London Calling! (Part 1)

Hey guys! So Katie and I recently got back from spending a weekend in London! It was super amazing! I wish I could go again! We saw just about every British sight you could see. We’re also now pros at navigating the Tube! It’s actually pretty easy haha. Our trip started with a bus trip leaving at 5:30am. It was definitely tough getting up that early but worth it when we got to London at 11am. Our first sight, I’ll give you a hint...Beatles. Correct! It was Abbey Road! I’m a huge Beatles fan and I realized after I looked at the photos of me walking on Abbey Road that my expectations for duplicating the Abbey Road cover were way too high. I never would have guessed this road would be so busy! Trying to get the perfect picture, I was waiting for all cars to go by and people to get out of my photo without much luck. So here it is: the original album cover and my album cover.

Not quite the same. Anyways, it was still really cool being there and getting to do it!

The rest of the day we spent traveling outside of central London to find the Harry Potter Set Tour which is at Warner Bros.’s Leavesdon Studios! This is the actual site where the Harry Potter movies were filmed! When we got there it was amazing! They had actual the actual sets from so many of the scenes from the 8 Harry Potter movies! It really was magical (see what I did there? haha)! The amount of detail that was put into every single thing was just crazy! For example, we got to go into the actual main hall and see original outfits from the movies! One of my favorite things to see from the entire day was the door to the Chamber of Secrets that has the big snakes on it! It was just so massive yet so detailed! They had brooms, entire room sets (like Dumbledore’s office, Umbridge’s office, the Weasley kitchen, etc.), life-size dummies of the main characters, sketches of everything imaginable! It was extraordinary!

Here we are super excited to be there!

I kept telling Katie that I was getting so overwhelmed by how much amazing stuff there was that I just kept taking photos of practically every single thing!  We also had butterbeer! Katie loved it! For me, I’ve now had butterbeer at the only 2 places in the world that officially sell it, here and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, Florida! (Yes, I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve been able to go to both of these places!) We finished up the day by going to King’s Cross to see Platform 9 ¾! So cool! Anyways, our first day back in London (We were here for a day and a half for orientation where we saw Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden, and Hyde Park) was pretty amazing! Day 2 would be filled with the more quintessential tourist experiences. More on that to come…

German Travels--Berlin and Potsdam!

      Hello again! I'm back to talk about my time in Germany! We spent about a week in Berlin before leaving for  the UK so we had lots of time to explore and see the sights. There was definitely no feeling of having to rush anywhere. Aron, Katie's brother, was our tour guide through the city and took us to all the major areas around town and also some smaller events that a tourist wouldn't know about.

      The 1st thing we saw was the Berlin Wall. My first impressions of it was that it was a lot skinnier in width than I had imagined it would be. Aron explained to us that the real dangerous part that kept people from crossing the wall was the middle zone between the east wall and west wall where anyone trying to cross pretty much became a sitting duck to get shot. The River Spree also served as a natural barrier in between the walls at certain parts. The wall was pretty cool looking because a decade or 2 ago they commissioned a whole bunch of local artists to paint on the wall. It's super colorful with probably 100 different designs on it.

After we walked the mile down the Berlin Wall, we continued to other places. My favorite building by far was the Berlin Cathedral. 

      It just looks so cool to me! I like the colors on top a lot too! We also saw the Parliament building, the Brandenberg Tor (which is this big arch), and a few rail stations (they call them "bahn"--train in German). We also went to this building called the Colorful World of Chocolate where you could pick the ingredients to put in your chocolate bar! I got gummy bears, jelly beans, and yogurt crisps in a milk chocolate bar. That might seem gross, but I picked them because I wanted ingredients that I couldn't normally get in a chocolate bar. The taste of it was very sweet! The crisps were a good touch because it gave it a little crunch. Ok, enough of my Food Network descriptions of the chocolate, but here's a photo! :-D

Some of the less known things we went to in Berlin was a Turkish farmer's market, a boat tour on the River Spree (which was awesome because I love boats), and a giant flee market in Mauer Park.

