Personally, I simply got tired of sleeping so little.  I always sacrificed sleep for more work time in the past.  But now, I’ve come to realize how powerful being rested really is.  It feels so empowering when I wake up in the morning, fully refreshed.  I don’t have to struggle to get out of bed or set 5 alarm clocks to get me out of bed in the morning.  The reason that the struggle exists is because the body wants more sleep.  This is a clear sign of not sleeping enough.  I’m definitely no sleep expert and I don’t claim to be, but I thought I’d share some techniques in how to think differently about sleep.  But first, I think I should share my experience with sleep deprivation, which I felt heavily motivated me into adopting this way of life.  All of this below is just my view on sleep health.

My Battle with Sleep Deprivation

In high school, I pretty much got 8 hours of sleep a night.  It wasn’t that hard since at that time I didn’t really think about optimizing my sleep.  I just remember being nagged to go to sleep by my parents every night.  I never had to stay up doing any homework or anything like that.  Even my first year of university was like that.  Rarely found myself staying up to do work unless there was a exam the next day or something.

Second year of university is when it all changed.  A thought clicked in my head that I could sleep less and get more work done.  It’s not like I felt sleepy at night anyways.  For a while it was alright, but then as I slept less and less, my sleep debt accumulated.  I found myself napping in class.  I even micro-slept while I drove and almost got into not one, but a couple car accidents.  I didn’t try to do anything about it at the time.  I liked the extra time.  There was a while where I slept about 4.5 hours a night because I stayed up playing computer games.  I looked like a zombie.  I yawned all the time and everyone knew I was sleepy.

In my third year, I lived alone on campus.  No one told me when to wake up to go to class.  With all the sleep debt I had, I struggled to get up every morning.  Eventually, I stopped going to morning classes altogether and my grades suffered.  I started questioning myself, “why is it so hard to sleep early?”  I was easily annoyed all the time.  I was so tired at one point, that I caught myself hallucinating.  It was weird because I saw this strange bug crawling up the curtain and when I waved the curtain around, it was gone.  I couldn’t find it anywhere on the floor.  I wanted to change my sleeping habits, but I couldn’t do it.  Logic told me to do it, but I couldn’t act on it.

My sleeping habits didn’t change until I went to Germany for my co-op work term.  I guess because I was adjusting to this new environment, I actually felt sleepy at night.  This urge made me sleep a lot earlier than what I was used to doing.  I felt rested for the first time in a long time.  It felt so good.  My constant zombie look faded away.  I could tell that my skin complexion was improving.

I guess because I’ve seen how dangerous sleep deprivation could be, it finally compelled me to change my ways.  Ever since I’ve made sleep a priority, I feel a lot healthier.  I lose out on wake-time for working, but I am able to think better when I am rested.  My thoughts are a lot clearer.  That makes me a more efficient worker.

Getting into the Frame of Mind

You’ve got to be truly convinced that you want to get more sleep.  I know a lot of people who say things “yeah I know I don’t get enough sleep”, but they don’t do anything about it.  Nothing at all.  Everyday they keep their usual sleep routine and they’re struggling all the time.  They’re the ones who are always late to morning appointments, and some even for afternoon appointments.  Why does it have to be that way?  It doesn’t.  But before even trying to maintain a proper sleep routine, people really have to change the way they think about sleep.

Sleep is NOT a waste of time. I’ve heard people say, “sleep is a waste of time” or “sleep is for the weak”.  It definitely is not.  Somehow I think there is a competition between who gets the least amount of sleep and still gets the most work done.  I’ve heard people people saying (sometimes bragging) stuff like how they got only 3 hours of sleep and then pulled an all-nighter to study for an exam.  Sure, they definitely were up for a while, but should we question the efficiency of that work?  Of course.  Anybody who has pulled an all-nighter has experiences how “out of it” they were by the end if not half way through.  Nobody wants to do an all-nighter.  That is an extreme case though.  A more common theme is to stay up for 18 hours or so.  That leaves 6 hours to sleep.  The average for most people lies somewhere around 7.5-8 hours.  According to the statistics, more than half of us need more than 6.  By not getting our required amount of sleep, this so-called “sleep debt” will accumulate over time.  Like I mentioned before, I once slept on average 4.5 to 5 hours a night for about 3 months straight.  People around me could tell I looked like a zombie.  I’ve definitely experienced sleep debt first hand.  In retrospect, doing this was so stupid, but that experience definitely helped me reshape what I thought about sleep.  It is a necessity.

