Schneeballin'

After 10 days of heart renching separation Nell and I met up again in Berlin. I heard her voice from the bottom of the stairs, an angelic tune that haunts my dreamss..

After an epic reunion of a backpack hug we met some people at the hostel and went wondering around the city to find a labrynth that we had heard about. After about and hour and a half of us failing we found a cool warehouse party where we danced and chilled by the fire for the night..

The next day I (Lee) went to the Jewish museum and Nell went to the Topography of Terrors. They were both good. After a couple of hours we became museumed out and met up for noodles in a box, the first of many to come.
That afternoon we headed to Amani's house to stay there for a couple of nights. We met his roommates and he also had a few of his friends over, we played kings and then went to the club Matrix.
I was a good tourist and woke up before it got dark again and went to GDR museum and the Jewish Memorial museum.which both were really interesting and met up with Nell at Brandenburger Tor and went to the Homosexual memorial.

We had a quiet night chillin at Amani's house and woke up the next day, when it was still daylight hours and went to an abandoned theme park with Brieuc. It was soo surreal, there were old roller coasters and we rode around on the tea cups

and even got our bridge photo.

After we went to the communist war memorial.. which was large..

and went to coffee with Jhana and Tim who we had met at the last hostel. That night we attempted to catch a train to Nuremburg but we failed and went to the wrong train station and got very confused so we took an overnight train to Nuremburg and pretty much spent the next day very tired and slightly grumpy..

But in between being grumpy we did manage to see the Nuremburg museum.

We then went on another train to Rothenburg ob der Tauber.. We learnt that little German towns overrun all grumpiness and tiredness and we spend the night running around and acknowledging the cuteness of German towns and talked about how we liked the wooden things on the houses and how they added to the cuteness of German towns..

But the height of excitement came when we saw Schneeballen which we had been talking about since we saw a documentary about Germany.. There was lound noises and jumping involved..<<< possible highlight of trip.

We woke up in an awesome mood ready to admire the cuteness of the town (yes, we are aware that we have already overused the word cute)

The town then increased in awesomeness when we found a variety store which had a 10cent pile. This then lead us to buy weird novelty hats, a VIP sticker and alot of other useless things that seemed very important at the time and somehow meant to spent 7 euros.
On the plus side when we went to the main town to have lunch everybody could tell we were very important people.

Apart from just walking around pointing and posing next to cute building we took the time out of our schedule to eat shneeballen and walk along the towns fortification..

Sadly that night it was time to say goodbye to Rothenburg as we were cute town hopping skanks and head off to Cochem. On the way we discovered the trick of what to do when its cold and you have to wait on the train platform..  So we sat in the elevator of the platform until the train came.

We got to the guesthouse and were upgraded so we got a whole apartment to ourselves.. so we went wild and made spongebob pasta ( a quality purchase from the variety store) and relaxed in our apartment.

   Hey guys, Its Shanelle. Its been a while since I wrote so I felt I needed to reintroduce myself. Anyway, we woke up late the next morning late as we didn't have a check out time, very dangerous for us. It was so foggy that we didnt realise there was a giant cathedral/castle in the middle of the town until we saw a postcard of it.

We then naturally found the Christmas markets of Cochem, which were adorable, and invested in our first Gluhwein and Strudel.

We then both spontaneously suprised each other with thoughtful gifts of love and friendship.

We walked to the cathedral on the top of the hill which would normally have amazing views of the town, but due to the fog all we could see was white mist below us. We did get some impressive castle photos though. They involved a lot of running and self timers.

We went back to the christmas markets, saw a goose and went back to our apartment.

We left Cochem for Cologne and departed on our last Eurail train. The next few hours were filled by going through all our train journey nostalgia. After 5 months of travelling, we began failing: we took about 5 wrong trains trying to get to the hostel, failed at making soup and were reduced to eating leftover train snacks for dinner.

We spent our last day in mainland Europe Christmas market hopping around the very jolly city of Cologne. After 5 different Christmas markets we had sampled all the adorable German food we could find and had aquired another gluhvein mug.

We went out with some people in the hostel and stayed out all night to avoid a hostel, apparently our last day in continental Europe isnt worth the splurge of 'a place to sleep'. But we did take a quick nap at the underground snow boarding club we somehow landed up at.

Then we made our way to the airport and headed to Israel. 

That sounds cool.

It was when we were waiting for the bus to Montenegro that we realised that we had the wrong time for the last few days, which led to to wait at the bus station for an extra hour before our bus actually came. The bus ride was incredible, We drove along the coast of Croatia and Montenegro, on the way passing a place we later found out was called Perast, until we finally got to Budva in the afternoon.

That night we went wondering around the fortified old town

We went back to our private room with an ensuite that we were paying $9.95 for, ate some stir fry and chilled. Sadly the ensuite wasn't as cool as we first through because she had to sit on the toilet while showering. This led to our boycott of showering in Budva...

 The next morning we walked along the coast to the beach a little away from town.

And sat of the beach

We went out for Chinese for a late 4 month anniversary dinner which was really just an excuse to buy a three course meal.

