wake up to mountain fresh water every morning! Christine and I also took a steep hike up to the Marienbrücke to get the 'Fairy Godmother' of all views of the Castle. Very picturesque and I can see why the Castle at Disneyland was based upon this one. Very imaginative and inspired building!

Cold Weather Has Finally Caught Up With Us!

I think after our time in Rome and Pompeii Christine and I were ready for a little rest from the ruins and figured it would be good to book a nicer place to stay at in Pisa, our next destination in Italy. All we really wanted to see there was the Leaning Tower, so we would have planty of time to just relax, do a little laundry, watch a little satellite T.V. and just chill out. Alas it was not to be! We did book a nice place there, but due to some linguistic misunderstandings and it being so far from the train station it took us an hour to finally figure out how to get to the place! It was all good once we arrived, the staff were friendly, the room was nice and we figured NOW we could finally relax! And we did, until the next day, when we wanted to go out to see the infamous Leaning Tower. After a stretch of perfect weather in Italy our luck finally ran out and when we arrived in town to see the Tower it of course started to rain....pour actually. We got a few decent shots with tower but nothing especially good. To escape the rain we ducked into the large Cathedral that was located next to the Tower. It was quite beautiful inside with many paintings, a huge intricately carved pulpit and an entire skeleton of a saint that they've preserved since the guy died some 400 years ago! A little morbid but kind of cool to see! (They did have a cloth and mask covering him and he was in a glass case so it wasn't sooo bad). We spent a little time in a nearby museum of the Cathedral as well and I was thouroughly impressed with the huge choir books they used in the Middle Ages, mom this pic is for you! So when we were ready to leave it was still pouring outside so Christine and I tried to make do with the lone umbrella the hotel borrowed to us as we tried to make our way back to the hotel. A little frustrating I must say since my feet were soaked, it was miserably cold and we just found out we had to wait another hour until our bus arrived to get us back to the hotel! All part of the adventure right!? Well the adventure continued when we got back to the hotel. We desperately needed to do some laundry so the hotel kindly allowed us to use their facilities...which we should not have done! The washing machine left our clothes completely waterlogged (no spin cycles in Italy?). We attempted to use their dryer but it only served to colour our clothes pink, so we hung them up all over our room instead but it was so humid from the rain that by the time we wanted to leave the next day none of our clothes were even close to being dry! AHHHH so much for our relaxing time in Pisa! So we packed up, wet clothes and all, and headed to Milan where the air was much drier and was much kinder to our clothes! We even dried them local style and hung a whole bunch of stuff out our fourth floor window! The ledge out our window was also perfect for storing milk and cheese overnight! We had no fridge but needed stuff for breakfast so we just left it all on our window ledge overnight to stay cold! Milan was not as beautiful as some of the other places in Italy but still nice....for the shopping! We didn't do too much of it because of the lack of space in our lauggage but I did buy a bag to replace the old juice bag purse I've been using the last few years! I know some of you will be happy to see that thing retired! Being the fashion mecca for the wealthy that Milan is, we did do a little window shopping on Via Napoleane with the Prada, Dior, Armani types...but we relegated ourselves to the discount shopping street and shopped at Phard, Pimkie and Pfaff! We saw a sweet Lamborghini parked on the expensive street and so of course I had to take a pic! The green colour was not so impressive but I know a few of you might be able to appreciate the car itself in spite of the colour! Other than that Milan was not too exciting...so on to Germany we travelled today! We spent a long day on three different trains but again the scenery made it so worth it! We went from Milan to Zurich so the Swiss Alps were magnificent, especially since there was a fresh layer of snow....something we haven't seen for awhile! Another memorable sight was the huge inflatable Lindt Easter Chocolate bunny we saw en route as well! The Swiss take their Easter chocolate very seriously! It would have been nice to spend a little more time in Zurich, it looked like a really beautiful place...So now we're in Augsburg Germany, staying in a really nice hostel. Tomorrow we're heading out to see the Neuschwanstein Castle, which I'm really excited about!

The Eternal City and the Buried City...

