Köln AKA Cologne

We have almost been in Cologne a week already and the time has flown. After being relatively isolated in the German countryside for six weeks, it´s been like a different world here.

We are renting an apartment right on top of Zülpicher Straße, which is a student area full of bars, pubs and restaurants. Our apartment is small and has a shared loo (but own shower), but it´s clean, cheap and the location is just unbeatable! The only downside is that we have spent a lot more money than we normally would this week on drinks and meals out, as it´s SO convenient and the food is great AND with 4€ cocktail happy hours! It also sucks that our room is 85 steps (!) up as we are on the 5th floor with no elevator - on the flipside we are both well on our way to buns of steel!

Our 'cosy' one room apartment in Cologne

Our first day after arriving was discount day at the zoo (Montag ist Zootag!), and seeing as the zoo here was rated in the top three things to do in Cologne by Tripadvisor, we gave it a go. I always love watching animals be silly and, although it was a hot day, the animals were being quite active and we even saw the tigers swimming.

Saw some parents pulling their kids around in these cute carts which
were all fine & dandy untill you have to pull them UP hill!

The absolute must see attraction in Cologne is offcourse, the cathedral, which is actually also the only attraction you cannot avoid seeing in this city. As soon as we arrived at the main train station and walked outside to find a cab it was right there and blew us away! I still can´t believe it somehow managed to avoid bombing in WWII, it´s HUGE, just as well though as rebuilding it would´ve been a bitch!

There´s even boats all along the river that will take you up and down the Rhine for an hour for only about 8€ to give you a different view of the city so we did that a few days ago too for something different. Actually I was surprised Zac agreed to do this with me, as it´s not typically his thing, but I think the fact that it was only for an hour helped me sell it.

Our cruise vessel of choice - including 'oompa loompa'
Music blasting from strained speakers

Oh and that bridge you see in the photo above is the Hohenzollernbrücke, famous for it´s 'love locks'. What are the love locks you ask? Well I´m glad you asked ;-) There are so many of them that you can even see them from the ground, they are colourful padlocks that span the whole bridge mainly put there by couples who engrave their initials on them and lock them to the bridge to signify their commitment to each other. They are a nice idea and a beautiful sight, does kinda make you wonder how many of those couples have actually stayed together though...

 

...I know, I know, I´m missing the point right?

Renting an Apartment While Travelling Germany

I thought I´d better blog today as we only have one full day left pet-sitting the sausage dog in this pink house in Bavaria, and most of that time will be taken up with cleaning and packing, so if I don´t blog today it may not be for some time.

As we no longer have the van, the rest of our trip will be by train, and on Sunday our train leaves here (departing at 6:30am no less!) and we head up to Köln (Cologne) for a week. It´s a trip that is around four and a half hours by car,that will take us almost eight hours on the train as I booked the cheapest tickets possible (damn budget!). The good news is we´re being met at the other end by the lady who is renting out her apartment to us for eight nights. I found her on the German real-estate website Studenten-WG which has lots of ads for share-house accomodation, but also has the option to restrict your search for what the Germans' call 'Zwischenmiete'. Zwischenmiete is when a persons' apartment is available to rent for a short period only, usually just while they are away on holidays or similar, in my case it's because the renter spends most her time at her boyfriend's apartment while on uni holidays. Zwischenmiete is great if you want to spend at least a week in the one place, as they´re not usually available for less than this, and the apartment's come completely furnished with everything still in them. It does help if you're flexible with your travel plans and dates though, so that you can work around when a Zwischenmiete is available, the same goes for pet-sitting.

So yesterday we gave the sausage a bath so that she´s super pretty for when her owners get home (considerate much?) and afterwards she just went psycho with energy. Between appearing to be digging to China and barking at the wall, it was all pretty entertaining to watch, I even made a video out of it:

We´re both more than ready to move on and explore new places, but boy am I going to miss my little sausage friend, even though lately it seems to be Zac she´s more in love with than me.

haha man these dogs crack me up! Found this one on dachshundlove.blogspot.com



Awwww I´m gonna miss that face!

 

 

What to do in rural Germany

We´ve now been pet-sitting the sausage dog in rural Germany for four weeks, and we still have just over a week remaining. Since we sold our van almost three weeks ago, we are definitely more restricted with where we can go and when we can go there. Living here is great but I think we´re both ready to move on and explore elsewhere.

