49 minute country

So as Linnea already said we headed off to Liechtenstein and Switzerland. I was rather interested in visiting Liechtenstein since we were travelling the region, mainly to see if there is anything to see around and how cool is it to say you've visited Liechtenstein, a country that almost nobody visits. And after walking around for a while I stopped wondering why. We spent a whopping 49 minutes in the capital Vaduz, which was more than enough to see most of it. You could easily miss the whole country driving by since it is only the size of your average township with it's ~35'000 inhabitants. After entering the country from the Austrian side it took us about 10 minutes to reach the capital and another 5 minutes to get out of the country and into Switzerland. The only advice I could give you for visiting Liechtenstein is to go there with a big pile of money. We had some plans of eating some lunch there but it never happened since it was so ridiculously expensive to eat there. We didn't even find a grocery store so we wondered where they do their daily shopping.

So did we do something else there beside look at the sky high prices? As a matter of fact yes. I sent a postcard to the old lady living next door at home (I bet she's never gotten a postcard from Liechtenstein), we looked at the castle and went to a super expensive toy store where all the toys were handmade in Europe. So you can guess how many toys we took home. I've also never seen so many fancy cars in one place. It was Porsche, big fat BMW:s and Audis one after the other. I guess there is not much more to do in Liechtenstein than to show off to your neighbour who has the biggest and baddest car. The only real plus side in Liechtenstein is the beautiful scenery, since it is located in a valley surrounded by beautiful mountains.

After enjoying our 49 minutes of Vaduz and not paying for parking (again) we headed off to Switzerland. We didn't really have a plan on where to go so we looked on Google maps some place relatively close to the border since we booked a hotel in Germany for the night. Every hotel/hostel/whatever in Switzerland was waaay out of our budget. We ended up in this small town of Rorschach at the Bodensee lake. We were really hungry since we skipped lunch in Liechtenstein because of the prices. Well not much more luck here. We looked around and looked around but the cheapest we could find was a pizza for about 15€, crazy eh? So no choice for us but to hit the supermarket. Linnea ended buying a horrible bagel and Lemon soda and I bought a pasta salad,muffins (discount -50%) and two sodas (also -50%) and we still ended up paying 6,50€ each!? We went to sit by the lake and tried to enjoy our lunch which wasn't really too tasty. At least we had a nice view sitting by the lake. After sitting around for half an hour or so we had had enough and wanted to move on to our hotel in Germany.

Our hotel was located in Oberstdorf, a famous winter sports town in the German Alps. We had found a cheap room for about 40€ which was the cheapest we found along our way. The drive took us half an hour longer than expected since the road we had to take in the first place was closed due to road works. Typical. After finally making it to Oberstdorf we were navigating the dark streets to find our hotel. The navigator pointed us to a small unlit gravel road on which we drove for a few kilometres. Out of the darkness a house emerged with only a few lights on. I felt like I was in a horror movie driving towards our death. We stopped at the front door where there was a small note written, “If you have made a reservation, please go inside and check-in yourselves”. So we did as the paper indicated. I went inside and there was nobody. Just a set of keys on the front desk where we could choose our room from. We took a nice looking room facing the backyard. As we took our stuff out of the car I saw a silhouette in one of the windows which really gave me the chills. We quickly unpacked the car and went to sleep hoping to wake up alive in the morning.

Cheers,

Arno