Europe trip - Day 2 - Rothenburg, Germany

We began our day early around 7 am. We had an awesome breakfast at our hotel. The experience was very different from what we expect in a buffet style breakfast in most hotels in America. We were served lovely coffee and breakfast at the table. We filled our bellies and hurried to the train station to catch the train to our next destination - Rothenburg. Packing light definitely gave us lot of mobility. Our bus arrived promptly to take us to the train station. In Germany the buses are very punctual. At each bus stop it shows you in exactly how many minutes your bus would arrive. If it says 2 minutes, without any doubt your bus will show up in 2 minutes.

As we settled down in our first class compartment in Eurail we were impressed. With 5 hours to kill, Rakesh got busy with reading the Rick Steve's travel book and I started to pen down our travel diary. Unfortunately we could not carry a laptop as that would add too much weight to our baggage and so I had write my travel diary. It was kind of a pain.

We reached Rothenburg at around 2 pm and met up with bhaiya and bhabhi (Rishi and Minu) who had already reached there from India. It was great to see them in Germany. We had plans of visiting Germany and Italy with them.

Rothenburg ob der tauber is a beautiful walled town located on the banks of Tauber river. We entered the city through a beautiful gate and it was like stepping into a fairytale city. We walked through the maze of narrow cobbled streets to reach our B&B. The B&B was located in a central location and had a nice medieval touch. We dropped off our luggage and set out to explore the town.

Rothenburg is a picturesque medieval German town which is the best preserved medieval town in Germany with not much touch of modern times. Reminded us of Leavenworth near Seattle.

We walked to the market square which is the central "hang out" place in Rothenburg. There we climbed up 218 stairs to reach to the top of a clock tower to get an aerial view of the city. The view was magnificent with all the beautiful rooftops.

We spent the rest of the day strolling along the walls of the town and the cobbled streets. There were pastel colored buildings, houses, fountains, gardens, churches, watch towers etc at every corner of this town. Just like a fairytale town. We were loving the slow and relaxed pace of this charming town.

Next on the agenda was the Night Watchman tour at 8 pm. The Night Watchman tour is highly recommended in Rick Steve's book. The Night Watchman arrived at 8 PM sharp dressed in a cloak and a hat with a halberd and lantern. He was very funny and his comic style reminded us of our favourite comedian Jerry Seinfeld. He took us all over the town for an hour giving interesting historical details and stories with lots of humour. This guy has been doing these tours everyday at 8 pm for past 20 years. He thanked the American tourists for the booming tourism in Rothenburg. Overall he was witty and worth an hour of our valuable vacation time. So if you ever visit Rothenburg don't miss the tour. We loved it!

We missed seeing the crime museum as we were just enjoying outdoors.

Then we were craving some warm food so we picked a great Italian restaurant mentioned in the Rick Steve's book and had some amazing pasta/pizza and wine and called it a day.

Europe Trip - Day 1 - Berlin, Germany

We woke up early morning to catch our flight to New york from where we had to catch the flight to Germany. After traveling for about 10 hours from New york we finally reached Berlin on May 20th at 10.00 AM. We took the bus from the airport to our hotel. A nice warm bath later we were all set to explore the historic city of Berlin.

Armed with maps of Berlin city, local bus schedules Rakesh was all set to take me to all the historic sites in Berlin. Our first stop was the Victory Column.

Victory Column in Berlin

The Victory Column is one of the most popular historic monuments in Berlin which symbolized the victories of war for Germany. We roamed around the tower admiring its architecture and the beautiful golden statue of Victoria. Little jet-lagged and tired we started hunting for some vegetarian food and water. Well, beer is cheaper than water in Germany looks like :). After paying around 10 euros for a average tomato and mozzarella sandwich and bottle of water we enjoyed our meal at a local street cafe with a view of the victory column.

Posing for the camera

After going around in circles for some time we finally got a hang of the city roads and hopped on the bus and headed out to Reichstag which is the parliament of Germany. Turns out we needed a reservation in advance to visit inside the building. Our 2010 Rick Steve's book did not mention that. Maybe the latest edition would have this information. After pestering the attendant there, lady luck smiled on us and we got an entry to building.

Rakesh at the Reichstag

We visited the dome and took a audio tour which explained about all the other historic and political buildings in the neighborhood which we could see from the dome. The Reichstag building has a beautiful glass dome at the top which gives a 360 degree view of the Berlin city. The dome itself has remarkable architecture and has lot of technology built into it for sun tracking and rain water collection for cooling.  Well that's the only part of the Reichstag that you can visit so you cannot really visit the debating chamber of the Bundestag(the German parliament). You can just peek into it from the dome. 

