Croatia

We both really wanted to go to Croatia during our trip, but we couldn't quite decide where. There are two cities that sounded interesting to us, one is very touristy and beautiful and in the south of croatia, and the other is near a national park with all these amazing beautiful lakes, neither of them however are very accessible by train. After some thought and consideration, we decided to go for the lake park town. We took trains all night long to get there, and when we arrived we realized that we were in the wrong city. Yup. We decided to make the best of it, so we walked around for about 1/2 an hour, and then decided to just jump on the next train and get out. We ended up in the capital of Slovenia. Neither of us ever figured out how to pronounce the name, but it is spelled Ljubljana. We spent the day just walking around and enjoying not having an agenda. We found a really cool castle, and it turned out that there was some sort of city festival going on in downtown, so we listened to a big community band play michael jackson hits. It was awesome. The city was clean and beautiful, and everyone was kind and pleasant. It was a little hidden gem that are glad to have discovered.

Hope you enjoyed these few pics from the day!

Budapest!~!

This fun city was not in our original plans, but when we left Prague, we found ourselves sitting in a Mcdonald's in Vienna, trying to find an affordable place to spend the night... and well, we couldn't. So we thought "why not go to budapest?" We found a super cheap hotel, and hopped on a train, and could not have been more pleased with the results. Our budapest experience went like this:
We woke up at 8 a.m. to get ready to go to church. We then walked about 3 1/2 miles to the chapel, in our church clothes, and wearing our backpacks. We got there just in time, and slipped into the back row right before sacrament meeting started. After church, we headed out, with a free map we had picked up at the hotel, and several land-marks circled by a very kind missionary. We started out thinking that Budapest was just a dirtier version of the rest of the European cities we had seen, but when we got to the top of castle hill, we fell in love. It was probably my favorite site we have seen so far on the trip. I know that words aren't really going to relay the message as well as I would like, so here are a few pics to give you a taste. Remember that pics don't do this place justice.
This is us getting off of the train. We are tired and have no idea what we have gotten ourselves into:)

This is us walking to church. We had to walk VERY quickly, because google-maps told us it was going to take 1 hour and 20 minutes to get there, and we only had 1 hour. FYI we made it:)

On the way up castle hill. Things are starting to look more promising

At the top of castle hill. Not yet to the castle, but this building had some pretty awesome roof tiles.

Cool church with awesome roof tiles

The CASTLE wall things. Awesome.

View from the castle

A view of the parliament building from the castle

Beautiful Hungarian countryside. Seriously so beautiful.

Cool bridge

A view of the castle from below

Clay found a new friend

Prague

We were excited to leave Berlin and head for Prague because it is a city a lot of people have told us alot about, and we have really looked forward to going there to visit. Right before we left Berlin we booked a hotel in Prague and hopped on a train. We were a little nervous about getting to our hotel because we didn't know anything about Prague and we weren't getting in until 11h30 at night. We met a bunch of really great people on the train, one of which, a scientist from Prague, offered to help get us to our hotel. He helped out so much because it would have taken us much longer to find it without him.
We were amazed to find that our hotel was located right in the Old Town of Prague. Literally perfect location. It was also really cheap, but the room itself was a ton better than we had expected. It was so nice that eating the breakfast buffet the next morning we decided to stay a second night.

Prague was something unlike anything we had ever seen. Having only one building really be destroyed during the second world war, most of the architecture dates back hundreds of years. A few highlights were the Atomical clock

The Tyn church

The Castle (everything you can see on the hill is the castle. Its HUGE! The biggest in fact.

And, the castle at night. Amazing!

We wandered around the whimsicle parts of town all day, and when we were too tired to wander any more, we went to a restaurant and had some typical Czech Cuisine. I had dumplings, and Clay had schnitzel (There is a lot of german influence in the czech republic, in case you are thinking to yourself that schnitzel sounds german...)

We took about a million pics, but they just don't quite show how beautiful it really is. If you are ever in the area, make sure you stop by.

Berlin!!

After visiting Amsterdam we decided that we really wanted to visit Berlin, and more specifically, the Berlin wall, so we tried to figure out the best way to get there. Turns out that the overnight train was completely full, and we really didn't want to stay in Amsterdam another night. So, we decided to try taking 5 different trains throughout the night to get there.
Sounds rough doesn't it? It was worse than you think, but we survived. It actually went really well for the first part until we got to Kohl Germany at 1am. Our next train didn't leave until 430am so we had some time to kill. We walked around a bit and finally found a place we could stay and attempt to sleep. They were two benches that sat two people. we laid out our sleeping bags and tried to sleep. I gave up after about 30 minutes and just hung out until our train came but Amy manged to get some, often interupted, sleep. She was wearing my beanie and looked, in my opinion, absolutely adorable, though, others may use the word, homeless!

We finally got to the Berlin train station and had breakfast at McDonalds where we actually brushed our teeth and got ready for the day.

We then stashed our bags in some day lockers and bought a map of the city for a Euro and made our way into the city. We started by eating a currywurst that we had read about online. A currywurst is essentially a hotdog with ketchup on it, sprinkled with curry powder. It was alright, but nothing exdrodinary.

Next, we walked around the city. We followed from the train station the former Berlin Wall where most major monuments and touristy things are. Probably the coolest thing we saw in Berlin was the Memorial for the Murdurded Jews. It is the memorial done by the Germans for the Hollucost victims. The exterior is incredible looking with thousands of pillars of differnet heights, and the interior was just was cool. There were six rooms: A timeline of the killing of Jews in Europe, a room with projected images of journals and letters of the victims, a room where they would announce the name of a victim and tell their life story, a room dedicated to different families who were affected by the genocide, as well as a room showing different hollucost sites and the last showing the diffent memorials in the world. It was a great experience, and being in Berlin really put it into perspective.

Another cool thing we saw was a large segment of the Berlin wall with a timeline telling of the rise and fall of the Nazi regime. It really was weird thinking that not so long ago all of this really happened, and how it all started in this city. It really put things into perspective.

All in all, Berlin was pretty much what we expected it to be. The architecture wasn't as cool as most of the other cities we have visited in Europe because it was almost all destroyed during the World Wars, and everything was a little spread out. It was nice though to be in the place we talk so much about though, as well as being able to better understand the German Culture.

Amsterdam!!

We finished up with brussels and headed out to Amsterdam at about 3 in the afternoon. It was a 3 hour train ride, so we figured we would get to our hotel, get situated, and then head into the city for dinner. But what actually happened was, we got off the train, walked around for an hour and a half with our backpacks and everything in about a million degree weather, finally asked for directions, and found our hotel. Talk about guetto. We figured it would be, because it was super cheap, but we were happy to have a room to ourselves, even if we had to sleep in separate beds. By the time we changed our clothes (the ones we were wearing were too wet to continue to be worn)

and got outside to head to the tram into the city, the weather had changed drastically. We finally opted to just grab a kebab close to the hotel and spend the night watching The Big Bang Theory (our new favorite show). It poured and poured rain all night long. We finally had to shut the window, because the thunder kept waking us up, which means we were a too hot to sleep comfortably, and also it meant that we had to deal with the full odor of our hotel room.

Anyway, after a not so restful night, we woke up, and headed into the city. It was a little chilly in the morning, but it warmed up, and we had an awesome time just wandering around, getting lost, and taking pictures. We had a herring sandwich for lunch, because thats apparently what you are supposed to do. It was not bad. Neither of us are huge on fish, but we ate it just to say we did.

The city itself was absolutely beautiful with canals running down almost every street. A few highlights were Anne Frank's house (we didn;t go inside), the Picasso Museum, and the beautiful architecture. Loved this city.