So It Does Exist

My weekend to Germany went quite well. It was a lot of traveling, and a little bit of sight-seeing, but overall it was good. As it turns out, the city of Rothenburg (notice the corrected spelling) is a real place, and not just some myth that leads one on endless searches on the internet. Our journey started on Thursday a little after 4pm, taking a shuttle into the train station to catch a train a little after 5. We then took the train and made it to the airport and had to wait for a few hours before boarding our plane. All in all, using planes, buses and trains we were traveling until about 9am the next morning. We were all dead tired. The bed and breakfast that we were staying out was run by an old couple that if they weren't grandparents should have been. The husband picked us up at the train station and then we went to the bed and breakfast. The lady was very apologetic because she didn't expect us as early as we had gotten there, and so one of the rooms wasn't ready. So while that was taking place we had some breakfast. Every morning that we were there breakfast was amazing. They had everything you could ever want, from meats to breads to eggs to sweets. Needless to say breakfast was always a drawn out and filling event. After we got done with breakfast we took about a 3-hour nap and then decided to explore the town. We walked around for a while after meeting up with the 5th member of our party, Rachel, who was staying at a different place than us. First we went to a medieval torture museum, which was interesting, to say the least. Very morbid, but interesting. We then basically walked around for the rest of the day, checking out shops. We tried a traditional German sweet, called a snowball (I don't remember how to say it in German), which was basically fried bread with sugar on it. It tasted like Pop-Tart crust with sugar on it. It was alright, but nothing spectacular. The medieval wall is still up around the inner-city (which isn't very big, maybe 2-miles in diameter), so we walked around that a little bit. The city was very pretty, just a quaint little out-of-the-way town. We then went back to our respective housing and went to bed fairly early. The next day we all met up at the Rothenburg city museum. That was pretty interesting, with the museum being in what used to be a convent. It covered all eras of the city, although it was severely lacking in the Roman-era, which was a little disappointing. We then basically window-shopped the rest of the day, with a stop into the Christmas museum. Apparently the Germans think they invented Christmas. Ok, so not really. They were the first to use Christmas trees though. Another interesting anecdote was that Santa Clause used to have a helper, who's name escapes me right now. Anyway, this helper looked like the devil and was basically around to eat the kids that were bad. Fun stuff, I'm glad I never had to worry about Santa's demon-minions devouring me. There's not much else to say about Rothenburg. That Sunday was just spent traveling back to Harlaxton, from about 8:30am to 11pm. Long day. But it was a fun city, and we mostly just walked around and shopped. It was relaxing though, which was needed. I will be writing up another entry shortly about our trip from last weekend to London. Then I'll be all caught up. Of course I also have pictures that need captions, as well as pictures that need uploaded, but that's another story.