Inside the dome, Reichstag

Walking along from there we reached another famous attraction the Brendenburg gate and Parisian square. Brendenburg gate is the only remaining gate of a series of gates in the former Berlin Wall. The gate itself was very beautiful and has a lot of historic importance as when the Berlin wall fell lot of people gathered here to celebrate the freedom. We found a Starbucks at the square and had our fix of caffeine and sugar. The weather was nice and sunny so we enjoyed our coffee on the street side tables where we could see some local artists perform. This area was full of tourists though we did not see many Indian tourists there. By now we had become familiar with some German words for hello, thank-you, bye etc so we started greeting people with those.

Brendenburg gate

Next up was the memorial of the murdered Jews. The memorial has a maze of about 2000 plus varying sized hollow graves to commemorate the murdering of Jews. After spending few moments here we headed to Unter-den-linden road. This road has a bunch of beautiful structures like Humboldt university, princess palace, Friedrich the great's palace, memorial of mother who lost her husband and child in world war and few impressive cathedrals. This is a nice walk to explore the various sites in Berlin.

Murdered Jews Memorial

By now our feet were killing us but carrying on with our vacation spirit we reached the Charlie checkpoint. Also Rakesh is a big history buff so there was no chance that we would miss any historic sites in Berlin.

Rakesh driving the car through the Berlin wall :)

Charlie checkpoint was a well known passing point between East and West Berlin during the cold war. So today it has become a symbol of separation between the west and east during the cold war. 

Charlie checkpoint

Finally after a nice meal, we hopped on a train and got back to our cosy hotel.

For more pics of the day.

Dream vacation to Europe



Taj Mahal, India

We came back to Seattle in January 2011 after a refereshing 5 weeks of vacation with family in India. One more thing on our mind was to do something special for my birthday which is on June 5th. Last year for Rakesh's birthday I organized a bollywood party along with our friends who performed some wonderful bollywood songs/acting movie skits. It was a fun party. I had europe trip on my mind for my birthday. Rakesh also started thinking about whether we could plan to celebrate my birthday in Paris.

Well we got in the routine and time passed by and soon it was April. We started feeling that we were already late to make any plans. But then Rakesh's brother and sister-in-law had plans to come to Spain in June beginning for a conference. So we started to think of planning a Europe vacation together.

We started scrambling to get the Schengen visa. Well turned out you need to go in person to get Schengen visa which meant we had to fly down to SFO. That didnt seem like a feasible option as we didnt have much time in hand. We came to know about a honarary german consulate in Seattle where we could go in person to apply for Schengen visa if we made Germany as our port of entry. It seemed like a great option. So we gathered all the paperwork and met the German lady in Seattle. She approved our docs and we mailed them to SFO. Then began the wait to get the visa as we wanted to book our flight tickets soon. The prices were already rising. Luckily for us the German consulate processed the visa within 5 days and we got our visa. The peculiar thing about Schengen visa is they give you visa only for the number of days that you have on your flight itinerary. It is not a flexible visa like 6 months or a year. So you are pretty much locked on the dates for which you get the visa. So we had our visa from 19th May to 6th June.

With visa in our hands, we promptly booked our tickets and started planning our itinerary and booking the hotels, museum passes, city passes etc. The first thing that we did for our research was to buy the europe travel books by Rick Steves from Amazon.com. Rick Steves seems to be very popular among American tourists visting Europe. He gives you detailed ideas about what to see, how to plan your days, where to stay, where to eat etc. We also ordered the Rick Steves money belt as all our online research mentioned about pick pocketing in europe. Then began the search for bag packs. We wanted to travel light as recommended by Rick Steves and most of the online europe tour sites. We had lot of places to cover on our agenda so didnt want to get bogged down by luggage. We came across these bagpacks on amazon.com which had awesome reviews. We checked them out at our local REI store and fell in love. They were light, had lot of room and lot of adjustable straps which made them fit nicely. So we bought two bags - one in red for me and one in black for Rakesh. By this time our Euro Rail pass had also arrived. We spent couple of weekends shopping for clothes etc and we were all set. Finally everything was falling in place as we could not wait to board the plane to Germany.

Keep reading our blog entries as we take you with us on our Europe vacation....

Boarding the train at Rothenburg, Germany.. checkout the awesome travel pack