Getting into the right frame of mind takes time.  I definitely did not just one day choose to make sleep a priority.  It happened over time.  For me it took a few years in order for me to drill it into my head.  After sleeping late and waking up early, I’d ask myself why I did that.  Why did I sleep so little the night before when the consequence was me feeling sleep deprived the day after?  As I’m in my early 20’s, sleeping late is easy.  It’s not difficult to just stay up late doing nothing in particular.  In fact, it seems to be natural tendency for most people in my age group to be night owls.

Going to bed early is not a chore.  Chores are something we’d rather not do, but we’re only doing it because we have to.  This attitude will not work.  Eventually, you’ll give up and revert to your old ways.  You have to change your attitude toward sleep.  You know how some people feel passionate about their work and will always feel motivated to do it?  That’s their motivation.  There is a similar motivation for sleeping early.  I want to go to sleep early today, so I feel rested and ready to go tomorrow.

Ask yourself why your sleep habits are the way they are right now.  Why do I have to wake up feeling terrible every morning?  Why do I have to set so many alarms just to get out of bed?  Why am I pressing the snooze button so much?  Shouldn’t I be getting up super early? Doesn’t this struggle to wake up give me less time to get ready?  If I don’t have enough time to get ready, won’t I look like a mess when I go to work/school?  Am I sleeping late all the time because I have so much work to do?  Could I be improving on my time management to make me more efficient? Is sleeping late worth it?  I’m sure there are way more questions to be asked, but asking yourself these questions will tell you how you really feel about it.  Everyone’s going to have different answers.  Some might want to change, but others might feel that what they’re doing is the best solution right now.

The Bottom Line

Sleep is absolutely essential for good health and its benefits are far reaching.  Ever since I’ve slept better, I’ve been able to accomplish more.  No longer am I the sleep deprived zombie.  My grades in school are better despite harder courses and more commitments. Better sleep health is something that anybody can do, but they have to want it.  You have to convince yourself that sleep deprivation is a terrible thing and it is something to avoid.  You’ve got to get into the frame of mind that sleep health is good and the will to change.  If you truly want to improve your sleep habits for the better, the improvements will happen.

I’ve been tracking my sleeping and over the past little while and I’ve accumulated 12.7 hours of sleep debt (as of 5 Oct measured by the Sleep as an Droid app).  I got this value by taking the difference of my actual time slept and the actual amount of time I need for each day and added up all those numbers over two weeks.  I noticed that this sleep debt over several days stacks up more and more.  I ended up feeling less and less rested everyday.  It seems obvious, but I never really paid attention to it until now.

What I’ve been doing now is try to sleep earlier to “pay back” this debt (probably the right thing to do).  I did a quick search on Wiki about sleep debt and as it turns out, the article basically told me the same thing that I noticed myself.  Sleep debt indeed does accumulate and catches up.  For me, one or two days, it’s probably okay, but anymore than that, then I start feeling less rested everyday.

For a bit, I tried sleeping at 11pm and waking up at 7am to pay back this debt, but I soon came to realize that I still didn’t feel better even though I was in fact paying back this debt (albeit slowly).  I came to realize the problem was in my sleeping pattern.  I didn’t actually know how much sleep I needed or when I needed to sleep (i.e. circadian rhythms).  I had completely forgotten about it (I wrote something similar on the subject awhile ago).  I always knew it existed, but I guess I lost track of what it was after I came back from Germany.  As of right now, my sleep debt for the last two weeks –7.9 hours, which is a lot better than before.

Circadian Rhythms

After I bit of trial and error, I found my optimal duration and time to sleep.  Apparently, I feel best if I sleep for 7.5 hours at 2:30am and wake up at 10am.  When I woke up after doing that, I felt great.  Kind of a night owl’s sleeping pattern.  Apparently some people can in fact sleep for 6 hours a day and sustain this daily without the need for naps, but that is a small minority of the population.  I on the other hand, fall within the average.

