Snowboarding

I will skip a little forward to our time snowboarding. – Hintertux – Austria. The home of the glacial skiing that we were string to do (in summer-well not really summer, but it’s the equivalent of boarding in march in Australia! So we arrive around 6-7.00 and a nice meal at the local hotel (Calzone!) and then went to bed – with the alps in the window of our hostel room. Breakfast was at 7.30 in the morning, which was good, because we had to be made to get up. Meat and cheese rolls with copious amounts of coffee followed. Eagerly we drove the 6 minutes up the road to the base of the slopes to get our board and boots fitted, buy our lift tickets (2 days hire, 2 days lift tickets cost us 42 and 67 respectively – considering that in Australia a ticket costs you $95 for 1 day!!!  Up the mountain we went – I made a huge error in the clothes that I wore, Heacy jacket, vest, thermal and t-shirt – all under my rain coat… Makes for not very comfortable boarding when the temp is 8 degrees. We tried to find funky a lesson – but alas, they were not running lessons over summer. So we had to try and teach him, which was difficult – it is very taxing on your legs trying to teach someone for a long period of time, plus that we didn’t have waterproof clothing didn’t help when we tried to rest in the snow. But watching him try and start (Oh I forgot – he can’t board) made you realise how far that me and mark have come since we started. Some hilarious crashes, not in any part help by the part of the mountain that was open was the really steep parts. Lol, so learning on a extremely steep slope is not a good idea. But by the end of the 2 days he could get down the mountain at least. I forgot just how sore I could get from snowboarding, the day after our first day – the 3 flights of stairs to our room were just torture.  After the second day my old knee was giving way, and my inside leg was ‘done’. We left tired and sore, but the snow at times was awesome (at others it was icy and very dangerous) and we had heaps of fun.

While snowboarding we got to look at these mountains

We took off the next morning to see the Disney castle (called Neuschwanstein) or something like that. It took us 3 hours to drive there, and what a disappointment it was. The castle was not that cool, the place was overrun by tourist busses and obviously tourists. We didn’t want to pay the grumpy car attendant his 8 euro, and we certainly didn’t want to pay the 12 euro to get into the castle. We did get a few pictures, but I think that this castle is more famous because Disney adopted it as it’s logo, not because it is a cool castle. The castle between hamburg and berlin was much better.

We left quite quickly and headed off to Munich, we were staying at camp weisen. Basically a camp purely set up for people going to Oktoberfest. It was a tent city, with a massive line of portable toilets and showers that were  horribly dirty. (if you have plans to go – don’t stay in a tent city) even if you hire a caravan – you had to pay 100 euro to use your own toilet!!!!!  That night we went to a famous beer hall, basically a huge hall set up with tables like a restaurant. (which is what the tents at octoberfest are setup like also) Food was so so, and we went to bed early – still sore from the snow. What we were not ready for that night was the temperature!! It was cold – really cold, we hadn’t been camping for a while, and wow…. The last night we stayed there,  I was wearing 2 jumpers, a vest, a thermal and my sleeping bag and blanket – still cold. We met some really cool people in munich – some girls from Bulgaria, some students from Switzerland, some doctors from Austria on a 1 week holiday, a rich drunk western german idiot from Singapore, and many other people that were really friendly. We also went to the Munich duesches museum(which is a science and technology museum) (under recommendation from cuthy) which was thoroughly enjoyed by me ( I think tarks liked it – Andrew didn’t go) and we learned about nano technology, other new crazy ideas, there is a company in germany that is solely based on research, they have over 4000 scientists, and invest billions of dollars  a year on researching things.

The museum also had huge exhibits on planes, rockets, space, geology, computers and miniature technology, food and other things.  The newer sections of the museum are clearly better than the older sections. It is due to be finished being upgraded in 2012.