Freiburg

Our last night in Bern was a quiet one; doing laundry and hanging around watching some television in German. Yesterday morning we left early to catch our train to Freiburg, Germany. Back to the Euro! The train was really nice and I was fascinated with the electronic text above each seat which displayed automatically what your leg of the journey was. I was incredibely impressed until a lady came over and had the exact same seat reservation as me...luckily she was nice and just sat somewhere else laughing it off as a silly mistake. We got into Freiburg and had to walk around for over an hour to find our hostel. I don´t think I will even trust locals again to give me directions in their hometown. When we did finally get here (Black Forest Hostel) we were all amazed. It is a super hippie hostel that used to be...who knows...some sort of huge warehouse. They have a pingpong table, no curfew or lockout hours, free showers, and we have a private 3 person room. Mark needed a towel and most places have been charging about 2 dollars to borrow one, and this place gave him one for free. It´s a cocopops towel with a big monkey on it, haha.

After putting our stuff down in the hostel we immedietly went out to hike in the Black Forest around where an old castle used to be and up to a viewpoint. It only goes about 2 km into the Black Forest, but to get to the viewpoint you have to climb up about 500 steps! More than to get to the top of Notre Dame tower! But the view of Freiburg was pretty amazing, although it was a little scary because it is very windy here and so the top of the tower was vibrating pretty hard... It was then we learned that Steve is afraid of heights...

By the time we got back to the hostel it was starting to rain and since we were all pretty beat we took a nap through the rain. We got up early evening and wandered around town for a bit and found the town´s wine festival! We were very lucky because it is a yearly event and we caught the last day! It was tons of fun; I tried 3 different types of wine- a Guwertztraminer (sp?), a Pinot Blanc, and some sort of rose sparkling wine. All of them were delicious. We ended up buying a bottle (for only 11 euros!) that we will drink tonight. Today we are just planning on wandering around the town some more, I want to see the big cathedral here (every town has one) and who knows what else we will find!

This town is very nice and not touristy at all. There is a big university here so it reminds me of Blacksburg a bit, just the German version of a college town.