The 7 hours on the train was brutal but we managed to keep ourselves entertained, mostly by talking about names that sounded good and bad. When we got to Heidelberg, we stepped out of the train station into a sea of rental bikes and we were greeted by a huge metallic sculpture of a futuristic-looking nodding horse across the road. We asked for directions to the hostel at the Tourist Info Centre and we were off once again. The hostel was pretty remote and for a first hostel experience, we were roughing it. It was cheap though. After dumping our stuff in the hostel, we caught the bus, passed downtown Heidelberg (lots of places to go shopping + a big mall + a Woolworths which I haven't seen since I left Australia) and got off with all the other tourists at the stop for the Bergbahn. The Bergbahn is one of the oldest funicular railways in Europe, apparently. And a funicular railway is like a tram that takes you up a super steep slope to the top of the mountain. We could have walked up but we were trying to catch the last English tour of the day and we were already late so we just took the Bergbahn. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Anyway, we got up there, took pictures in the gardens just outside the castle grounds and eavesdropped on the English tour we just missed, and took pictures of the castle itself. There were lots of pink stone knights stuck on the castle walls, and there were some broken down walls standing where an entire part of the castle used to be. Even though we caught up with the last tour, we lost interest and just drifted away from the group and looked around on our own. Inside the castle, there were more fancy pink buildings with some gold trim and stone kings and knights stuck to the walls so we took pictures of that. There was also a cobblestone courtyard with a fountain, the obligatory overpriced souvenir shop and a massive wine cellar. The wine cellar had a huge barrel that was twice as tall as me, called the Kleines Faß which means 'small barrel', and in the next huge room was the Big Granddaddy of All Barrels Ever Known to Man -- the Großes Faß. That thing was probably more than four times as tall as me, and you had to climb stairs to get on top of it (where there was a platform). I couldn't fit the entire thing into a single photo, even standing in the next room. Whoever used to own that thing must have been a very happy, very drunk human being. After that, we tried to find our way out onto the balcony we saw earlier from the gardens but we ended up on a lane leading down the mountain out of the castle, so we backtracked and wandered around the gardens for a while. We took the Bergbahn down and walked to the Kornmarkt where we checked out the huge church called the Heiliggeistkirche or something and the Hercules Fountain. We grabbed doners for dinner, wandered around the university and tried to find the student jail but couldn't, so we ended up window shopping in the old town and went back to the hostel, with its huge huge disturbing poster of grey-skinned, big-pale-eyed, shocked-looking people in the lobby, for the night.