So our journey through Italy continues into Rome, a city of history, power and tourist, tourists and more tourists! Wow, I thought we were travelling in the off season, but it seems there is no off season in Rome, it's just always busy! In spite of the hordes we still had a memorable time in Rome. The first memory we have is not being able to find the hotel we booked for ourselves over the internet once we arrived. It was supposed to be on the street right next to the train station but when we searched for it the street number given to us as an address it corresponded with a Chinese Retaurant with no hotel in sight....hmmm, just a little sketchy. We went back to the train station help desk and they called the number we were given, the first woman couldn't get through, the second guy finally talked to someone and yes indeed our hotel was in a Chinese Restaurant, only it was on the floor above it. So thinking we had gotten our little problem cleared up we headed over there and checked in at the restaurant but it seems chinese is the chosen language of choice for some people in Rome so we really could not communicate at all with the woman showing us to our room. We had a few misunderstandings but when the owner finally arrived an hour or two later (she spoke english) we got everything cleared up and we ended up having a really nice room to stay in. It's all a part of the experience I guess! So we spent two full days in Rome and did some hardcore sightseeing on day number one. We covered the Colosseum, Forum, Palatine Hill, Capitoline Hill, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, and visited Piazzas galore! It was really cool to see ruins stemming from an Empire that pretty much controlled the world about 2000 years ago, but most of the sights are just that, in ruin. You want to be able to connect with what you're seeing and understand the meaning of it all but it's hard when what's left to look at doesn't resemble the way the area looked in the past at all. I bought a souvenir book that has transparent pages you can put on top of the pictures of the ruins to see what they looked like back in the day of the Roman Empire which really did help with the visualization. But Christine and I decided to take it a step further, we happened upon a Blockbuster Video store on our walk home that day and thought we could take advantage of the built in DVD player in the TV in our room. So Christine signed up for a Blockbuster membership in Rome and we rented Gladiator. It was really insightful to have seen all the Roman sights that day and then to see them in action and in context in a movie, really a lot of fun and the way it should be done! Not all of the sights are so hard to visualize though....some are still just as gorgeous today as they were when they were built, especially the Trevi Fountain. I think that was my favourite sight in Rome by far. The next day we decided to devote to seeing the Vatican City and it's museums. It's good thing we devoted that much time because we had to wait an hour to even get into the place! The line was huge and it snaked all the way around the walls enclosing the Vatican City. I would love to say it was worth the wait but it was really hard to see all the museum had with soooooo many people trying to see the same thing! We really only came to see the Sistine Chapel and when we finally found it, it was so full of people you could just feel the temperature change as you walked in. I really was very impressed by the Sistine Chapel, it's not how imagined it would look, but it's definately beautiful and very worth seeing. There's a lot of other art worth seeing that I didn't get a good look at but I guess that what books and documentaries are good for! The Raphael rooms looked very intriguing as I got pushed through them so I think I'll have to take a look at them online or something later. After leaving the museum portion of the Vatican, we made our way to St. Peter's Square. Huge courtyard, nice fountains, Pope makes speeches there, NEXT. My non-catholic ways seemed to create a little disinterest there, although the courtyard itself was very impressive! The afternoon was still early and the sun was still shining so we headed over to the Villa Borghese to chill out in the gardens for awhile. Sitting in the sun, taking in the Roman skyline it was all very ideal. Now Christine and I have been doing our best to eat at interesting and authentic Italian reaturants and food, but in Rome we were met with a McDonalds at almost every turn and so we could no longer resist the Golden Arches and bought it twice! I feel guilty about it, but when it's so cheap and so satisfying after a long day we just had to! But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing so no more McD's for awhile! After Rome we headed south to visit some more ruins, only I don't think we were expecting to see such a shift in the social stratus as we gazed out the train windows. Our books told us that as you go south in Italy it tends to get a bit poorer, but it became blatantly obvious given some of the modern ruins we saw outside our window. It wasn't so bad but people living in RV's on side roads with their laundry drying on the public fences was a little unexpected. Christine and I seemed to encounter some Ghana similarities as moved south. In spite of that Pompeii was a nice place to visit. We got a little lost looking for the hostel but were greeted warmly upon arrival and even spent some time with fellow travellers after a long day at the excavation site of ancient Pompeii. Pompeii was marvelous! I remember learning baout this place even when I was in elementary school so I was really excited to go. The whole story behind the place is so intrigueing as well. In 79 A.D. Mt. Vesuvius which hovers over the town, erupted and buried the place with ash and pumice stone. A lot of people died and over time the place was forgotten but in 1748 it was found by accident and so much history has been unearthed there. It was so cool to walk the old streets of Pompeii as it would have been 2000 years ago. The only disappointment was that a lot of the precious artifacts that were found are no longer at the ruins but have been moved to the Museum in Naples. Again, it would have been even more amazing if they could have left the artifacts in Pompeii to allow visitors a sense of context when viewing the pieces but I guess for safety reasons they decided to move them. They didn't take it all though. There still was some old frescoes and mosaic floor designs that were beautiful and the most interesting and even heart breaking thing was the plaster casts that were made of the cavities the dead human bodies left behind in the ash and stone from the eruption. I'm definately glad we decided to stop in Pompeii to see this piece of history. So Italy really has started to grow on me...in spite of the language dfferences here we have been able to get by and it's been a really great experience so far. I might even have to get a Vespa when I get home!

