Trip To Karlsruhe, Germany
15th - 23rd June 2006
We arrived at Frankfurt International Airport around 6:20am local time. Guten Morgen Frankfurt! What a long 12 hours flight! Sakit-sakit juga badan rasanya. The weather was quite windy. The smell was different. For some reasons, I've always believe that each country in the world has its own smell. That’s from a traveler point of view. Malaysia smells like home. United States smells like coffee. Toronto smells like Niagara Falls. Japan smells like shushi. And now I’ve learned that Frankfurt smells like fresh baked bread. Weird huh?
Frankfurt Airport is not an easy place to find your way around. We’re lucky to have directions from Dr.Rony. We managed to find the long corridor towards the ICE bahnhof (train station). Tickets to Karlsruhe cost us about €160. The train ride took about an hour and 30 minutes.
Karlsruhe train station
We reached Karlsruhe HBF at nearly 8:30am local time. Dr. Roni greeted and guided us to our Hotel. I felt a bit distressing when we found out that there was no air-conditioning in our rooms, but that did not demoralize us at all. The hotel personnel were very friendly and helpful. Thank god they understand English. Having mostly settled with our hotels arrangement, we’ve decided to do a bit of sightseeing.
The famous Kaiserstraße
Karlsruhe is a city lies in the south-west of Baden-Württemberg. Our hotel was just around the corner of Kaiserstraße, the famous street lined with shops, fountains, malls, restaurants and not to forget the well-structured tram system. We walked around for about two miles, checking out Kaiserstraße and after noticing that there wasn’t any Turkish or halal restaurants, we ended up at McDonalds, ordering FishMac using sign language (hahaha – ada dictionary di tinggal-tinggalkan!).
Going to work was fun. Office was just a few block away. We took about 5-8 minutes every morning depending on how fast we walk. In fact, everything was a walking distance from our hotel. I’ve lost almost five pounds walking(phew!). Europlatz was just around the corner, Schlossgarten was just a few block from the office. Baroque Palace was just next to the garden. McDonalds was just facing Europlatz and Esprit was just 5 minutes away. What more can we asked? Of course, KShikeen would prefer we spent a lot more time shopping(hahaha .. jangan marah KS!).
The pyramid
Second last day in Karlsruhe was the most tiring day on the trip. It was Saturday, a holiday for sure. We walked as far as our feet can walk. We’ve visited Markplatz, Pyramid, Baroque Castle and experience our first dark clouds in Karlsruhe. We went shopping at Etlinger Tor, RedBox and a few more shops along Kaiserstraße. We’ve tasted the delicious “Wok Gumus with Pink Tiger Shrimp”. Nice!
Markplatz
On the last day of the trip, we took 2 cabs to Karlsruhe HBF. KShikeen paid the tickets for us. We faced a bit of a problem to purchase tickets via the ticket machine. Every menus and instructions was in German. The train was scheduled at 8:15am, an hour after our planned departure. We’re very lucky to bump into Tanya and Vasco at the station. They helped us with our HUGE luggage. Traveling with train was a bit tormenting with our luggage. We would have HUGE problems with our HUGE luggage if they were not there for us. Thank you very much guys.
Baroque Palace
Our flight home was scheduled at 12:30pm. We went for last minute shopping at the airport. The flight was delayed 30 minutes due to unknown reason. We didn’t care much about it because everybody was busy sleeping. We reached KLIA around 6:45am the next morning.
Eight days in Karlsruhe brings so much joy and experiences for us. Although we can’t really stand the heat, we had so much fun walking, shopping & working. Thank you very much to those who were involve in making our days in Karlsruhe memorable.
Wok Gumus with pink tiger
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