This doesn’t really work for me since I need to be up at 7am to go to sleep.  So now, my solution is to shift my circadian rhythms forward.  I’ve read a method for people with DSPS (delayed sleep-phase syndrome) that involved pushing back my sleeping time later and later until I reached the time I wanted.  If I slept at 2:30am usually, I’d sleep at maybe 5:30am the next day, then 7:30am the next etc. until I reached my goal of 11pm.  It would mess up an entire weeks schedule but apparently it works.  I’m not saying that I have this syndrome (I’m not about to self diagnose here), but this kind of treatment seems kind easy to do at home without great risk.  I don’t really have a week to spare for this right now so that is automatically out of the question.

Another method involved bright lights.  The Harvard Medical School Guide to A Good Night’s Sleep (really good book on sleep by the way!) states the following:

This treatment grew out of the discovery that exposure to bright light within a few hours of the body’s low point in body temperature—which occurs during the overnight hours—shifts the circadian rhythm. A dose of bright light after the temperature minimum advances the circadian rhythm, while a dose before it delays the rhythm.

Knowing this, I can shine a bright light in my face every morning when I wake up at 7.  Hopefully, my circadian rhythm will slowly shift to this new time.  Once I do that, maybe I can wake up at 7am feeling well rested.

Although I try to sleep and wake up at the same time everyday, school work always tries to disrupt my schedule, and as a result, I haven’t paid off my sleep debt and my sleeping time is kind of inconsistent at times.  Life always finds a way to break it.

Random Analysis on My Sleep Cycle

As an aside, I tried to find out how long one of my sleep cycles were.  On average, they are 90 minutes long, but differ from person to person.  The app that I use for measuring sleep graphs out how deep/light my sleep is throughout the night.  Since the human goes through cycles of light and deep sleep overnight, I thought I could measure the time duration between.  I looked at some of my sleep graphs (similar to this one):

In this graph (from 9 September – there is a typo in the picture because I mixed up the dates initially), the blue graph shows how deeply I sleep through the night. The sampling rate for that measurement wasn’t very good with the trial version that I used at the time.  Three regions are shown where values of the blue curve above the blue line mean I’m awake, values between the green and the red line mean I’m in a period of light sleep, and any value below the red line means I’m in deep sleep.  As it is shown in the plot above, it seems that a huge chunk of my sleep is in deep sleep, which is really strange since I’m supposed to be going through cycles of light and deep sleep.  Here, I only see one instance of light sleep.  Not really sure what to make of it other than the fact that the app is not a robust way of doing such measurements.

Getting There

Just like the time I went to Barcelona, I had to wake up at a ridiculous hour to catch my flight.  Even though the flight was at 10, we had to take a few regional trains to get to the airport in Karlsruhe-Baden.  It was so early that when we got to Karlsruhe, we could see the sunrise.

Along the journey, a friend of mine forgot this iPod on the train and by the time he remembered, the train started leaving the station.  He watched the train leave with his iPod and could do nothing about it.  He immediately went to the Deutsche Bahn office for help.  The helpful staff there immediately called the next station that it would reach so that another employee could get on the train and retrieve it.  Lucky for him, they found it.  He would end up picking up his iPod after we came back from London.

I ended up sleeping for the whole flight and once we arrived we had to go through customs because the United Kingdom was not part of the “Schengen Area”, which is made up of a group of countries that allow travel within the group without going through customs, as in they have no internal border controls.

It was really easy talking to the customs agent because there was no longer any language barrier like in the rest of Europe.  It felt so nice speaking English again.  I no longer felt bad about not being able to speak a particular country’s language.  Speaking English felt so nice in fact, that I ended up having a brief chat with the customs agent about things like how I was liking Germany and what not.  Unlike the customs agents I see at the border between USA and Canada, the one in London was really nice.  I had initially thought that Londoners would give a really snobby vibe like the Parisians, but it didn’t seem like it so far.

After going through customs, we went to buy tickets for a bus to the city center.  Unfortunately for us, the lady selling tickets refused to accept our euros (good reason for that I suppose), so we had to exchange some money at a ridiculous rate.  We bought both our return ticket at the time too and for some reason the ticket lady wrote down 3:50 am for our return bus reservation (our flight was for 7 am).  We looked at it and we were just so sad to see we had to wake up at a ridiculous hour yet again to make our flight.  But then, we decided to stay up on our last night in London and not pay money for another night’s stay at the hostel.

The bus took us to Liverpool Street and from the looks of it, the districted seemed like an economic center.  People wearing business suits going about their business filled the streets.  From there, we bought our Oyster cards (kind of like the 八達通 in Hong Kong).  It is a prepaid card for taking the London public transit system.  One simply has to place the card on the scanner when entering and leaving the station.

