A Wet, Wet Bavaria

Rain in Königssee (King’s Lake), Bavaria, Germany

Another quick picture post coming up. I am really, really short of time. I feel like being sandwiched on all sides by tasks and responsibilities, which I have no way of completing within the short time that I have. So what do I do? Take a break and post this…

Yeah, back on the Europe story, we headed back to Bavaria Germany after a night in Tyrol Austria. The weather was 'fabulously' rainy and wet. Rain is delightful when it is in dusty, hot Arabia, especially in summer when you least expect it. Rain in summer, in Europe, when you’re in a once in a lifetime trip? Sucks! Big time! But what can you do? Make the best out of it! Here’re pictures of a wet, gloomy, soaking Bavaria. Enjoy!


We were supposed to go on a boat ride to some beautiful island with a traditional Bavarian church in Königssee. We had a look at the rain and fog and decided to go somewhere else. Where? Wait for the next post hehe


Our hotel near Königssee, Hotel Köppeleck – Königssee and the area around it would be a nice place if it wasn’t for the rain. This was Hitler’s favourite place (and headquarters) during his leadership of Germany. There’re lots of places of interest in the area related to Hitler’s reign, but we visited none of that. We’re staunchly anti-Nazi. …OK, it’s the darn rain & fog!






Us in Schönau am Königssee, Bavaria, Germany


This would be a picturesque Bavarian country-side picture, instead of something from the Evil Dead or something like that, if it wasn’t for the grey skies and gloomy rain! – Parish Church of St Sebastian (Pfarrkirche St Sebastian), Ramsau bei Berchtesgaden, Bavaria

Here’re some pictures from the Stupidest Day of Our Lives, i.e. the day we visited Neuschwanstein. We stopped at Wieskirche (Pilgrimage Church of Wies) and Oberammergau after leaving Neuschwanstein headed for Innsbruck. As you can see, the rain was similarly out in full force!








Wieskirche, Bavaria, Germany


Oberammergau, Bavaria, Germany




The painted houses of Oberammergau

Wonders of the Crystal Worlds

Guardian of the Crystal Worlds – Swarovski Kristallwelten, Wattens, Austria

Here’s a quick picture post. Very busy, started a new Project, and the old one’s still not fully finished. Gotta run now between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Looks like the dog days are starting again! And my car mileage and petrol bills are going thru the roof, sigh! If only the Company recognized the sacrifices that I’ve made…

Anyway, continuing my story on Europe, near Innsbruck, there’s a small town called Wattens, where Swarovski, the world-renowned maker of crystals, has its headquarters. Crystal is Glass, literally, in Swarovski’s case anyway (I Wiki’d it). Swarovski is so hooked on crystals (who wouldn’t be, when you’ve made your fortune on selling overpriced glass, …but beautiful overpriced glass), that it created a complete park dedicated to crystals! This was where we went after Innsbruck – Swarovski’s Crystal Worlds (Swarovski Kristallwelten).


The Green Grass Giant is actually the gateway / entrance into the Crystal Worlds’ Chambers of Wonder – Looks like some pagan earth god, huh? “Oh, Mighty Guardian of the Earth, show us the treasures of the Crystal Worlds!”








Inside the Chambers of Wonder, Swarovski Kristallwelten




The Crystal Cloud – as you can see, it’s still friggin raining!


In the Playtower – This is the kids’ favourite (it's also Mommy’s favourite, incidentally)


Justin in the Maze


Swarovski Kristallwelten, Wattens, Tyrol, Austria

A Stroll in Innsbruck

Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria – at Hofgasse near the Golden Roof (Goldenes Dachl) (of which the sides can be somewhat seen, right ahead, in the gap between the buildings)

Inn’s Bridge, I think that’s what Innsbruck literally means, a bridge (brücke) on the River Inn. I’ve always wondered what Innsbruck looks like, since the August of 1994 when a group of young, measly student backpackers (including yours truly), made a 1 hour stopover in the middle of the night at Innsbruck Railway Station.

We were on a 1 month backpacking trip across Europe. We had Inter-Rail Tickets which allowed us to go on unlimited train trips in Europe in that 1 month (good, huh?). We were in Switzerland, in …umm if I’m not mistaken, the city of Basel, or was it Bern?? We couldn’t cover the places we wanted to see in the day, and wanted another day in the city but were too stingy to fork out the meagre amount of cash we had, on some bloody expensive hostel in Switzerland. (Yeah, even then, Switzerland’s bloody expensive!) We decided to hop onto a train to sleep (all the trains had sleeping berths!), get off somewhere, hop onto a return train and Voila, arrive back at the same place we were the day before! Ingenious huh?

