First stop Augsburg

After an hours drive from our home on the sunshine coast in Australia to the local air port, three hours in the airport, 3 lots of 7 hour flights with stop overs in between and an hour and a half journey on a speed train we have made it to Augsburg in Germany.
Augsburg
Why Augsburg you may ask? Simple, it's located an hour and a half away from Munich which is home to Oktoberfest and is a quarter of the price for accommodation during this beer celebration.

The plan is to stay here for three nights and once we get our bearings right then leave to stay in an over priced hostel in Munich while we celebrate the local beer with 6 million other people. That's not an exaggeration as this is how many it attracts during the three weeks or so it's on.

I just admit getting off the train at the Augsburg station was what I expected to see,  a small country town with farms as far as we could see. After such a long trip all I wanted to see when I stepped off the train was some where to buy a Germany sausage and a Stein of beer. However how very wrong I was as we emerged through the archway of what looked to be a 500 year old building was a very busy city center. Trams, taxis, buses and cars filled the streets. A massive water fountain and people lazing about drinking wine and eating local produce.

We jumped in  nearby cab (mercades) and after working our way around a large language barrier with the driver set we off on our way to the hostel, Urbernatch or something like that. A 5 minutes drive and maybe 1km of road (bad traffic) we arrived. Definitely could have walked...

All we wanted was to check in freshen up and go to sleep after not sleeping for 2 days and being in the same clothes.. u get the point. But you see it was only 10:30am and check in is not until 3pm. No matter what I tried, check in was yep 3pm. The only good bit of news the lady at the front counter had for us is that we could drop our bags off behind the counter.. 

We set off on to a busy street with construction workers right outside our hostel, (great, even once we check in there is no way we are getting rest). We get to a set of lights look up and down each street and choose left. After we walked under  a sweeping bend a massive ancient church came into view. We walk around the structure for some time contemplating if it was still in use and if you could even enter it. We looked around but everything was written  in German.  As we were about to leave we noticed a bunch of tourists just walk up to the massive wooden doors and proceed to walk straight on in, like they owned the joint. I looked at Cass and said what's the worst that would happen.

This Gothic styled church was  over a thousand years old and absolutely blew my mind.

After walking the streets of the city and lazing about a local park (they are everywhere here) we made it back to the hostel.

We decided to have a quick rest at 4pm and both awoke a short time later at 6am the following day.

We have since explored the city center which is littered with old buildings from pre 1500s and a tower you can climb to the top of and look out over the city. Epic view!
Also visited a textile museum, fresh produce markets, more grand churches and a shopping center which sells beer by the half litre for as little as 0.60€. !!!

This post is already to wordy but the things we are discovering in this town which I expected to be nothing but farms and a whole lot of not much else is quite very different to what I expected.

Decision time

Ever since I was young I had often dreamt about being a nomad, living life without a clear direction but with a single desire  to travel the world. The idea of living on and with  as little as possible seemed like an ideal life to me,  as seeing people living out their lives around me working so hard to payback debts for items they really didn't need seemed obsurd to me.

As I grew older and received my very first pay slip, I managed to save some money but somehow always seemed to blow it on cars or alcohol or non necessities and materialistic items which were great to own and use at the time but after a period of time this lifestyle style became the norm. A desire to own bigger and better things, the latest gadget, the best of everything.

This life style was never what I intended but the social ideals of the society in which I lived encouraged such behavior. Work hard and spend most of it on an expensive living style with little left over and what little may be left would be used to buy those must have items or,  so I thought.

I had become by the age of 27 quite set in my routine of life that the idea of  living the life of a nomad or at least traveling the world I had once envisioned at a young age seemed almost out of reach, until I met Cass.

Cass and I after about a month of seeing each other decided that it was too early to say if we would work out but we should both start saving money so that if sometime in the future we had enough saved we could then make  the tough decisions of leaving our jobs, selling all our stuff and saying goodbye to those close to us.

Fast forward to the 23rd of September 2013 and this is exactly what we have done. I have left my job as an ICT Infrastructure Manager of 8 and a half years, sold off all our stuff and hosted a party to say goodbye to family and friends.

Buying tickets and making plans to travel is one thing but when it comes to leaving your job and saying goodbye to loved ones it all become a reality, real fast.

So this is where our new life begins, I own nothing but the essentials I carry in a 70 litre Deuter backpack and a savings fund which will hopefully see me though a few months of travel before I need to start finding work. Wish me luck  and I hope you enjoy the future posts of what I discovered in this world we all share.