Adventures Overseas 8/16

These sixteen updates will be the condensed and often more erratic version of my adventures overseas, comprised of the updates that I sent home to my family at the time.

Author's Disclaimer: The following were written when I traveled overseas with my sister. They were the short and sweet version of what was going on in my daily journal. Often, I watered things down so that our parents wouldn't know how scared we really were or how bad a hostel really was. We didn't want to scare them. Also, I wrote these updates on my iPod, and in the interest of authenticity, I haven't edited or changed the formatting much. This may be less to do with authenticity and more to do with all those darn buttons I'd have to press if I edited it all. Anyway, there are plenty of little typos to go around I'm sure. I'm sorry. They bug me, too.

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Update 8: October 12, 2018 – FRIDAY

This week, my excuse for the extended silence is that I was away from wifi a lot. Really, I was only without it for some of the days, but the rest of the days have been spent with people, and I can’t really sit and type out a letter when I’m with people other than Sister, now can I?

Anyway, it’s more of an inconvenience to myself because I have to flip between digital notes to see where I left off and what I’ve been doing. You’re welcome.

So I left you last Thursday with the tidings of our survival of driving in Ireland. Honestly, sharing the car with Sister as a makeshift hostel came much closer to being the end of me, so all in all, I’d have to give the rental car a ‘10/10: would recommend’ rating. Driving on the Emerald Island, you can see so many diverse and stunning landscapes, and you don’t even have to go that far. It’s amazing to be able to take the backroads, stop at beaches, do some hiking; it was a freedom we were sad to relinquish.

After a final night in Galway, we struck out early on Friday morning. We were heading back to Northern Ireland, where Sister’s friend’s dad had invited us back for a farm tour!

We got to their place on Friday afternoon, visited for the day, watched a movie with some of the ladies, and went to bed. The next morning, we got the tour!

It was really interesting getting to hear some of the practices, challenges, and struggles of agriculture in Ireland. It was strange to consider that, even though their land produces abundantly, they need to house their cattle for six months of the year, so they don’t wreck the water-saturated land.

They also have a cattle registry system that doesn’t allow them to sell any unregistered (or progeny of unregistered) cattle.

The farm we toured was a small one (about 25 cows), but it was a really neat peek into Irish agriculture. Sister and I were both thrilled to see it all!

On Saturday night, at 11pm, it was time for us to leave the hospitality there and fly out from Dublin.

Our fight was at 6am, so Sister’s friend drove us in to Belfast, where we took the bus to Dublin. We arrived at the airport at 2am and still needed to print off our tickets. One would think that RyanAir would have a kiosk that would do this. Nope. We had to sit around pre-security and wait for workers to show up. Luckily, we lined up right away, so we got our boarding passes quickly and were able to cruise through security shortly after. We’re getting good at not setting the buzzers off.

It wasn’t long before we were in the plane and cruising on towards Munich!

Since it was cloudy anyway, and also since we couldn’t hold our own heads up, Sister and I both achieved the miraculous and slept soundly on the plane! I peeked my eyes open once to admire the thin line of orange that was the sunrise, and then I was out again until we were landing. Once we got through the passport stamping place, we joined yet anther line to get train tickets out to Osterhofen.

Osterhofen is a small town in Germany’s Bavaria between Munich and the border of Austria. It is near the tiny community of Wisselsing, where my Great-Grandpa grew up before he moved to Canada. The original farmstead is now owned by Joseph, the husband of Maria (now passed), who was my first cousin, twice removed (I’m pretty sure I have that right...?).

We stayed from Monday to Wednesday with another first cousin, twice removed, Johanna (and her husband Berndt), and she positively spoiled us.

Johanna, along with her brother Peter, took us to Deggendorf, Passau, and Wisselsing. They took us to churches and restaurants, and opened their hearts and homes to us. We got to see the old farm and house, marvel at the Osterhofen Cathedral, and were treated to ice creams, coffees, and homemade treats along the way.

We were both blown away by the unconditional kindness that these people showed towards us.

We had an eventful three days with Johanna & Co, but I can’t do them justice in this update; I’ve written down the day-to-day in a journal, though, so for a bargain of a price, you’ll be able to buy that off me after I get back and get it transcribed.

Anyway, on Wednesday, Johanna sent us on our way, with sandwiches of course, back to Munich.

We pretty much had our day filled with getting to Munich, then getting to our hotel from there.

On Thursday, we did Munich at speed. Not really. We took the metro to city centre, then had breakfast in the big outdoor market there. By breakfast, I mean we each picked out a danish. Then we saw something that looked like Grandma’s kuchan, a cream pie.

It was not like Grandma’s kuchan.

It wasn’t bad, but the poor thing could hardly stand up to being compared with Grandma’s kuchan.

Also: it's time to tell a Dumkopf Sister story: Once upon a time this morning, a young traveller in elephant pants decided she would sit on her phone in the bus so that she wouldn’t forget it. I don’t know what kind of logic that is, but there you have it. Half an hour later, as we waited for our train, the loss of our travel notes, booking codes, and maps (all of which are conveniently held in her phone), became known to the elephant-panted traveller. We rushed back to the nearest stop that the bus would go to. Not two minutes after we sat down to anxiously wait, a blue bus came our way. “Is it the same driver?” We asked each other. “Mmmmmm, no, I don’t think so...” As he cruised past our glares of scrutiny, what should he do but reach down, pull up Sister’s phone, and gesture for us to wait there, as he would circle around on the loop. When we saw this, we jumped out of the bus stop seats, clapped our hands together, and bowed and scraped in humble service of our kind rescuer. This interaction didn’t last long, but we did a lot of bowing and scraping in it.

Anyway, after our balanced meal, we wandered. We went into every church-looking thing we came across, managing to hit up the bigger churches at city centre. They are all really huge and really ornate inside. It’s not that we got bored of them; it would just be futile for me to describe them to you. They were many. They were enormous. They were extremely detailed inside.

Sometimes they had skeletons along the wall in caskets.

They were all very beautiful.

At 3pm, I began to whine so that Sister would know for sure that I was very hungry. It must have gotten to her, because we stopped fairly soon after that. She ordered a Munich Soup with dumplings. She got a pumpkin soup. It was still good.

I ordered a dish that, according to google translate, was 8 pork sausages on a bed of saur kraut. All things I like.

For the price it was listed at, I thought it, “It had better be a BED of saur kraut.”

It was not a bed. It was barely even a futon. The food was delectable, to be sure, but I didn’t feel it reflected the price. Not when they call it a BED of saur kraut!!

Anyway, after that, we decided to hit the panic button on booking our bus out of there, so we rushed to the bus depot and got that all ready to go. I was glad that worked out, as we had no place to stay the night.

This morning, we got up early to catch a night bus to the train station and get on and off the metro before six, since our previous day’s ticket would be valid until then. Due to the bus system not following what it says in the schedules, we sat at the bus stop for half an hour, then just walked the 2k to the train anyway. After that, it was too late for us to cheap out on the tickets and we had to get new ones. Oh well.

We made it in plenty of time for our 8am bus, and are now in Czechoslovakia, just passing through on our way to Krakow, Poland!