My husband, Zac, is well and truly over it and just wishes he was at home, in fact, he changed his flight home bringing it forward 2 weeks earlier than originally planned. He was definitely only here for the snowboarding and now that all the snow has well and truly melted, and it´s so hot out we try not to leave the house in the middle of the day, he´s super keen to get home. I definitely have to give him credit for sticking it out though, we last snowboarded about 3 months ago and after the visit to Miniature Wonderland in Hamburg, that was already everything ticked off Zac´s Euro wish list with still three months left of his time here. Since then he´s been ready to go home but has been following me around to humour me.

We´ve found ways to pass our time in rural Germany, however creatively, Zac brought a GoPro nearby at Media Markt so we tried to strap it to the sausage dog like a 'day in the life' sort of thing. The results were a little dissapointing as she has such a tiny frame that the camera was too heavy for her and the mount we used (a spatula taped to a wooden spoon) was not ideal. Having said that, it´s still pretty funny to watch, you can see it at the link below:

Also, I have taken the opportunity of having a postal address again to ensure I get as many things delivered that I "need" as possible...

A bit of excitement for little Miss sausage

It´s like Christmas time!

Our pink house in Germany

For the last month or so we have been living in Kaltenbrunn, Germany, pet-sitting the same little sausage dog we cared for back in March. It´s been awesome having our own nice big home after spending the last 3-4 months cooped up in the van. The only part of this pet-sitting assignment that is not ideal is the rural location of the house, which is not the most convenient, but other than that it´s pretty sweet.

Innocent Little Darcie - butter wouldn´t melt in her mouth

The house we´re looking after is easy to spot, being the only pink house on the street, it´s a two story four bed-room dealio so has much more room then we could ever dream of having in the van. We managed to sell our van last week, although we were sad to see it go, I had hoped to sell it before Zac heads back home at the end of next month otherwise I´d be stuck with trying to get rid of it on my own, plus this way we feel confident it went to a good home! Now though we have to rely on public transport, which in the cities is no problem, but out here in the sticks our only option is a bus that goes into the closest big town once every 2 hours. In our village there is a tiny shop that sells Basics like eggs and milk, but if we want anything further we have to head to the bigger surrounding towns, which are about 30mins to an hour on the bus. The good thing about getting public transport again though is that we see things we wouldn´t normally see in the car (especially as the bus takes the long route).

Auf Wiedersehen Gunter!



Our pink home

Our street which ends with paddocks as far as the eye can see

The village clock tower

Last weekend was Bürgerfest which is our village´s annual festival when a stage is set-up in the main street of town and it´s basically turned into a big beergarden with live music. Was nice to enjoy something different but man it was a hot day...

Walking to the main street



The stage and traditional German band

das Bier!

Afterwards we headed back to our house, which is only a ten minute walk from the main street, and Darcie was so pooped in the heat I had to carry her some of the way.

Darcie back home all pooped out...



...a big day out for the little sausage.

Polska and back again

No we weren´t killed in Eastern Europe! In fact we returned from there back to Germany quite some time ago! This might be an extra long blog due to the length of time since my last blog, so please feel free to just skim ahead to the pictures...

After we left the Polish Baltic coast we headed towards Warsaw. Warsaw has a beautiful old town but the new part of the city can seem a bit depressing and bleak. Getting public transport in Poland was also a bit of a shock after having been spoilt by German trains for some time now, the signage was less clear, they were pretty cramped and just kinda old and a bit grotty looking.

Our Camping spot in Warsaw was in a paid camp ground that I saw in my guidebook. Although we found most things in Poland to be cheaper than western Europe, camp grounds were the exception, our camp spot per night actually cost a bit more than we were used to paying in Germany and the standards for the facilities was lower. The place was almost booked out by a big group of campervans all travelling together so we found ourselves one of the last remaining spots near the pool, unfortunately the pool hadn´t been used for years but was still full of water, so was party central for mosquito larvae. The good news was that we were camped beside a really lovely French couple who invited us to have a drink with them and, although they didn´t speak much English so it was a bit awquard, they invited us to stay at their home if we visit France again and even showed us pictures of their grown up children and grandchildren - such sweet people - and further evidence against my husband's stereotyped ideas of the French. Win!

Warsaw´s old town

From Warsaw we drove straight across to Krakow. Krakow somehow escaped destruction in WWII and is really beautiful and definately worth a trip - the secrets out though as there were tourists everywhere. Poland is particularly special to me due to it being my grandfather´s place of origin, and apparently the legend goes that Krakow was founded by a Prince Krakus, ´Krakus´is awfully close to my maiden name of ´Rakus´ so I can only believe that I have royal blood and my famiy have something to do with the founding of Krakow. This belief may require a slight stretch of the imagination and a minor distortion of names but I always felt I was special so it must be true...

