48 hours later.....

So Esther and I decided we would buy one way tickets to Amsterdam and journey back by train leg by leg... Well that was a cool idea for a little while...

So we left Amsterdam on a bus to go to Brussels, (meanwhile on the bus we stopped at a rest stop and I go a traditional Netherlands snack... a GIANT meatball lol)

We walked around Brussels for the time that we could because the next bus going to Cologne, Germany was leaving in 3 hours. We got to Cologne and decided that we would spend the night in the train station because we were trying to find the cheapest way possible to Nuremberg and didn't take when ended up being the cheapest deal initially. So... in Cologne, right outside of the train station was the most amazing cathedral complete with bats circling the turrets! We walked around for awhile, saw two drunk guys sitting out front of a closed cafe at two tables about 30 feet apart singing drunk songs back and forth to each other. So funny lol.

So spending hours in a train station where there is no place to sleep got a little, boring. Many card games and card houses later we finally got on a train (make that 4 trains) to Nuremberg. This was the cheapest train which involved switching trains 4 times.... The names of the stops are very similar in Germany, Frankfurt hbf and Frankfurt are 2 different stops and you must mind which one you get off at. Well, Esther and I heard the word Frankfurt and jumped off because we were supposed to switch there. This cost us 40 minutes until the next train came. We proceeded to do exactly the same thing on the next switch... costing us another 40 minutes. Apart from those little mistakes, the German countryside was beautiful. The train took us through the hillsides next to a huge river that was lined with small German villages, each one complete with a gorgeous church and a clock tower. There were SO many castles, there were parts where there were 4 castles on the same hill, it was amazing. I took some pictures, they are terrible as I took them on a moving train but you can still get the idea at least...

 So because we made 2 mistakes costing us so much time, we got to Nuremberg that evening and after 36 hours of no sleep we were told we had missed the last bus and train to Prague for the evening and had to wait until the morning. This is on Sunday night, we were supposed to be back on Monday morning for  class the next day. We were crushed and so tired and just decided to get a hotel and give in to sleep. We made a smart choice by buying our bus tickets that night though for a 6am bus back to Prague that would get us there in time for class. But.... we made a classic mistake of setting the alarm but not turning in on. So, needless to say, we slept through the alarm, missed the bus and wasted another 30 Euro... oops. So we finally got up, accepted that we had missed class and got on the next bus back to Prague... We finally got home though. FINALLY!! after 48 hours of bus and train hopping. The moral of the story is, always buy a return ticket, adventures are fun but....