Things I Love About Bavaria

We will be moving back to the States in less than a year. Although we are ready to move back and enjoy all the modern conveniences again, like 24 hour grocery stores, 7-11's on every corner, hundreds of TV channels to choose from, American restaurants! There are so many things about Germany we are going to miss; Like hopping in our car on Friday and spending the weekend in another country. Or how the Catholic Faith is celebrated everywhere. It's beautiful here!

I just wanted to show you a few things that our family loves about Bavaria. Hotels, buildings and homes around Bavaria are not afraid to show beautiful images of their shared Catholic faith. This is an image found above the door of a hotel in Ettal, Germany. Firehouses usually have an image of St. Florian, patron saint of firefighters, painted on the side of their buildings.

There are shrines all over the countryside in Bavaria. Shrines to Mary, shrines to Jesus, Stations of the Cross. As you are walking along, it is not uncommon to come across several different shrines during your walk.

I love the flowers that hang from every building in Bavaria during the Spring and Summer and early Fall! Above is a hotel on the Chiemsee Lake. Below is a Gasthof (kind of like a guest house) just outside of the Vilseck Army Post. The photos do not do either of these buildings justice! The Gasthof Stroll is a historical building in the Vilseck town. On a side note, all of us Americans start out the Spring season by planting numerous geraniums, petunias and other hanging flowers but ours are never as beautiful and full as the Germans. I have since learned their tricks; first, they use a weekly flower food. And then they use rain water and not water from the faucet to water everyday. Faucet water is so high in calcium here in Germany that all those minerals just kill our flowers. But the Germans will set a large barrel under their drainpipes to collect rain water so they can water their outside plants and flowers. There are many more things we love about Germany and Bavaria and I will save those for later posts so you can journey with us this Winter!

Buda, Buda, Budapest!

It was a holiday weekend, Columbus Day to be exact, and in typical Fitter Family fashion, Matt and Mary decided to go away for the weekend on Thursday. We had actually been talking about hitting another country since we will be leaving Germany next summer and there are still a few places we want to see. Budapest, Hungary was on the list. So on Thursday, we went to expedia.com, booked a five star hotel, loaded up the mini-cooper on Friday morning and headed out of town.
It was a very easy seven hour drive. The Fall colors are out which made for some delightful scenery. And believe it or not, the roads in Hungary are actually much better than the roads in Austria.
We stayed at the Ramada Plaza hotel situated right on the Danube and across from Margerit Island. The hotel was quite posh but not close enough to all of the sightseeing we wanted to do. But the high speed internet connection, the fabulous three pools of varying temperatures and the most modern exercise room that we have ever seen in a hotel (as if we actually used it) more than made up for the small inconvenience.
Tips before going to Budapest: Study about this city because I was certainly overwhelmed at the size, 2 million people and all the places we wanted to see. We started out by booking the hop-on, hop-off bus. In most cities, when you do these kinds of tours, that usually means you can hop-off the bus, explore the area and take pictures and then hop back on the next bus thirty minutes later. Not so in Budapest. Hop-off means they are stopping for five or ten minutes to take pictures and they will hold your seats. If you are trying to get back onto another bus, you could be out of luck! We barely made it onto another bus! With the purchase of our tour, we also got a free one hour Danube River Cruise.
I've posted some pictures below of this amazing city. And if you are counting, Mary and MK have now been to 24 countries since moving to Germany! Of course, Matt has a few more countries courtesy of the United States Army.