Germany trip

I just got back from a week-long trip to Germany with my girlfriend to see my mother, who is in the late stages of cancer (renal, I think, though she has massive tumors all over her body, which are pushing on her organs and making it hard to breathe sometimes).  Still, she's survived longer than anyone expected (3.5 years and running, on a timeline of 6 months), and she's in high spirits, though she's weak.  She attributes her continued life to foregoing all forms of conventional treatment, reasoning that chemo and radiation therapy would do more harm than good, and even if it did give her an extra year versus six months, that year would be a sucky one.  Quality of life, you see.

Though she has been taking echinacea extract, which she swears by.  My mother has very strong ideas about a lot of things, and health is one of them.  She's German, and a strong (read: stubborn) lady.  I remember about a year ago, when she told us that "Ach, I'm so lazy, I can barely clean the windows anymore" when referring to the increased tiredness the cancer was giving her.

This is the view from my mother's hospital room.  She is really enjoying the stay, and compares it to a hotel

Anyway, it was a really good trip.  We flew in to Munich, and took the train to a small town (24k people, 4,000 within the city wall itself) in Bavaria called Nordlingen (there's an umlaut over the o, but I can't figure out how to type it).  Nordlingen is a town built on the site of an old meteor crater, and it's round as a result.  It also has the distinction of being one of only 3 towns in Germany that have intact city walls around the whole town.

It was also the inspiration for the anime show "Attack on Titan," though the shape was about the only similarity.

Germany is pretty cool.  Bavaria has a lot of countryside, many small towns interspersed with fields.  It's so green.  Here's an example of most of what I saw on train rides

The food is really good, and so cheap, compared to the US.  I know part of it has to do with the exchange rate (it's about $1.10 per Euro at the moment), but even at its height, the food was relatively cheap.  One thing Germany does real well is baked goods.  Best croissants I've ever tasted.  You could get them for 29 cents at the supermarket (50 cents to 1 euro at a bakery).  We took this picture at breakfast one morning.  Not the greatest, but there you have it.  Those striped ones were actually pretzel croissants.  The doughnuts actually tasted like American bread rolls, which are slightly sweet.



Every day, we'd walk to the hospital about 3/4 mile from the city and visit my mother for a few hours, and sometimes we'd just walk around the city.  On one early morning walk, before the jet lag had subsided, we spotted a familiar figure in a window.

Adolph Kitler

Or Katzler for my Germans.

The best parts of the town were the cathedral and the wall.  We went for a walk on top of the wall, which was covered for the most part.

This is what most of the wall looked like

There was a bar on/in the wall

Parts of the wall were repaired and made into an uncovered bride type thing

It's pretty crazy to see buildings with dates from the 13th century.  Then you get the weird juxtaposition of traditional architecture and modern technology, because, y'know, people live here.

The cathedral was a 90 meter tall (300 ft) church in the center of the town

Getting to the top was a lot easier than the last time I was there 3 years ago, and the view is killer.

Us at the top

I'm always reminded of the scene in the movie In Bruges where Colin Farrell's character tells the fat American tourists they'd be better off not climbing the tower, and they get pissed and do it anyway, and get a heart attack.  Pretty sure fat American tourists are the reason they had to reinforce the walkway around the top of the tower

Though it's so narrow I don't know if fat Americans could fit.

Towards the end of the trip we went to Schoss Neuschwanstein (which I pronounced Noishwangshwang up until pretty much the last day), which happens to be the inspiration for the Disney castle.

This is a picture from the internet:

And here's a picture of us with the castle in the background:

We did go all the way up, but holy schitt there were a ton of tourists from all around the world.  Though I can't really complain, since... so were we.  Here are some more pics of the castle:

On our last day there, we visited Munich, which, while being a large city, feels fairly spaced out.  It's very pretty, very old, and has a distinctly European vibe to it.  We went to a palace with these huge gardens out front similar to Versailles, and walked around downtown with all its restaurants and museums, walking through what I think was called the British Garden.  It was similar to Central Park, and there was a large river that ran through it.  Due to heavy rains, the water level was higher than it usually is, and when it flowed under the bridges, it would come out faster on the other side, which some people were using to surf. 

In summary, Germany was beautiful, and I had a great time.