How to celebrate the 4th in Germany

This is mostly a post about my 4th of July - but I finally took a pic of my hotel today too so I'm throwing it in as well. This is the Hotel Atlantis. Pretty stylin eh? I'm on the 2nd/3rd floor. What I mean by that is in America it would be considered the 3rd floor but here they start counting at 'ground' so it is ground, 1st, 2nd. I never use the elevator down because I still haven't figured out how to get to the bottom. There isn't a "ground" button. The buttons actually look exactly like a phone keypad.


This weekend Jeremy and I drove over to Heidelberg. It's about an hour out of Ramstein. It was way awesome. In this pic you can see the castle on the left and the tower on the right. Those are the two places we went and the market in between.


This is just on a bridge over the river that we walked over just to check it out. Just before this we climbed the 200 (exactly - I counted) steps of the spiral stair case up to the top balcony of the tower you see in the background.

This is just a picture from the tower looking down on the river and part of Heidelberg. You can also see part of the castle up on the right.

This is down in the market area. It's actually called "market strassen" (which is spelled wrong because I don't know how to do the cool letter that looks like a B on my computer). We got gelato at that place on the right, twice actually. And that place on the left is a Hard Rock Cafe. Didn't eat there but I'm planning on it someday. This street goes on for blocks and it's just all different stores. I loved it.


This is a view from the tower of the castle that we hiked up to (314 steps).

A view inside the castle.

This castle was bombed during the war and they've pretty much left it as is. You can see part of the tower laying there at the bottom right that was blown off. It's HUGE in person.

After we were done in Heidelberg we drove back to base to check out the 4th of July festivities. We discovered a free Blue October concert. If you don't know who they are you should look em up. They're pretty good (if you like alternative that is). I don't know if you can tell from this pic but I was pretty close to the stage. And it was a way awesome concert. I recorded one of the songs on my camera but it couln't quite handle the noise level. It was sooo loud. I loved it

As soon as the concert was over the fireworks started and they played patriotic music through the base speakers so you could hear it all over.

All in all it was a pretty awesome day. I love Heidelberg and def want to go back. I'm just sad none of you were here. Basically you should come visit :)