 

The forest and countryside in Poland was some of the most beautiful I have seen anywhere this trip. It was particularly beautiful around the rural areas north near the Baltic sea and the drive from Warsaw to Krakow was gorgeous. From Krakow we drove to Węgierska Górka, the little village where my grandfather comes from, and the hills and forest around there were also very beautiful.



The view of Węgierska Górka as we drove towards the Slovakian border

The downsides to Poland were the amount of speed cameras along the roads, and lack of clear speed signage, so we were never 100% sure if we were speeding or not. Also, we found the Soviet style buildings that dominated some towns and cities, quite sad and depressing looking. I did most of the driving in Poland as it takes particular patience to drive across a country full of speed cameras with no signs, and roads in such bad condition that occasionally we would have to abruptly slow from 80km to 40km, a patience my husband doesn´t possess - and his swearing was doing my head in so...

 

We did love seeing the stalk birds that make their huge nests on top of power poles all around the country.

I didn´t manage to get a photo myself, but just had to show you, so I found
 this pic of exactly what they looked like from shutterstock.com

Oh and there´s a supermarket chain in Poland that has the cutest little ladybird as it´s logo.

After we left Poland we drove through Slovakia straight to Vienna, Austria, where we stayed a few nights before heading to Munich, Germany.

Munich Olympic Stadium



Munich old town - SO many People and a really hot day -
some People were even cooling off in the cities fountains

A couple of weeks ago we experienced a week long heat wave in Europe which started a few days before we arrived in Munich . I remember my brother, who has spent a lot of time in Europe, telling me about how difficult the heat is to deal with in Europe, and I remember thinking he must just be a wuss because there was no way Europe could get heat like I was used to in Australia. Turns out he was right though. The reason the heat in Europe is so hard to deal with is that the Europeans seem to have no plan or  demonstrate any prepardness for it. Most of the public transport is not air-conditioned, Zac and I caught a train in Germany during the heat wave ,and it was actually dramatically cooler outside the train. We went to a mall in Munich to try to escape the heat but we discovered the mall was not airconditioned either. Our only relief came the day before we went back to house-sit the sausage-dog again, a 10 minute drive from her house is this beautiful tranquil swimming hole. It seems the place to be when it´s hot is the country side, not the cities.


A beautiful spot to cool down

Pet-sitting the grumpy cat

After our time in the beach house in North Holland we got a last minute pet-sitting job in Brussels, Belgium so we packed up our things and headed straight there as it started the next day. The cat was the most grumpiest looking cat I have ever met and he even made grunting noises which is a sound I have never heard come from a cat before. Personality wise though he was such a lovely soul and didn't take him long to warm to us and start trying to sleep between us in bed and meowing at our faces to wake us up in the morning.


"Lucky" trying his darndest to look happy

It was great being based in Brussels for a week as the apartment we were staying in was centrally located and we were able to get public transport or walk around the city. Brussels is definitely not our favourite city we've visited, it appears a bit neglected and we never felt truly safe, but this might also be because Luckys owner warned us to be wary of pickpockets in the city so we always felt like we had to be on alert. One day while Zac and I were in the city, and just walked out of a kebab shop, a chuck off the building fell from three stories and landed right beside us, almost hitting us - that was nuts.

For a day trip we drove to Bruges as we had heard it was lovely and we were not disappointed. It was a beautiful sunny day when we were there and packed with tourists and simply walking around the town was absolutely beautiful.

After we left Brussels we headed back through Germany to get to Poland. Originally we had planned to head to Scandinavia but after researching these countries further we realised it was going to cost us too much as these countries can be as expensive as Switzerland, so instead of having to worry about every penny, we headed East!

Goodbye to the grumpy cat

On the way through Germany we stopped a couple of places including Hamelin, which is where the story of the Pied Piper apparently originated so around the cute old town there are statues and pictures of mice everywhere. The town clock is super cute as a couple of times a day it plays a sweet tune and little mice run around it as does the Pied Piper himself. Unfortunately my photos of this clock aren't worth uploading but it really is something to see.

Currently we are in Poland and have been here for several days now. First we headed north to check out the Baltic coast and for the first time our whole trip we came across mosquitos. After the weather cleared up we actually got to see quite a nice day on the beach which everybody seemed to be making the most of the sunshine. Not many people speak English but they do speak German so we have been able to get by but I expect this to change once we get further away from the German border.

Leba, Polska

I was lucky enough to celebrate my 30th while we were staying on the coast so we went to a local bakery and got a few different cakes to try for only one Euro!

This one was the favourite...

 

...but they were all divine.