Day Twelve: We Climbed HOW Many Stairs?

Today we toured the city of Ulm!!! It was beautiful! Well... the city was. The weather, not so much... It was pouring down rain almost the whole morning. POURING. Thank goodness I had a solid raincoat!

We took a city tour as soon as we got there, which I thought was a bit excessive. The tour guide was telling us all sorts of information we didn't really need to know or care too much about.  The first place we went was Ulm Minster (Ulmer Münster), which is a Lutheran church in the middle of Ulm.  When we went inside the church, I was bothered by how the decorations weren't symmetrical. I noticed that there were statues on one side but not the other; the layout seemed symmetrical so it particularly bothered me the the decorations did not follow the same patter. However, the tour guide pointed out that the entire structure is leaning. There is one side that the wall is probably an 80 degree angle, rather than the proper 90 degree. This was not our last time visiting this church... stay tuned for the wrath of the Minster.

Holes in ceiling to make construction easier

The huge organ in the church 

We continued on the rest of the tour, visiting some places that I thought looked like classic German structure and architecture.

 One of the coolest parts of the tour, I thought, was the "Schiefes Haus," which holds a record for the world's most crooked hotel. Part of it was in a lakeish thing and it appeared to be almost sinking. It was very cool to look at!

The rain........

After the world's longest tour, we went to lunch at a pancake house that served giant pancakes. When I say pancakes, I don't mean like Pamela's Diner hotcakes, but meal pancakes. They came with all sorts of meats and toppings and spinach, but the also served the classic dessert pancakes! I ordered a Hawaiian pancake, which is like a Hawaiian pizza... but on a pancake. My table got served really early, leaving us time to order a dessert pancake to split among the table (!!!). I don't think I've ever been full off of one pancake before...

Hand in picture for size comparison

Our dessert pancake yummm

We had a little bit of free time around Ulm, when a group of us explored and went souvenir shopping.
After, we did what we were all dreading all day. We climbed. To the top of the Ulm Minster. 768 stairs to be exact. We were given an hour to get up and down and meet at the bottom, so we had lots lof time to hang out at the top.  I found it not to be a challenge of physical strength or indurance but of emotional stability. People with claustrophobia were freaking out all over the place, but for me, it was more the repetitive winding uphill climb.  There were 3 tiers that were kind of like a break (my climbing buddies and I accidentally skipped the first one sooo I only had 2). So the first 3rd was the toughest part for me. Not even ashamed to say I crawled. Hands on floor. But quickly! I kept up the pace until the 1st break, which we didn't realize so we kept on going (oops).. After that, there were little windows with metal crosses in them to change it up until the next tier. I used those as sort of a railing, pulling myself up with every window.

The little windows; my saviors

Borderline tears on the way to the top

The 2nd tier was a crammed little area that you could only walk around the circle behind a fence to get any sort of break. We continued to climb until the 3rd break, right before the big ending.  It was this big flatish area where there was room to lay out and take a break. So we took a few minute breather before the final stretch. The last staircase was the smallest yet, but it had a lot of windows looking out. It was very squished, and we had to stop about halfway up to wait in line to get to the top level. Once we finally got to the top, there was a single file line going around the circle very slowly, mostly made up of Pitt students. Here are some photos from the top of the 768 stairs!

The way down the upper most staircase 

View of the final stair case from the landing area

Once we got up and back down the small little staircase (which was super inconvenient because there were people going down the same tiny staircase as the one we were going up), we hung out on the landing for a while. Since we had a full half hour left, we thought it would be a nice way to relax after all the stairs:

We climbed that thing

OK so the walk down... There was an elderly man in front of us as soon as we started, who eventually let us pass because we were "too noisy..." sorry...  Then we came across a woman who was walking so slowly. She was taking one stair at a time, stopping for a full second on every stair and did not acknowledge the line of people behind her even once. So the walk down took a lot of patience, but I didn't want to startle her because it was clear that she was panicked. Sure enough, we were the last of the group to get to the bottom, but we also spent the longest at the top :)

We had a goodbye dinner in a restaurant underneath town hall that night with the whole group. First, half the group wanted to stop at the hotel, so we ran.  Still made time for these pictures though:

As soon as the tram stopped at the hotel, we had 7 minutes to run inside, do what we needed, then run back to the tram station. We missed it. SO 14 minutes later, we got on the tram and got to the restaurant. I sat with a table of all Americans, but it's ok because 1) more bonding and 2) I get to spend all of tomorrow with the German students! We did a gift exchange between the group members of each company group. Most of the Pitt students got their German counterparts Pitt t-shirts (which they all put on during dinner and it was the cutest thing ever). Our PPG group made frames with the group picture in it that said "PPG BEST GROUP EVER". Ok now the best part. All week, we had been referring to our PPG group as "squad," like the slang term that's a thing right now for whatever reason. Turns out, the entire time, the German students thought we were saying "squat" so on the back of the frames, it says "SQUAT"... I think it's the funniest thing ever. The goodbye dinner would have been a lot more emotional if I didn't know I was already seeing them all tomorrow, so I just ate my weird mac n cheese with my frame in peace.

Veronica's Struggle of the Day:
Literally crawling up the stairs was probably one struggle... Wow, I think this bad luck is wearing off.