Train to Frankfurt

 On Thursday morning we had a team challenge. We divided into teams and were supposed to find 5 German advertisements: window displays, posters, billboards, etc. that were unique in comparison to American marketing. We went downtown and looked for these....it wasn't hard. During our search I saw the Ernst and Young office of Leipzig! Felt a little proud, had to take a picture. For those of you who don't know, I will be doing an internship in the spring for Ernst and Young in Fort Worth. Anyway one of our stops was a Dillards-like department store. We passed by some Espresso machines on display and a salesperson offered us samples. She didn't speak English but we were able to communicate a little bit. We tried to tell her the German phrases we thought we knew but we just shrugged. We need more practice I guess. I was able to tell her we were University students in Leipzig and will go to Oxford too. She gave all of us a double-shot espresso. The language barrier made things pretty funny, I felt like a child trying to communicate. She looked a lot like Phyllis from The Office! haha

 We left Leipzig at 2:30 on Thursday to take a train to Frankfurt where we would stay on the way to Rome Thursday night. This is what the inside of the train looked like. First time in a train! It was a 4 hour ride and I got a window seat so I saw lots of beautiful scenery and took lots of pictures! Frankfurt is west of Leipzig.

 Is this Germany or West Texas??? Pretty hard to distinguish here, but it is in fact Germany which has wind turbines also.

 With this scenery I felt right at home, although it didn't last long, the next several pictures were much more the norm. This was taken right outside of Leipzig. There was so much farmland on the ride!

 The next several pictures are just pretty pictures of the countryside. It was such a beautiful ride.

 Now you know this isn't West Texas...look at all that green! I had forgotten it was a color that was naturally occurring in nature. Pretty clouds too. Wow.

Enjoying the ride, enjoying some music as well. 

 I love Germany!!

 Some cows.

 Looks like a really old castle on the hill in the distance.

 In the distance you can see a really big hill. I'm not sure what it was...maybe a landfill. Anyway it was really cool looking. Starting to get really cloudy.

All the churches here are so pretty. 

 Passed lots of small towns nested under the mountains or in a valley. Probably lots of farmers there. Winegeart's mother is German and he was born here. He said a lot of his family are farmers and that they are male. He said they are having trouble finding wives because no one wants to be a farmers wife because it is such hard work....imagine that! haha

You can see a little tractor on the left. Looks a little different than dad's tractors.

 This is really what most of everything looked like. I slept for part of the ride but at one point a guy sat beside me who smelled like Subway and cigarette smoke...not a great combination. I started to feel sick and didn't enjoy much of the last hour or so.

 OkI. Now for a story. Caution: this story may contain content that will worry parents. When I got off the bus I was standing there waiting for the rest of the ACU students when a guy about my age came up to me speaking German. I said I don't speak German and he so in English he asked me if the t-shirt I was wearing (just an ACU shirt), was original or a style. I said well its from my school. He was like oh ok well then it's original. At that time the rest of my group came up and the guy asked me where we were from. I didn't want to answer but someone in our group said Texas. We started walking to our next train and he was singling me out asking where I went to school. I said, "I'm not going to tell you." haha. He was confused. He asked if it was private information or if I was embarrassed. I just said it was private. Thankfully he had another train to catch. I'm sure he was harmless but I didn't like how he kept asking me questions about where I was from and what we were doing in Europe. Anyway we arrived in Frankfurt, which is the picture on the left. It was dreary outside and I thought Frankfurt was just an ugly, ugly place. It's just  a really big city. So anyway, our train was an hour late. Even if our train would have been on time we would have had to rush to get on the last bus running to where we were staying. So we missed it. Well it was about 7:30pm I think and we had no idea what we were going to do. Our hostel was about a 2 hour drive. Our plane was to leave at 6:20 the next morning. We tried to find a taxi but the prices were so high and they wouldn't fit all 9 of us anyway. It was a high stress situation for sure. There were 8 boys and 3 girls so I felt safe. They were doing all they could to find us something. We even thought about staying the night at the train station. I thought, "If my parents knew what was going on right now, they would not have let me come to Germany." So anyway after about an hour we found a taxi that would reduce his rate and who had a van that we could squeeze into. even so it was more that what we would have spent on the bus.

 Here is all of us squeezed in. Everyone is just happy to have a ride and not have to stay in that dreadful place! haha. We had 4 in the back, 3 in the middle, and 3 in the front, including the driver. The driver could speak English and kept flipping through the radio stations to find American music. I was amused by what was playing. It went from Bryan Adams "Heaven" to a station with club music playing X-rated lyrics when he changed the station. We may have been cramped in there but we were entertained.

 Here is the van that we rode in.

 Everyone standing outside our hostel in the cold at 11pm, paying the driver.

 This was above the check in desk. Google translator says the sign says, "lord bless this child and all who go there on and off!" We were in the right place. The man was so nice. IT took us so long to check in though because everyone had to pay separately. 

 Inside my hostel. I had a single room and I definitely got a little scared a few times. It ended up being a great hostel. I didn't go to sleep until 12pm or so though. I woke up at 3:45am to take a shuttle to the airport. Difficult start for the weekend for sure.

 We flew out of a small airport called Frankfurt Hahn to Rome. It was so cold walking out to the plane...of course we were dressed for warm Rome weather.

On the  plane early in the morning. Pictures from Rome in the next posted......get excited.