We departed Prague around 8AM this morning for Nuremburg, Germany. Of course, we didn’t actually leave until forty five minutes later because 6 people were missing and no one could find them, but what’s new. Due to the fact that the majority of us only got 3-3 ½ hours of sleep last night, the moment the bus started moving all noise ceased and everyone fell into uncomfortable positions to get a few hours’ sleep.
Nuremburg is most famously known as the site of the trials for the Nazi leaders. But as our tour guide frequently reminded us, there is much more to Nuremburg than that- though we aren’t entirely sure what she was talking about. She was crazy, to put it simply. At first we were all excited because when we met her she was speaking perfect English without any accent. Turns out, she is originally from Wisconsin, so that makes sense. But we quickly learned that that was about all we liked about her. She began the tour by implying that we were all hungover. I’m sorry, but just because we are a group of college students does not mean we are all hungover. We got three hours of sleep and just traveled three hours on a greyhound bus; excuse me if I don’t look my best. The rest of the hour dragged on, with her treating us like we were in elementary school and trying way too hard to get us to like her.
After the tour we had an hour and a half to grab some lunch and explore. Walking around was a lot harder than we expected, because the Red Bull District Ride was in town. It seemed like everyone in the country was there to watch these young kids do terribly dangerous tricks on their bikes. Despite that, we managed to look around and spin the golden ring for good luck. There is this Middle Ages water fountain in the middle of the city that has a gold ring. The story goes that if you spin the ring while making a wish, your wish will come true. Sorry, I can’t tell you what I wished for- or else it won’t come true! Obviously.
The city was packed with people, but our tour guides had decided that they would pick our meeting point and be the ones to tell the buses where to come pick us up. So not only were they basically holding us hostage, they decided to make our lives terrible by picking the middle of the city. At 3:30PM we made our way back to the fountain to meet the rest of the group. We waited a half hour before we found out that the bus drivers refused to drive down into the city to pick us up… which meant that we had to walk all the back up the hill of the castle to where we had gotten of the buses earlier in the day. By this time it was close to 90 degrees and we were all hot, tired and not in a good mood. And just to make it better, when we got on the bus, it was a sauna. We had to wait another twenty minutes to get air conditioning running through the place. We are pretty sure someone was out to get us today with this stupid bus, because on our arrival to Nuremburg it took our driver over forty five minutes to figure out where he was going to drop us off. We went in a lot of circles.
Finally, we were on our way, and again everyone was passed out within five minutes. It wasn’t until the bus driver turned on the lights did we all wake up and realize we were in the middle of nowhere. Literally, Bad Kohlgrub is in the middle of the mountains. It’s gorgeous, but remote. We were an hour late thanks to our super late start, so we didn’t even settle into our rooms before we hit dinner.
This is our last hotel before Florence. Tomorrow, we have the option to go hiking in the Hornle Mountains. It will be nice to get out to fresh, clean air. None of us realized how much of a difference a little law like ‘No Public Smoking’ can make. There better not be any smokers on that mountain tomorrow.
Saturday, September 10th
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