We took the metro to King’s Cross and proceeded to find the hostel we booked.  It turns out that the hostel used to be a courthouse, which is kind of cool.  The interiors still have some of the furnishings of a courthouse and even has courtrooms that have been redecorated into hangout areas for guests.  Unfortunately for us though, when we actually saw our rooms, we were less than satisfied.  We got a super small room for eight people with beds arranged in two rows of four.  The only way we could get in and out of our beds was to crawl from the end instead of getting on from the side.  Solid walls surrounded the other sides and gave a really cramped feeling.  The showers there weren’t that clean either.  Regardless, that was the place that we had to stay at for the next two nights.

Imperial War Museum

Our first destination was the Imperial War Museum.  The museum chronicled the British Empire’s involvement in wars since the First World War up to the present.  In addition to exhibits from the two world wars, it even had exhibits on terrorism and the Iraq War.  Like many museums in London, this one was financially supported by the government so entry was free.  Upon seeing the building, one could already notice the 15 inch battleship cannons placed in the front – one from the HMS Ramillies and the other from HMS Roberts.

When we entered the museum, we were immediately overwhelmed by the sight of all the military vehicles in the museum’s atrium.  They had everything – tanks, fighter planes, rockets, artillery cannons, submarines, etc.  There was even a piece of rubble from the World Trade Center.

In addition to the exhibits about the wars that Britain fought, there were exhibits for the Holocaust as well as genocide in the modern era.  In the World War I section, there was even a reconstruction of a trench.  When I walked through it, I saw statues of soldiers going about their daily life at the time, like a soldier manning a machine gun or a soldier writing a letter to his parents.  In the World War II section, the museum managed to get a hold on the actual bronze eagle that was once on the Reichstag in Berlin.

We stayed at the museum until its closing time at 6 and afterward, we looked for a place to eat.  Just like in Rome, we looked at the Rick Steves’ European travel guide book for a recommendation.

Trafalgar Square

The guide book led us to a pub in Trafalgar square.  Before going to the pub, we decided to check out the place first.  We didn’t spend a lot of time here because we were in a hurry to eat.

The Lord Moon of the Mall

Following the guide book, it led us here to try out London’s “pub grub”.  The way the pub worked was that people had to find a table, take note of their table number and then go up to the counter to order food.  The servers would then bring the food over according to the table number.  I ordered sausages and mash (aka bangers and mash).

The pub itself seemed really British to me.  I don’t really know how, but it just gave me that vibe.  After our meal, we walked around the city for a little bit.  Since Trafalgar Square was really close to the tourist parts of London, we decided to go there.

Westminster

Westminster, one of the districts in London, is what people know London for.  This is where the Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, and the Palace of Westminster are all situated in.

We didn’t stay here very long since we knew we’d be back here the next day when we took the walking tour.  We were all really tired too so we were all very eager to go back to the hostel to sleep.

Wellington Arch

At the beginning of the tour, everybody gathered by the Wellington Arch, a triumphal arch dedicated to Britain’s victories over Napoleon.  It is also the site of London’s second smallest police station up until 1992.

Part of the arch is also used for the ventilation from the London Underground (subway) and the heat coming out from the vents sometimes causes people to believe there is a fire.  Every now and then, somebody ends up calling the London Fire Brigade about it.

War Memorials

Throughout much of the city, war memorials can be seen almost everywhere.  Some are dedicated to certain people such as Churchill or Monty, while some are dedicated to Britain’s former colonies or even to the war effort on the home front.

Buckingham Palace – Changing of the Guard

Pretty much everyday at Buckingham Palace, tourists can see the guard change at Buckingham Palace.  We didn’t intend to go see this so when we arrived at Buckingham Palace, we saw a large concentration of tourists watching it.  There were so many people that I couldn’t even see what was going on.

To see the guards up close, we went elsewhere where there weren’t that many tourists.  In the past, people were allowed to go up to the guards and annoy them, but ever since one of the guards flipped out at a tourist, tourists are no longer allowed to go up to the guards anymore.

We tried to annoy the guards anyway though.  The tour guide got everyone to shout out “penis” really loud to see if it would make the guard laugh.  According to the guide, it works about 1 in 4 times.  This guard didn’t laugh though.