Bolzano, Verona and Venice

Well, here we are in an open-air internet tent in Pompeii, Italy with finally some time to post the next blog! Since we last posted we've done so much that it feels like a month has passed instead of only a week. I have to mention that the weather in Italy has been nothing short of perfect! It's been sunny and warm every day but not so warm that it's uncomfortable. It's been so great! Anyway after our wonderful week in Austria, we headed south to get to Bolzano, Italy. The train ride through the Alps and the Brenner Pass was a beautiful one, and we had no problem finding our hostel when we arrived in Bolzano. This particular portion of Northern Italy used to belong to Austria before it was passed on to Italy after the war so there is still a lot of German-speaking people in this region. This was particularly handy for us because it meant that we were not totally clueless when it came to communicating with people! Most people in the south Tyrol speak Italian, German and English so we had no problem with the language. Anyway, the hostel we stayed in there I think has been our favourite so far. It was clean, quiet, new and had cheap internet! We really didn't spend too much time in the hostel though. We only stopped in Bolzano for one reason...to see Otzi, a stone age man that died, was buried and mummified by a glacier, frozen for 5300 years and then accidentally discovered by hikers in the Alps on the Italian/Austrian border in 1991. I was very intrigued by this whole story when I read it in my Europe Guidebook and had to take the time to see this for myself! I'm very glad we did too, it was really very fascinating. Not only did they find the mummy back in '91, but they also found a lot of his clothing, weapons and tools, all of them incredibly well preserved given the amount of time they had spent in the ice and snow. The museum did an excellent job of presenting all of these finds. We even got to see the mummy itself...they have a little window you can look through to see him in the freeze chamber they keep him in. I just can't get over how incredible the circumstances of this find are and how much researchers were able to learn about how people lived in the late Stone Age/Early Copper Age off of this one man who died so long ago. It's amazing. Anyway, it was well worth the stop to Bolzano! After Bolzano we couldn't resist the allure of a town where a very famous story was set. Verona was charming, stylish, and full of gelatis! We only stayed for a night but we really liked Verona. Inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet we searched for the 'Casa de Giulietta' on the Via de Capello (Capulet in english) and found the house that the Veronese like to think is where the two lovers could have begun their affair. We didn't acutally go inside it but there is a little courtyard with a balcony in it that looks like it could have hosted a secret nighttime meeting or two for the couple, but it did look a little hard to climb, I don't know how Romeo could have done it...oh well, we'll leave the Veronese their claim to fame! Verona is also where we got our first glimpse of how stylish the Italians are. Here we are walking down a marbled street with fashionable boutiques on either side in our schleppy travelling clothes while surrounded by good-looking Italians with their designer sunglasses and clothes. I've never felt so underdressed! I guess we can't all be Italian, we have to stick out as North Americans somehow! My favourite thing about Verona and Italy in general is the gelati. We had our first Italian gelati in Verona and while it's little creamier than the kind we're used to on Corydon Ave. back home it's still so good. And the presentation of it was so artful I had to take a picture of it! Lucky for us we met a fellow traveller from Germany, Malene, who we spent the afternoon with and who helped us with our italian. Without her I don't know if we wouild have even been able to order any gelati! Our italian has slowly been improving, i now know how to communicate a lot of the inportant things we need to say, but we have found that a lot of people here speak english. That may be because we tend to hang out where all the tourists are but hey, we'll take the english where we can get it! So after our stop in Verona, it was on to the City of Canals and Gondolas: Venice. I will forever remember walking out of the train station in Venice and seeing the glistening water of the Grand Canal instead of another concrete street! Although Venice is old and a lot of the buildings look like they need maintenance it was still a really nice place to see. We stayed in a small hotel just the main walking circuit in Venice and really enjoyed being able to have all the sights in close proximity to our accomodation. We saw St. Mark's Square, the Doge's Palace and the Rialto Bridge, the three main tourist attractions in Venice. I especially liked the Rialto Bridge because we found a cute little shop that sells antique leather bound journals, which was only too perfect because I lost my original journal somewhere in Munich, so of course I bought one! (I did find that other journal when we got to Rome but I definately like my leather one better!) Christine and I took a boat ride down the Grand Canal just by taking the waterbus #1. Definately a nice way to see Venice and not as expensive as a gondola ride would have been! I think two days was enough to see it all though. Given the way Venice is situated on a bunch of islands in a lagoon, it really has nowhere to grow so it's small enough to see it that amount of time. Really a very unique city, with a lot of history and stories to tell! After Venice we aimed for Rome, but I think I will have to write about Rome another day as I'm running out of time here! Hope all is well back home! Christine said you guys are due for some more snow in Winnipeg tonight after checking the weather network. I love snow and all when I'm in Winnipeg but at this point I can't say I'm envious! Take Care!

