Mannheim, Heidelberg, & Karlsruhe

So after meeting my drive at the train station, we headed off to Mannheim at 1pm. It was an interesting drive, got to see much that I hadn't seen before, and experienced German traffic. What terrible traffic, you're going 160km/h one second and a blink of an eye later you're coming to a stop. Not sure I could get used to driving in that. It was an extremely warm day, over 30°C, and I still had jeans on from work, not the most comfortable. We got to Mannheim around 4pm, so it was about an hour quicker than taking the train. I wandered around by the train station for a while before using my phone to figure out where the hostel was. I found the hostel easily, got a room, it was a recently renovated hostel, so everything was brand new and seemed like a hotel, except for the sharing the room with a stranger bit. I expected a room with a bunch of people but I ended up in a room with 3 beds, and the belongings of one person all over the place. I later found out my 'roommate' was a 60 or 70 something year old man, who spoke almost no English, not what I was expecting from a youth hostel, but I survived haha. So after putting on some shorts, I walked around Mannheim, saw the various tourist sites and ate dinner, some sort of French pizza, on the patio of a restaurant.

 The Rhine

 The Palace that is now home to Mannheim University

 The park behind the water tower

                                                  The symbol of Mannheim, the water tower

As I was finishing eating it started to rain, then it started to pour, then came the thunder and lightning. With a bit of difficulty I made it back to the hostel, which was when I met the roommate. I didn't feel like sitting in the room with him, so I sat in the lobby area for a while before deciding to go to bed since I was exhausted, after running all day on 3 hours of sleep. I woke up around 7:30am, ate breakfast, which was included in the stay, and headed to the train station again. I bought my ticket to Heidelberg and was there in no time.

Thursday evening I had arranged to Couch Surf in Heidelberg, which is where you can stay on someone's couch for free. A bit out of the norm for me, but I thought I'd give it a shot. I left the train station and went to this guy's apartment. I met him and another couch surfer who had been there the previous night as she was in town looking for a place to move to. I chatted for a while with the host, Andreas, who is an engineer for Siemens, one of the biggest companies in Germany. We then took a tram and a bus to the old part of the city and I met two of his friends, two girls studying at the university, one from Northern Ireland, the other from Chicago, and we had cheesecake and hot chocolate at a tiny cafe. They then told me which places to see, and I headed out for an afternoon of being a tourist. I think I'll just put in some pictures here instead of writing about the whole day since I'm already way behind with this blog thing.

 View of the castle from the old city



 Castle and Heidelberg

 The Old Bridge

 Church and busiest street (I later climbed the church tower)

 Destroyer tower at the castle

 Inside the castle

 Me and the city

                                                             Entrance to the old bridge

 On the bridge

 View from the Philosopher's Path

                                      The former student prison at the University of Heidelberg

After sightseeing, I headed back to Andreas' as he said he was going to cook supper for a bunch of people. I met the other couch surfer staying that night, a girl from Bavaria who works in theatre, and another of his friends, someone from England doing their PhD in Nice, France, and the Couch Surfer, Melanie came back just to eat before heading out again. I met a lot of people from all over the place in a very short time, it was very interesting. I was pretty tired from walking all day so I got to sleep relatively early. I woke up and headed to the train station earlier than I planned. I grabbed an egg McMuffin at McDonalds, and got on a train headed back my way. Once I realized the ticket I got was good for all day travel within the state, I though why not explore the city I would have to change trains in anyways. Below are the pictures from Karlsruhe, most are from the palace and the awesome public park behind it.

 

I made it home around 6pm, got my laundry done, got annoyed with this terrible internet connection, and went to bed.

On Monday a group of the UNB students here decided to blind book a trip for this weekend since we have a 4-day weekend. Blind booking is where you don't find out where you're going until you pay, so we ended up getting a trip to Berlin. We fly out of Stuttgart on Thursday morning and it should be a fun whirlwind of a trip since we couldn't even pick the flight times we fly back on Saturday morning. But it was a good deal and if the weather is nice we should get to see the famous spots in Berlin, visit the zoo and go on a pub crawl.