Trafalgar Square (again)

The first time we came here, we didn’t really know the significance of the statue in the city square, but the tour guide explained it to us.  The statue was of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, a British war hero involved in the Battle of Trafalgar against the French and Spanish navies.  His fleet won the battle so decisively that his fleet took no losses in ships despite having a smaller fleet than his enemies.  Unfortunately for him, he died during the battle.  It is said that his crew put his body in a wine barrel to preserve his body so that he could have a proper burial in England.  However, since his men had won such a huge victory, they ended up drinking the wine from the barrel that the admiral’s body was in, hence producing the phrase, “tapping the admiral”.

Horse Guards Parade

The next destination was the Horse Guards Parade, basically an area with an open field for horses.  It wasn’t that special I suppose.

Westminster Abbey

According to Rick Steves’, Westminster Abbey is one of the most magnificent churches in the English speaking world.  When I read that, I figured that it might not be as good as the churches that I saw in Rome.  Nonetheless, I still wanted to check out this place.  It would have been nice to see the inside, but it would cost a hefty 13 pounds to enter.  With such an expensive admission fee (compared to churches everywhere else which have free entry), I couldn’t bring myself to pay that.  The churches in Rome are probably way nicer anyways.

Palace of Westminster and the Big Ben

Pretty much right beside the abbey was the house of parliament, also known as the Palace of Westminster.  Attached to this building was the Big Ben.  I didn’t really get a good picture of the palace during the day though.

More Pub Grub

At the end of the tour, we went to a pub that had connections with the tour guide so we all got discounts on our meal.  I ordered fish and chips, one of Britain’s specialties I suppose.

Churchill War Rooms

After eating, I went to the Churchill War Rooms Museum, while my friends went to the National Gallery.  The war rooms was a museum set up such that it displayed the underground complex that the British government used during WWII.  Many of the rooms had been untouched since the end of the war.  In some instances, once the war ended, the staff went home and never returned to the command center.

The meeting room, map room, and many of the dormitories in the complex still had the old 40’s vibe.  Paraphernalia was left untouched.  Even maps showed the old names for different British colonies and still had the pin holes leftover from mapping out troop movements.

A large slab of concrete covered most of the complex to protect its occupants from bombs.  Nobody knew how well the slab would protect people, but luckily, the complex was never hit.  While walking around the complex, there are areas where a speaker will play the air raid siren sound.  I guess that was for authenticity, which was really cool.

Buckingham Palace

Now that the wave of tourists had subsided, I finally got the chance to get a good look at Buckingham Palace.  It was one of those places that didn’t look amazing in architecture and was a place where one would have to go while on a trip to London.  Maybe the next time I come to London, I will buy tickets to visit the inside of the palace.

The Cafe in the Crypt

For dinner, we looked at the guide book yet again to find a place.  This time we were recommended a place called “The Cafe in the Crypt”.  It was under a crypt of a church in Trafalgar Square.  When I ordered my food, the server for some reason was really delighted by the fact that I could speak English.

Platform 9 3/4

I hadn’t known before that in the Harry Potter books, Harry Potter went to Hogwarts from King’s Cross Station, which happened to be the station that our hostel was close to.  On our way back to the hostel that night, we came across the famous Platform 9 3/4.  There was even a cart halfway through the wall – just like in the books.

English Breakfast

Because the breakfast at our hostel sucked so much, we all decided to go have an English style breakfast on our last day.  The breakfast came with eggs, mushrooms, bacon, tomatoes and sausages.  It was really oily, but delicious.

The British Museum

According to Rick Steves, the British Museum “is the best chronicle of human civilization…ever”.  With a recommendation like that, we had to go to it.  After seeing it, I agree with Rick Steves.  The museum had information on pretty much every continent in the world.  Its most well known artifact, the Rosetta Stone was also on display.  Apparently, it was the stone tablet that allowed modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In the exhibit on ancient Greece, the museum showcased a lot of sculptures from the Parthenon.  I guess that would explain why I didn’t see any of those things when I went to Greece.  Another really nice exhibit was the one on mechanical clocks.  It displayed a lot of the different mechanisms that clocks were built out of.  Being part mechanical engineer, this was of a lot of interest to me.  I ended up analyzing the entire mechanism and figuring out exactly how clocks work.