Anyway, that stop in the middle of the night was at Innsbruck, and I remember smelling fresh mountain air, at 3am in the dark, in the nearly empty railway station. We were there for only about 1 – 1.5 hours, trying to sleep, but since that night, I’ve always been curious about Innsbruck! So, here we are!




Goldenes Dachl (Golden Roof), the main landmark of Innsbruck …Just a li’l bit of gold, and it’s famous. Wait till they see the gold that the Asians use on their buildings. Like in Myanmar!


Maria-Theresien Strasse, Innsbruck


Innsbruck on the River Inn - If it wasn't for the clouds, you'd see snowy mountains behind the buildings!


Hofkirche (Court Church), Universitätsstrasse, Innsbruck


Anu at the Rudolfsbrunnen (Rudolf Fountain), Innsbruck, Austria

Here’re the awesome interiors of the Innsbruck Cathedral (Dom zu St Jakob), one of the many churches in Innsbruck: -









Central dome of the Innsbruck Cathedral


The famous ski jump Bergisel, designed by renowned architect Zaha Hadid, can be seen straight ahead on top of the hill. The church on the right is the Wilten Basilica

Innsbruck was our stop, after Neuschwanstein, Bavaria, Germany. We arrived in the night after making short stopovers at Wieskirche (the Pilgrimage Church of Wies) and Oberammergau, in Germany. (I’ll post pictures of these in another posts, OK?)

The Stupidest Day of Our Lives

The great oppressive Arabian summer has started. And summer always brings back memories of Europe. I’m continuing with our Europe Trip 2015 story from where I stopped the last time, Liechtenstein. From there onwards, it was a continuous spell (well, almost) of rain and fog for the rest of our trip. The day after Liechtenstein, we did the stupidest thing in our lives. No, actually it was a series of stupid things, all in one day!


Gloomy weather over Neuschwanstein Castle, Bavaria, Germany

From Liechtenstein, we headed to Bavaria, Germany. We booked a night in a hotel in a little village called Schwangau, near Füssen in the Bavarian Alps. We were there for only one reason, to visit the famous fairy-tale castle of Neuschwanstein. Neuschwanstein is the inspiration behind many of the fantastical castles you see in the Disney cartoons. It’s also the inspiration behind Disneyland’s main castle, which you’ll now see every time you watch a movie from Walt Disney Pictures! I’ve visited Neuschwanstein Castle before, way back in the summer of 1994, during my student backpacking trip. I remembered it to be a fabulous day when we visited. Clear sunny skies, fresh mountain air, not hot, not cold. Perfect! It was one of the most memorable days of the trip. That’s why I had to bring the missus (and the kids) to see this magical castle.

Except for the thick blanket of clouds in the sky, everything went OK at first. We woke up very early in the morning (earliest we ever woke up during our entire Europe trip of 14 days). We wanted to get to the ticket booth before 8.30am, as advised by the travel books (there’ll be long queues, the tours are guided, with a limited number of people per guide, and so on, and so forth). The ticket booths are about 2 km away from where we stayed. But what the heck, we have a car!

We finished breakfast close to 8.30am and decided that we’ll come back later to check out. (After all it’s ONLY 2 km away). We had no problems reaching Hohenschwangau where the ticket booths are, queued up and got tickets for Neuschwanstein Castle and Hohenschwangau Castle. Yes, there’re actually 2 castles in the area, and there’s a gap of about 2 to 2.5 hours between the guided tours, I think 10.00am for Hohenschwangau and 12.30pm for Neuschwanstein, something like that. The ticket includes horse carriage rides / bus rides to the castles! Great, no worries!


The kids and I, Hohenschwangau, Bavaria, Germany


Neuschwanstein Castle above the village of Hohenschwangau


Just look at the number of tour buses in Hohenschwangau!

We then proceeded to nicely waste our time, and about 15 minutes before the time of our Hohenschwangau Castle tour, asked about getting onto the horse carriage. “Oh, the trip only takes 8 minutes.” “When’s the horse carriage coming?” “Oh, in about 15 minutes.” “Huh? But our tour is in 15 minutes’ time!” “Well, you can walk. It’ll take 10 minutes if you walk fast, up those steps.” We ran, carrying a baby, and a pram, and pulling a 6 year old kid, who knows nothing about what urgency is. And reached, just in time, to join the rest of our tour group. “Whew, that was close!”






