What we have been doing so far...

Once again falling behind on my updates. As most of you know Diana arrived on the 26th and since then life has been a whirlwind of adventures, goodbyes, and missed trains. We spent our last days in Munich having vegan dinner with couch-surfing friends, wandering the city, finishing up school, and organizing for the next two weeks of travel. We left Munich on Monday following the sad loss of the euro cup soccer competition by Germany to Spain the previous night. Our first experience with train station personnel was awful causing us to miss the 11:50 train we could have taken and wait for the more direct but later train at 12:50. Our first stop on our tour of Bavaria was Fuessen, which we have determined is an overrated tourist town. From Fuessen we took the bus to see the Neuschwanstein and Hohenchwangau castles which were also crowded with tourists and might as well be owned by Disney considering how fake they look. We ended our Monday in Garmisch-Partenkirchen where we stayed over night with an amazing couch-surfer named Stephanie in the dorms for the employees of the military R&R hotel in Garmisch. It was a bit unnerving having to show our passports to get passed the German guards at the entrance but Stephanie was a really great host. Tuesday morning we got on the 8:30 bus from downtown Garmisch up to the Skistadion where the Olympic ski jump is and began our ascent of the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany standing tall at just under 10,000 feet. This may sound small compared to the mountains we have, but due to our not so optimal physical condition the 6,000 feet of elevation gain over the course of to days was really brutal. The beginning was very beautiful. Our route took us first through a river gorge called the Partnachklamm where a brilliant blue glacier river gushes it ways forth through a slot canyon. Another two and a half hours of hiking through forested river land brought us to the hut we planed to have lunch at, called Reintal-Anger Huette. As we were finishing our meal there at about 2:30 the afternoon thunderstorm hit and we were forced to stay there instead of continuing up another two hours to the next hut, which would have put us within three-hours hiking time to the summit. We spent a leisurely afternoon napping and eat a very nice German dinner at the hut before calling it an early night. The next morning we had planed to get up at half past five to start our grueling hike but instead where awoken at five by the alarm clock of the other guests in our matrazenlager, both of whom hit snooze and went back to sleep. Needless to say we hit the trail early, 5:27 if I remember correctly and watched the sun come up on the towering granite peaks we would be conquering in the next few hours. The ascent to Knorrhuette, where we had originally planed to sleep our first night was brutal. We climbed over two thousand feet to breakfast at the hut. The following two-hour hike up the summit cable car was very beautiful but exhausting. The herds of mountain goats and sheep with their tinkling bells added another worldly charm to the whole hike; the actual summit was rather touristy filled with people of all nationalities who are dry and cheery after their train/gondola ascent from the valley floor. After enjoying a nice lunch we took a cable car down to the Eibsee and swam for a bit before returning to Garmisch to beg one more night from our brilliant host. A few hours after we arrived in Garmisch it started to hail and then pour torrents of rain. The night we went out to a small Italian restaurant with our host and then took our soggy selves back to the dorms to clean up. We caught an early train to Innsbruck in the morning and spent the day exploring that city and worrying about our host for the night before taking the train to Lucerne, Switzerland and meeting our wonderful hosts there. We stayed in a flat with three couples but had our own alcove with a very comfortable mattress. We made stir-fry for our hosts and spent the night talking about the differences between English and German and then German and Swiss-German. The next day the weather was beautiful and we spent about six hours exploring the very quaint city of Lucerne. We had fondue for lunch and got many strange looks from Swiss people as cheese fondue is really more of a winter dish and very hearty. At four we caught the train to Interlaken where we couchsurfed at a hotel in an attic full of mattresses. Not sure if I got pictures but it was very creepy the first night until we got to know Barbara who is one of the nicest Swiss people we met during our entire stay in the country. On Saturday afternoon we went paragliding, which was amazing! It would have been a lot nicer if I had taken a motion sickness pill as I really felt nauseated the whole time but the weather was perfect and flying like that was really mind-blowing. A Canadian man we met in our mattress room went skydiving and came back lit up about how great it was. After another night in our windowless attic room we made the train-bus-cable car trip up to a village called Gimmelwald where we stayed in a place called that mountain hostel which struck us more like a Frat house with obscene rules. The beds we comfortable and we went on a hike with a very nice Bostonian couple that was on their honeymoon. We hiked up to a waterfall with a view of a glacier mountain but it rained most of the time so the views were not as good as the could have been. From the waterfall we hiked up to a small family restaurant where we got a piece of tort and bread to go with our Alpkaese, which is some of the best cheese I have ever had. The hike back down the mountain was not very enjoyable as it poured rain the entire time and we got extremely wet. The rest of the afternoon and most of the evening was spend making two trips into the hot tub which was very hot, 44 Celsius, the first time because it is heated by a woodstove and someone had added to much fuel. The atmosphere in the hostel made us both feel a bit uncomfortable but here was a small village festival to raise money for the youth ski team going on so we went and enjoyed some really Swiss food and funny village music which was really fun. For dinner we enjoyed chocolate fondue, which was nice with fresh fruit, and half of a very good pizza that one of the guys we met could not finish, and wanted to share. Getting up in the morning was really difficult as we did not want to wake up our six roommates but we had to catch the 8:30 cable car down so we could make our train connection.