The Millennium Bridge

Our next destination was the Tate Modern Art Gallery.  Before going inside, I went to see the nearby attractions first.  I learned of the Millennium Bridge during my engineering courses because it was an example of a badly designed bridge since it was affect by resonance.  Simply put, the bridge physically wobbled as people walked on it.

Shakespeare’s Globe

Based on the original Globe Theatre, this theatre is a modern reconstruction of the old one that burned down.  I didn’t know before that the original one had burned down.  I thought I was seeing the original.

St. Paul’s Cathedral

During the Blitz, St Paul’s Cathedral became a national symbol of resistance.  During the sustained strategic bombing of Britain during WWII, this cathedral somehow still stood.  Many of Britain’s heroes are buried here, namely Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, Sir Winston Churchill, Florence Nightingale, the Duke of Wellington, and Charles Cornwallis.

Normally, it costs money to go inside as a tourist, but since it was Sunday, the church was open for church services.  This allowed tourists to go in for free, but they weren’t allowed to take any pictures.  As usual, I disobeyed that and took pictures anyway.

I probably could have done something similar at Westminster Abbey also, but that was on the other side of town so I didn’t bother.

Tate Modern Art Gallery

Like many museums in London, this one was also free.  Looking at the different works of art here, I understood pretty much none of them without reading the description.  Interpreting art just isn’t my thing I guess.  Although, there was an exhibit about anti-Nazi works of art that was really interesting.  One photo in particular portrayed Nazi Germany as a house of cards, while another showed a bunch of skeletons depicting what Germany will be like in the future.  Another photo, although not anti-Nazi, it depicted the Japanese waking up the “sleeping giant” known as China when they invaded.

Chutneys Euston

For dinner, we went to a vegetarian Indian buffet.  For 7 pounds, we could eat as much as we wanted.  What a good deal.  That was my first time ever eating Indian food and it was really delicious.  I ate about three plates before I was full.  I didn’t get hungry until 3 in the morning.

Tower Bridge

At night, we went to see the Tower Bridge and the London Tower.  I originally thought the London Tower was just a tower, but it turned out the tower was actually part of a giant castle.

We walked across the bridge and saw the HMS Belfast, a British cruiser docked on the side of the river.  Apparently, the ship had been converted into a museum and was part of the Imperial War Museum.  If I had known about it earlier, I probably would have visited this too.

Going Home

Since our bus time was 3:50 am from Liverpool Street Station, we took a taxi to there to wait.  We went to a nearby restaurant and stayed there for a few hours playing cards.  When the bus came, we got on it and just slept.  We slept some more on the plane and on the train until we got home.  My original plan was to nap when I got home, but after so many naps earlier, it didn’t feel necessary anymore.  It probably would have ruined my sleeping schedule too.  I still felt the effects of the sleep deprivation the day after too.  Either way, it was a good trip.  I think I want to come back some time in the future.

More photos here

Since we never got to go to Neuschwanstein because of that rainy day, we went yesterday because it was so sunny.  We all woke up super early to take the 7:17 train out of Stuttgart and I ended up sleeping for most of the journey (sleeping at 1 the night before didn’t help).

Four and a half hours and 3 train transfers later, we arrived in the town of Füssen, and from there we took a bus to Hohenschwangau.  All of these German towns had a really old style of architecture – even older than the ones I see around Stuttgart.  It’s almost as if Band of Brothers used these houses for filming their show.

On the train to Füssen, we could already see that pretty much most people on board were tourists all heading to the same place.  It seemed as if the sole purpose of this town is for tourism, despite its rich history.  The nearby municipalities of Schwangau and Hohenschwangau were the same too.  Tourists were everywhere, and taking photos of everything (myself included).  From Hohenschwangau, we could already look up the hill to see a glimpse of Neuschwanstein Castle and the Bavarian Alps.

We could also see the less popular castle, Hohenschwangau Castle from Hohenschwangau.  By itself, that castle looked really great, but when put beside Neuschwanstein, it just doesn’t compare.

We went to the ticket center to hopefully get tickets for the tour of the inside, and when we reached the ticket counter after 40 minutes of waiting, we found out all the tours we wanted were full.  We even tried to get tours in languages we didn’t know like French because we just wanted to see the inside, but those were full too.  The only ones left were too late in the evening for us to go since it would conflict with our train back.  We had no choice but to only see the outside. 