This is at Mauer Park. You'd probably think there was something really cool going on here. This ENTIRE crowd was here watching......Karaoke! Seriously?! It's the largest karaoke crowd I've ever seen! 

These guys in Mauer Park have lifted up their kilts to pee in the bushes... 

And I have no idea what this guy in the 2nd photo is doing, and I don't want to know...

Just some culture of Mauer Park for you haha

      We also took a day trip to Potsdam while we were in Germany! It was our 1st little excursion by ourselves in this foreign country and we did pretty well! Potsdam is a nice town. It had a quaint shopping area that we spent some time in, but most of our time was spent in Sanssouci Park. In this park there are 3 palaces that royal people built. They were impressive and pretty! Here is one of them.

     The park was huge and I got pretty tired from walking around in it all day! But it was fun overall!

      Germany was a really fun, interesting place! I'm really glad I had the chance to experience it. And thanks to Aron and Simone again for letting Katie and I stay with them! Next, it was off to London!

My Journey Begins in German Airports...

      Hi friends and family! I decided to start this blog so that you guys could get a glimpse of what I am up to and participate with me as I discover new lands! As the title says, the first place we traveled to was Berlin! My girlfriend, Katie, will often be mentioned in this blog as well, as we frequently travel together. Our flight was on Lufthansa. I had never flown with them before so I didn't know what to expect. The flight itself was actually super nice! They had TV shows and recent movies to watch. I watched The Avengers, Men in Black 3, and New Girl.

      There was a young couple with a baby directly to the left of me. I thought this would be bad (who doesn't dislike having a baby next to them on the plane?), but it ended up being great! The baby was super cute! Whenever it would look at me I would make a really happy, smiling face and it would smile back! I did that like 30 times throughout the plane ride and it always smiled back! She started banging my tray a little at one point so I banged it back, and we took turns banging the tray for about 5 minutes. It was adorable! After that, the mom put the baby on the dad's lap and they banged the mom's tray for awhile. They got jealous of me.

Our Lufthansa plane

      We were happy to finally be off that 9-hour plane ride! Little did we know that this was the happiest we would be for the rest of the very long, stressful day.

      Upon entering the airport we discovered that our connecting flight from Frankfurt to Berlin had been cancelled. We didn't know this yet, but Lufthansa ground workers were on strike...goodie. Katie and I had no idea what to do so we went to the line that people who needed to re-book their flights were supposed to go to. We stood in this line for about an hour and had gotten about half way through the line. We were clearly not the only flight that had been cancelled. We began to have second thoughts about this line so I tried finding a clerk to help me (I had done this earlier, but they were not really knowledgeable enough about the airline to help). The clerk I finally got a hold of told us that we were in the wrong line and needed to move to a different line.

      Long story short (because this is stressing me out just having to think about the experience again) we stood in 5 different lines for a total of 5 hours before finally getting new tickets. Upon arrival in Berlin we then had to stand in line for another 1 1/2 hours because our luggage did not travel with us to Berlin so we had to fill out paperwork to have it mailed to us. We were finally able to leave the airport after many strenuous hours. We took a taxi to Biesdorf which is where Katie's brother and his family live. Oh yeah, the taxi driver did not speak English and got lost at least 3 times. 

      Summarizing, we were on a plane for 2 hours, had a break in Denver, plane for 9 hours, got off, stood in different lines for 5 hours, got on a 1 hour flight, stood in line for 1 1/2 hours, took a 40 minute taxi ride getting lost multiple times, and finally made it to our destination. If we were on The Amazing Race we would have had the worst luck in the history of the show!

      Aron and Simone (Katie's brother and sister-in-law) were letting us stay with them and were extremely generous in the time we were there! We talked to Simone for a little bit and then went to bed. This was how my European journey began...