From the grounds of the Hohenschwangau Castle


A swan fountain – the people here are crazy over swans. Every other thing is named after swans (Schwan in German) e.g. Neuschwanstein (New Swan Stone), Hohenschwangau (High Swan Land), Schwangau (Swan Land)


Neuschwanstein Castle, seen from Hohenschwangau Castle

The Hohenschwangau Castle visit was over in about umm 30 – 40 minutes. There was still about 2 hours till our Neuschwanstein tour. We promised the hotel that we’d check out at 12pm. If we waited till after our Neuschwanstein tour, it would be way past 12pm. Since we had so much time in hand (and thinking that we’re marathon runners), we decided to walk back to the hotel, 2km away. After all, the German countryside looked so pretty, even in cloudy weather. There goes another stupid decision.

After 20 minutes of walking, joking and taking lots of photos of the pretty countryside (yeah, even in gloomy weather), we realized that we had walked barely 300m. OK, so what, it’s only 2km and if we take the car, we’ll have to pay the parking fees again, and there may be no more spaces to park when we return (actually, there’re tons of spaces, but just a little further off). And so, we made a stupid decision to stick to our earlier stupid decision.

After about 50 minutes of walking briskly, we reached the hotel panting. We packed up hurriedly (that’s how I lost my phone charger), paid and proceeded to head back to Hohenschwangau. There’re buses to Hohenschwangau from Schwangau, we thought about waiting at the bus stop, but every person we asked had no idea when the next bus would come and our visit was in about 30 minutes’ time. We decided to abandon the bus stop (which we would later learnt to be another stupid decision) and jogged, ran and panted our 2km back to Hohenschwangau, with pram, baby, kid and high heels (Anu had to have high heels on a day like this!) And did we reach in time? Of course not. The bus from Schwangau overtook us about 10 mins before we reached our destination. Damn! Should’ve waited. (Told ya it was a stupid decision).


The nice road connecting Hohenschwangau to Schwangau, where our hotel was - It's 2km long. Notice high heels on Anu? Imagine walking the entire distance, and back, in an hour, in those shoes? That's what girls can do

And that’s not all yet. We learnt that to get up to the entrance of Neuschwanstein Castle from where we were, is another friggin 1.5km on a steep hill road (didn’t look that high to us?!?) This would take able adults, wearing hiking shoes (instead of high heels), 30 minutes to walk up. Either that, or wait for the bus… And since we had already screwed up our entire visit, what the heck, we decided to wait for the bus. But not all is lost. When we reached the castle, we learnt that we could still go in! We just had to reschedule our ticket with the officer in charge.

We got it rescheduled, Group No. ummm 241 or something like that. I told the wife, “Honey, there’s good news and bad news. Good news is that, yes, we’ll still be able to visit. Bad news is that we’ll have to wait till bloody 4.30pm, …over 3 hours to wait.” What I didn’t realise at that time, was that the officer had actually written 14:30, not bloody 4.30! What in the world made me think it was 4.30pm, still beats me to this very day. Anyway, we proceeded to waste more time, since we had such a long wait ahead of us. And then, for some reason or other, I had a peek at the Electronic Display Board and saw them calling our Group No, …241. “Can’t be, it’s only two-ish…” and that’s when it dawned on me! I quickly reached for the ticket, and saw it written, in clear German handwriting, friggin 14.30! We ran for our lives, for the fourth time in the day, and reached just before the rest of our group disappeared through the entrance. We were in such a hurry that we didn’t notice the free audio guides at the door. But we got in! And that’s what matters, right? For the next 30 minutes or so, when everyone was deeply engrossed in their headphones on what it was saying, we made up our own stories… “Oh, this was where the fairy godmother stayed, …and that’s the stairway to the room that had that spindle that put everyone to sleep, …and that’s where the magic mirror of the wicked queen was kept, etc”. Until someone from our group started staring daggers at us and showing that shush, finger on the lip sign. “Spoilsport, why can’t you just concentrate on what that headphone of yours is talking about…”

Oh well, at least we didn’t waste our trip. But the weather was horrible (it started raining in the afternoon during and after our trip, and Marienbrücke (Marie’s Bridge), which was one of the nicest place to view the castle, was closed for maintenance! (What a bummer, why can’t they wait till off-peak season for maintenance??!) Auf Wiedersehen, Neuschwanstein. If we ever meet again, I hope it’ll be in better circumstances.


Schloss (Castle) Neuschwanstein, Bavaria, Germany


The countryside, from Schloss Neuschwanstein – with a view of the Hohenschwangau Castle in the distance


Here’s a photo of Neuschwanstein I found from the web which shows Neuschwanstein in its full glory, clear skies and sunshine. Source: http://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/neuschwanstein-castle-germany#neuschwanstein-castle-bavarian-alps