Ciao!

Laura

Someone in Venice loves me!

Buongiornio!

Hey all who read this blog...

Just a quick post to let you know Christine and I are still alive and well in Italy. We're in Rome at the moment and are at the end of an exhausting but exciting day of sightseeing. We don't have enough time to do the full post at the moment but we're getting our pics ready to do it soon, so stay tuned for our first episode on Italy coming up soon!

Laura

Yo de lay hee hoo!

After our busy, busy, 5 days in Paris, Christine and I hopped on an overnight train to Munich. Paris was a beautiful city to visit with so much to see but I think we were both ready to move on to a place where we could apeak and understand the language ten times better than we could in France. After waiting in a damp and cold train station in Paris for 4 hours we finally boarded our train to Munich and found our 4 person sleeper car that we ended up sharing with a German girl working in Paris and a Japanese fellow. Both were very nice. Sleep was a little hard to come by that night so we were relieved when we finally arrived in Munich after the 11 hour train ride. From there we took a few more trains up to Mayrhofen Austria, a ski resort in the Zillertal Alps. We, however were not quite at our final destination yet. We are staying a smaller village further up the valley called Vorderlanersbach, so we had to take a cab up the winding mountain road to get to our vacation apartment. When we finally arrived we just passed out from exhaustion, it had been a long day! The next day (my b-day) we explored our village a bit as well as some of the other villages further up the valley leading up to the Hintertux Glacier. Lucky for us they have a free sport bus between all the villages and Gondola stations in the area, so we've been making good use of it! The villages here are definately cute and very classically Austrian. All the buildings are in the alpine A-frame style with carved balconies and window shutters with Austrian themes painted on the sides. So pretty to look at! All the apres-ski huts are also pumping German\Austrian Ooom Pah Pah music, some mixed with a disco beat and a few others with yodeling added for good measure! The backdrop to all of this is magnificant! The Ziller Valley Mountains are absolutely beautiful, especially when viewed from up high. The valley ends at the Hintertuxer Glacier which is 3250 m high. Of the three days Christine and I spent skiing this week we went there on our second day. Needless to say we didn't ski\snowboard down from up there, but there were many die-hard Austrians who did! It was very windy and cold at that altitude and we just saw them all dissappear over the piste edge into the clouds as though they just inuitively knew where where to go, who needs trail markers?! We skiied further down the mountain that day, but the wind and warmer temps have made for less desireable ski conditions. The snow has been pretty sticky and in some spots even slushy. We definately caught the back of this years ski season! It's been so warm here this year that you can't even ski down to the villages at all. We have to drag all our gear to the Gondolas and then get set up to ski once we've reached the higher altitudes where the snow is. Let me tell you, at the end of a long ski day it's a huge chore to hike all the way uphill back to our apartment with ski boots on and ski gear on my shoulders! Not the way I had imagined it would be but you do what you gotta do to get to the slopes! If the Austrians had some kind of initiation test though, I think this would definately be it! It has been a good experience, skiing down the side of an Austrian mountain with snow-capped Alps in the distance is a memory I will not soon forget! I think I definately need to try this out back home in Canada next year! Of course in Canada you can't eat wurst and apfelstrudel in an alpine hut at 2600 m, but hey, I think I'll leave that to the Austrians, they're pretty good at it! So I wish you all a sincere Austrian 'Grüß Gott' and hope you are all doing well! If any of you are interested, feel free to check out my sister Christine's blog as well. www.christineadventure2007.blogspot.com She's got more pics and details there as well! Next stop: Bolzano, Italy!