From the base of the mountain, we proceeded on foot and arrived at the gate of the castle after about 10-15 minutes. For once, the attraction we went to visit wasn’t under some kind of maintenance. Since I had walked up to the castle a lot faster than the rest of my group, I went ahead and went inside to the castle courtyard.

The castle courtyard also had a spectacular view of the surrounding area.  Looking further up the mountain, I could see a lot of parachuters slowly drifting down.  Those people probably had a better view of the castle than everyone else on the ground.  When I went back to the castle gate, I found that the rest of the group still hadn’t caught up yet and I probably spent almost 30 minutes up there.  I had no idea what took them so long, but it turned out that they walked really slow and made a lot of random stops.  After meeting up with them, we walked along the forest trail to the Marienbrücke, and that was where we arrived at the location where all the iconic photos of the castle were taken.  According to Wiki, this castle was the inspiration for Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle.

Before taking any pictures of the castle, we had to fight through the rather large crowd of tourists that also wanted to take these iconic shots for themselves (I can’t say that I wasn’t one of them).  Eventually, I got on and enjoyed the view of the castle and the surrounding area.

After crossing the bridge, I climbed up a hill to get an even better view and that’s when I stumbled on a cross placed on the edge of the cliff.  Apparently, someone had died here and it was probably from falling off the mountain or something.  That made me feel a bit uneasy, since falling off was definitely in the realm of possibility.

From the bridge, we saw that people were down in the gorge and it seemed like a nice place so we took the trail down as well.  On the way down, we passed by a waterfall and two my friends decided that they’d go swimming in it.  The water looked super cold too.  Regardless, they climbed down and started swimming in there in just their underwear.  Some of the tourists walking by were kind of shocked to see that.  Some weren’t very impressed, but others found it amusing.  A funny thing about that was that people didn’t take any pictures of the waterfall because the two swimmers would be ruining the picture.  They swam in there for about 10 minutes before getting back out and once they did, we continued down to the bottom of the gorge.  The water at the bottom was so amazingly clear and looked so clean.  It was reminiscent of the time I went to Banff National Park when I was 10.

Along the shore, people had stacked stones together to build towers and they were scattered everywhere.  I tried building my own, but I failed quite epically.

It was soon time for us to leave for our train back to Stuttgart so we continued following the trail down the mountain.  The path down went along the creek where the water flowed down the mountain and that was quite nice to see.  The way the water crashed down looked kind of like white water rafting, except that there wasn’t enough space for it.

Eventually, the trail led back into town near a residential area.  The houses here too looked really old.  More architectural styles that Band of Brothers probably used.

After about 15 minutes of walking, we ended up back in Hohenschwangau.  From there, we took the train back.  At the train station, I saw the largest mass of people ever waiting for a train.  Pretty much all of these people were tourists too. 

Needless to say, it wasn’t very comfortable on that train.  All the seats had been taken up and most people had to stand in the aisles and that wasn’t great at all.  I ended up standing in the train for about an hour and fifteen minutes.  The train didn’t have air conditioning either, so here we all were, getting blasted by the sun without any ventilation for all the warm bodies in the train.  The loud drunk people and the screaming little kids didn’t make it better either.

After getting off that train to wait for our connecting train in Buchloe, we went to go buy some food at a local cafe.  While buying our food, we chatted with the owner for a little bit and it turned out that he used to work in Vancouver and lived on Robson Street.  Small world.  Unfortunately, we were in a bit of a hurry so we had to just buy our food and go.  Originally, the 20 minutes we had would have been sufficient for buying food, but the guy (not the guy we chatted with, but someone else) trying to give us our bill took the longest time ever doing it.  He literally stood at the cash register and stared out into space as if he didn’t know how to do his job.  Then he’d press a few buttons on the register (wrong buttons), and the machine just gave an unhappy beeping noise.  I had never seen anybody work so slow before.  It’s almost as if he worked with zero efficiency.  Even worse was that he forgot my order too.  My friends ended up sharing their food with me (I was really hungry).  After getting our food, we sprinted back to the train station and caught our train.  On the train back, I ended up sleeping since I was so tired from walking around all day (and was probably still under the effects of sleep deprivation from the night before too).

After my nap, I ended up taking random photos of the countryside and playing cards with the others until we reached Stuttgart again.  It was a nice trip, but it is a shame that we never got to visit the inside of the castle.

More photos here