Today was an early morning as we had to be downstairs the hotel by 7:45 am to make our way to Regensburg which is the fourth largest city in Bavaria. This means that it is a bit smaller than Augsburg so I was very interested to see how the feel of the city differs from where we have been all trip. The bus ride was about two hours to Regensburg and I was able to get some sleep in before walking around and exploring for the day.

As soon as we stepped off the bus in Regensburg, I quickly noticed how many other buses and tourists there are in the city. This is way different than Augsburg where it feels like we are the only tourists hanging out. However, once we started walking into the city I could tell why this is such a popular tourist destination. To get into the city, we walked over this huge bridge to meet our tour guide. The bridge is all original from before the war because most of Regensburg was not hit during the Second World War.

Once we met our tour guide, we started walking around the city and she explained lots of history about Regensburg and what the significance was behind many building. The one type of buildings she focused on the most were these towers that were scattered throughout the city. Our tour guide explained how these towers were something that represented wealth in the city. If someone had one of these towers built, it was an indication that they were a powerful and rich family which I thought was pretty cool.

After our tour, a few of us walked around to try and find a place to eat. Because we have all spent so much money on the trip, we were looking for a cheaper place to eat and we found just that down a small side street. The place we found sold traditional shawarma in pita bread. The shawarma was probably one of the most delicious things I have eaten on the trip thus far. Along with the chicken shawarma, there was salad and an array of sauces all stuffed into the pita bread.

Once we were all filled up, we headed back into the center of town to explore the inside of the massive cathedral. It was a little disappointing at first because there was scaffolding on part of the cathedral, however once we got inside it definitely didn’t disappoint. There were huge columns running throughout the middle of the cathedral and huge stained glass windows all along the walls. Because there were columns supporting the weight of the roof, this allowed for the big windows which made the place so spectacular.

We then killed some time by walking around and shopping before it was time to meet with the rest of the group to head over to Walhalla, which was about 15 minutes out of Regensburg sitting on top of a huge mountain. Walhalla looked very similar to the Parthenon in Greece. On the inside of Walhalla, there were many busts of famous Germans scattered trhoughout. This was super cool to see the influence that Germans have had on the world. We also walked all the way down the steps to get an even better few from the outside. It was spectacular!

Tomorrow we go up into the alps for one last time to visit a very popoluar German castle. I cannot wait!