Europa Park!

Last weekend I had the pleasure of joining Erika's family to visit Europa Park, one of Europe's biggest (if not the biggest) amusement parks.  Erika's mom got 4 free tickets from her work, including 40 euros worth of food vouchers, and she asked Erika and I to join her and her partner Sven.  Score. Also it was approximately one hour away from Erika's family's apartment by car. Double score. I hadn't been to an amusement part since the 8th grade trip to Adventureland, but Europa Park was a huge step up. Roller coasters are awesome, and they had a few big ones. Probably not as awesome as Cedar Point or whatever it is in Ohio, but that's a pretty American thing to do, have the biggest and fastest of something. Europa Park is smaller in size most likely, but with much more style, probably. It's divided into 13 different countries, with different architecture, styles, and attractions to match the country. Iceland was pretty awesome because thats where all the new roller coasters were, not sure why though. Also interestingly enough, the newest roller coaster located in between Iceland and Russia was built with money from the Russian gas company, Gazprom and was title "Blue Fire". They had a fancy little Gazprom exhibition hall with company propaganda and an 8 man foosball table and bouncing techno music for the entire roller coaster queue.

The entrance at 9am. It was probably high of 50F and overcast the whole day. I could start a roller coaster feeling reasonably warm, but by the time it was over I was shivering and with a wet stripe of tears from the edge of my eye to my ears.

Here is one of the roller coasters, the Silver Star. An oldie, but a goodie. That way up was very slow and suspenseful the first time around, but the drop was awesome. 

The Grimm Bros. area, mostly for kiddie rides on mushrooms and the like

I thought this was a pretty cool design for a toilet...

Italy

The Russian area was really cool. A couple roller coasters (top left corner) and directly in front is a model of the Mir station, I think. Still not sure how legit it was but it had some signatures painted on the side and some biographies inside.  

Kremlin gateway to Russland.

Finland

This big ball in France actually had a roller coaster inside of it. It was space themed and simulated a blast off. It was also awesome because of the techno music, spacemen, and because it was pitch black inside except for the strobe lights.  And the big bow tie was added this year to celebrate Europa Parks 40th anniversary this year.

Portugal's water coaster. It was fun, but quite cold afterwards. You can see the splash in this picture. Best part was that there was no line.

They even had a little parade rolling through the main streets. It's hard to see from the picture, but that girl is waving a Netto flag. Netto is a discount grocery store that Erika's mom works at once a week, and they were the ones sponsoring all the free tickets. There were hundreds of flags and banners around the park because it was "Netto Employee Appreciation Day" or something, so the park was opened specifically for Netto employees and families. I used to shop at a Netto in Erfurt and thought it was a pretty good grocery store, and now that I got some roller coaster rides out of it too, Netto just moved up a few places in the grocery store hierarchy. Aldi is shit.