Europa Park

Got home earlier than anticipated today, so the daily posting will continue at least one day longer.  So today I went with some friends to Europa Park, which is a big theme park just near Freiburg.  You can google it to see some pictures, but its pretty awesome.  It's huge, and has a bunch of big roller coasters and such.

Aside from a bad start, which involved the trams not going regularly til after I needed to leave to meet the others in time, we made it there taking first a train then a bus.  We got there 15 mins after opening at 9am, and stayed til 4pm.  I'm a pretty poor picture taker - I never remember to do it - but I will put a few photos up on Facebook.  We went on the Silver Star first, which is this huge roller coaster with massive rises and drops (anyway you can look it up on google if you want to judge for yourself).  We were a group of 5, which was a bit awkward as most of the coasters had rows of 2 or 4, so I ended up getting left behind to go on the next car by myself - daunting enough in itself, as I was pretty nervous to begin with - and then I got herded into the front row!  Needless to say I was scared stiff, but survived to tell the tale!

After that we went on a bunch of other rides, including a roller coaster largely made of wood, and a rafting ride in which we all got quite wet.  Another thing I learned was that German milkshakes are not so great - no ice cream or anything, just vanilla flavoured milk with foam as thick as the foam on coffee on top.  But the salad bagel I got with it was really good, even with the mayonnaise :)  The day was great, though it basically involved some really fun rides and then a lot of waiting around, mostly in the sun, in between.

Freiburg continues to be a lot hotter than I expected, and I am definitely getting desperate to find at least one pair of shorts to buy!  Ended up wearing gym shorts and flats at the theme park, which as you can imagine looked very classy.  Also bought icy poles and iced tea on the way home, after such a hot day in the sun!  The heat also tends to make things even more tiring, so I'm going to have to get a good nights sleep tonight before going on the Elsass, which I discovered is the German name for Alsace - a name I actually recognised from history classes!  As I said yesterday we're definitely soaking up all the free time we have before classes start for real on Monday.