Downtown Hannover

Saturday Daniel and I went to Hannover. It was our second time taking the car to venture onto the autobahn and try to arrive at a special destination. The first time was to go grocery shopping at a store called REAL ("Ray-all") which is just like a giant walmart. It's in a city 25 minutes from here called Altwarmbuchen and it definitely took us about an hour+ to make it there! Frust-rat-ing!!!! Anyway, we made it to Hannover fine, but we had trouble with the parking garage. You pull in and get a plastic coin from the machine, and when you walk up the stairs there is another machine where you are supposed to put your coin when you leave to pay. Well, we didnt understand at the time, because we werent sure if we were supposed to cash in our coin to get a ticket with an arrival time written on it before we went shopping or...something else. Well, we made that exact mistake and paid 1€ for 7 minutes of standing around conversing about what we should do with said coin. Then we took the ticket upstairs to a kind gentleman who didnt speak any english and was working the desk and tried to explain to him our confusion...in broken english/german. He must have pittied us because he was very patient and tried to explain to me what I should have done (but I couldnt understand) and eventually he gave up, ran in the back room, grabbed a red coin, gave it to me, smiled and waved me away. WE WERE STILL CONFUSED. Frustrated, we walked away and decided we didnt care anymore and we were going shopping. We had a great time, saw some funny people, and I bought some new leggings and a small magnifying mirror for putting on makeup. When we came back to the garage we were so excited to find that our red coin let us park for FREE. :) Sometimes being a confused foreigner has its bonuses...although its extremely exhausting before you get them.

On our way there...

Daniel looking like a tourist. :) He says he's going to attack me for saying that.

Shopping!

Lots of great shopping along the two sides of this street and also underground.

Pretty apartments.

Hil-ar-e-ous! A beer bike! A swarm of men jumped up on these seats as soon as this bike pulled up in front of the train station/shopping center.

Bicycle taxi & the "hauptbahnhof" = Main train station.