Paris in the 'Almost' Springtime

Well I can imagine that the saying that Paris is best seen in the springtime is true because seeing it in the 'almost' springtime has been great but the weather has definately not been ideal. It's been chilly and rainy here and our trek up the Eiffel Tower was done on a cloudy rainy day so the view was a little foggy, but still visible. I shouldn't complain though, it's much warmer here than it is back home! Anyway, our first couple of days here have been so busy we've just been exhausted by the end of the day! There's so much to see and do here it's amazing! Our first day we visit the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, Champs Elysee, Arc de Triomphe and all kinds of intriguing little side streets in between. We wandered aimlessly for awhile and came upon a huge shopping street called Rue de Rivoli which led us straight to the Louvre and the PLace de Concorde. We decided to explore around there a little bit and as we walked the gardens in front of the Louvre we heard some good tunes coming from a big white tent set up in the garden so we thought we'd check it out, maybe a free concert or something. Instead we discovered a Dior fashion show was letting out and watched models and the well heeled of Paris emerge to greet the media awiting them outside! Since then we've confirmed that it is Fashion Week in Paris and that explains all the white tents set up at all the landmark locations in the city! Pretty cool. On Tuesday we pretty much spent an entire day at the Louvre Museum...so much to see there! After 6 hours in the museum we were pretty exhausted, mentally and physically! It's a beautiful building, with beautiful old tresures inside, definately a must see. We of course saw the Mona Lisa, but oddly enough didn't seem to live up to the hype... just a painting of a woman. In my opinion there's so many better things to see in there! As we wandered out of the museum we found a nice little cafè called 'La Brioche Doree' and had ourselves some 'pain au chocolat et un boisson chocolateè'. This particular cafe can be found all over Paris. We like the atmosphere and they always seem to be located in good people watching locations! After a long day at the museum we took the metro home and were serenaded by an accordian player on our train. That music you hear everytime Paris is depicted in a movie or T.V. show... it's real! You do hear it on the street and in the Metro here! We had another long day at Versailles yesterday. Another beuatiful Palace, just like the Louvre. Unfortunately a lot of it was under construction and the gardens were not in their summer glory but it was still fascinating to see this historical location. The wealth and luxury of the French Monarchy prior to the revolution is unbelievable. No wonder the commonfolk revolted! Christine and I took a boat tour on the Seine River lasr night when we got back to the City and had a chance to see some of the city at night too. Today Christine and I visitied a FREE museum on the history of Paris. It was in an old hotel and it had these beautiful gardens in the courtyard with sculptures all around. Very french and very pretty! Tonight we leave for Munich on an overnight night train and then tomorrow we are travelling to the Alps for some skiing! Miss you all!