Home at last

To paraphrase from the last entry:
"I can't imagine anything exciting will happen". What a crock!

• We got confused about which tickets to buy at Frankfurt train station to get us to the airport, so we waited in line for half an hour at the information desk and were helped by a chap with the most stereotypical German accent you've ever heard.
  
• We ended up getting on the wrong train anyway!
  
• Our flight out of Frankfurt was delayed by two hours due, according to the sign, to 'ship rotation'. We still don't quite know what that means.
• The bottle of duty-free port that Owen purchased with his last Euros (only after being assured that it would not cause troubles with security, so long as it remained sealed in its bag) made it through security at Frankfurt with no troubles, but was not allowed onto the plane when we changed at Tokyo - apparently the Japanese airport security don't trust the German airport security (feel free to insert your own WWII joke here!). He was required to enter Japan (going through customs etc) in order to have it placed in the hold as checked baggage. Fortunately there were two others in the same situation, and a Japanese airport official was able to accompany them all through the process. It was exceedingly fortunate that, even with the two hour delay from Frankfurt, there was enough time to do this, otherwise the port would have gone the way of the vegemite, sunscreen, toothpaste and insect repellant.
  

That about wraps it up for this trip. Thank you all for reading and commenting, and a special mention must go to Adam, for his daily quotes.

Until OX fun times goes aborad again (don't hold your breath), it's sayonara, auf wiedersehen, tot ziens, au revoir and goodbye from Owen and Xavier.

Day 23: Homecoming

It is now the morning of Day 23. The day for going home. We have a train to Frankfurt, and then our flight leaves from there tonight.

We may manage to get in a last round of spiral stair-cases as well :)

This may be updated if anything exciting happens...

I can't imagine it will - 40 hours of travelling doesn't lend itself to that kind of thing.

We get back to Canberra at lunch-time on Friday. See y'all soon.

Day 22: Fun and Games

So we had a solid plan for today, but they got stuffed around a bit this morning by the opening times of the various things we were going to see. In the end, however, we got to everything we intended to.

We went to a maze this morning. Made of Hemp plants. I have photos, but no time to upload them this morning. We were the only people there who were not either under 10-years-old, or supervising people who were under 10-years-old. But because we can't speak any German, we had fun!

You get a little brochure thing on the way in, containing a list of questions and a slection of coloured shapes. The idea is to find, inside the maze, signs that give answers to the questions, and hole punchers of different colours which punch appropriate shapes into your card. Once you have all the holes punched and questions filled-in, you hand it back in at the shop - possibly to win a prize or something, who knows.

Because of our lack of skills in the German language, we had great fun trying to match words on the signs with those on the questions to get the answers... no idea how we went, but we banked on having the right answers :-)

The it was to the water slides!! The place we went was part of Therme Erding (http://www.therme-erding.de/de/100682/100888/english.html) - but we only went to "Galaxy Erding" - a dome-shaped building filled with about a dozen water-slides. Everything from 4 foot-high kiddy slides, to "extreme" slides. We tried out all of them except the kiddy ones that we thought we might get ordered off if we tried to get on them!

There was a central stair-tower that all the slides came off - some from the second storey, with the highest ones up as high as 8 storeys.

Pretty much every slide had it's own theme or novelty to make it totally different from all the others, for example:

The slide with uphill parts - where there were jets of water to push you uphill (you had to have an inflatable donut thing to go on it)

The Extreme Faser - "reach speeds of up to 72km/h"... and it timed your run, so you could see how quick you go. Owen (4.75 sec) defeated Xavier (4.77 sec) in the duel by the barest of margins.

I could tell you all about every slide, they were all awesome! It was such a good fun way to finish off the trip espacially given we were both pretty much ready to go home.

If anyone every asks me what to do in Munich... I will recommend the slides!!!!!