The rest of the night was spent attempting to take a photo of a hedgehog. We developed what we thought was a fool proof plan and made friends with a nice Turkish guy who was staying at the hostel. He was sitting outside relaxing and when he saw any sign of the hedgehog he would run to our door knock acouple of times and shout 'hedgehog'. Sadly our photography wasnt as good as our plan.. this is pretty much the best photo we got.

The excitment of the night continued as we discovered to free HP games on Lee's laptop. We are now the proud parents of a young Travel journalist, who we affectionately named Stupid due to him sucking at finding himself a decent wife

The next day we went to Perast. Look it up. Its really beautiful. We drove past it on the bus a few days earlier and made it our mission to go there. This photo barely does it any justice.. 

That night we had a heartfelt reunion with Orr and Amy. There was alot of hugging and random high pitch squeals involved. We headed to Kotor the next day. We wondered around the town and got a traditional Balkan food which involved a cabbage and strange soups that tasted like Jewish.

We got our bridge photo for Montenegro

And started climbing up the fort which was amazing and had an incredible view from the top. It was a bit like the great wall of China minus the 10000 tourist and random Chinese people trying to takes photos of us.

We went back to Perast to make a gourmet Dinner and discovered how fun it is to high five with eggplant

The next day Nell and I split up again. I went on my way to Dubrovnik and Nell headed to Kosovo...

Celebrity spotting in B&H

We arrived in Sarajavo after a horrible overheated bus trip at 6 in the morning and started to follow the slightly tragic instructions towards the hostel ("go to blue scrapers") We arrived only to be shut down by the next door neighbour who told us to come back in later. When we got there we met the owner of the hostel Jasmina who was the sweetest lady ever...
We then had a bit of a nappsipops and went off to explore sarajavo and by explore we mean shopping.
It was really interesting walking around, you could see both the muslim and christian influence.

After some deep and meaningful analysis on the population of Sarajavo we had some completely sickening dessert of halva (which was about the size of big slice of cake) and Baklava... couldn't eat anything else sweet for a while after that.

That night we decided to go and Nell ended her week of sobriety..

We where then hungry and in our search for food we needed the bathroom which led us to the Colosseum Casino. Because we didnt have our ID's on us this led to a rigorous interegation to get inside. This involved writing our age and our name down on a piece of paper... and then we got 2 euro gambling voucher.
We got food and went to the bathroom and went to use our voucher where I (Lee) won 6 euros! and the owner of the casino told me to stop taking all the casinos money. I dont think most people cash 6 euros..

The next morning we woke up and Jasmina took us out for a traditional Bosnian breakfast and she told us her story of when she was in Sarajavo during the seige. She moved to Sarajavo a year before it started from Dubrovnik and had no way of contacting her family for a year. She said she was always hungry and this led to her hostel's philosophy because she knows how hunger feels like she never wants any of her guests to go hungry.

She then took us to the Tunnel of Hope, a private museum which had a small section of tunnel which was used to get supplies into Sarajavo during the seige.

In the afternoon we went to the Latin bridge where Franz Ferdinand was assassinated... but more importantly got our bridge photo for Bosnia.

It is so interesting walking around the centre of Sarajavo you can still see so much from the war. There are artillery marks on the building and some buildings still remain abandoned. Its just so different to any other city we have been to. You also saw what Bosnians call the "Sarajavo rose" which is indents in concrete caused by mortor fire and they are filled with resin all around the city centre

We then went to have some traditional tea which Jasmina gave us money for ( have i explained enough how much we love her)

I (Lee) then paid 50cents to buy seeds and be mauled by pigeons in pigeon square.

We then attempted to go to the History museum sadly it had stupid opening hours so we walked around in the park.

We went back to our hostel and met the new people who checked in one of whom was a Bosnian television star.. ( he was actually just interviewed on TV about the Sarajavo shooting the day before) So we watched the dubbed footage of the interview on repeat. He was pretty impressed with himself and not going to lie I was a bit jealous of his stardom.
We then went to have some Bosnian coffee with Palo and Jonny's friends from Sarajavo

and went galavanting around to a couple clubs..

The next morning we headed for an earlybus to Mostar with the package of food Jasmina gave us.
Sadly we missed saying goodbye to her because we are not very smart and the whole time we where in Bosnia it was an hour later then we realised. But we did get a text message from her saying " Mu girls thank jou for jnur stej i camin vith bananas for jou bat jou live"

The bus ride was so pretty and we arrived in Mostar and were picked up by the owners of the hostel Tanja and Sadik who were so lovely.
We went around Mostar and the old town which where really cool and saw the famous 'Stari Most'.

We had an early night after barely no sleep the night before and played free rice.
The next day we went to an old abandoned bank in the middle of the city which was a snipers nest during the war. It was so weird and there were still bullet shells on the ground. which we collected. guess what everyones' christmas present this year is..

It had a view of the whole city of the top

After walking around the new town and doing a bit of shopping we went back to the hostel where Tanja invited everyone at the hostel to have tea together. It was so homely and she even let us try her mother's home made rakija.

We then realised that although we where in a place known for its bridge we had not yet got our bridge photo so we wandered around until some nice couple took a photo of us on the bridge.

　
We then decided that Montenegro sounded cool so we got on a bus early in the morning to Budva.