liters of beer + great pretzels = Munich

Gutentag! Munich is awesome, but more on that later in the post.

I have lots to say (as always) so this might be another epic blog. :) Thursday Andrew and I went to that Indian concert thing and it was spectacular. As I'd said, we'd seen them rehearsing, but they were even better doing their “real” thing. They were in a 4x9 square that had lights separating each person and curtains. So each person would “reveal” themselves. At first it was the singer, then the violin-type players, then the drums, etc. The music was unlike anything I'd ever heard. Of course, there were a bunch of hippies around. With that many European people around on a summer night, I was surprised it didn't smell bad. My theory is that maybe the hippies here go against the norm by actually wearing deodorant. Haha. The concert was so impressive that I even bought the CD. That's saying something because I have maybe 10 CDs to my name. It was a nice night...we split a bottle of wine and just got engrossed in the music.

Friday morning we got up early (4:15...ugh! That was 10 PM for you guys...we should have called to say goodnight!) and hopped on the subway to the train station. Stupid us assumed that our train would leave from the main train station, but once we got there, we realized it left from the station across town so we had to hop on a tram. Our getting up in “plenty of time” turned into just barely making it on the train (we have a tendency to cut it close with traveling transportation!) For future reference if any of you come over here with a Eurail Pass, it is not valid in the Czech Republic. We kind of learned that the hard way...it was no big deal, we just had to buy train tickets for our traveling within the country. They weren't too expensive and they were well worth it because Prague is beautiful.

Since we only had a day in the city we made the most of it and walked around the “old town”, “new town” and “lesser town.” We also walked up a humongous hill (and the sun was actually shining and it was actually hot) to the Prague Castle. It was neat...we just walked around it and didn't actually take the tour of it. (We're saving all of our castle touring for Neuschweinstein in a couple days!) We also walked around the square where we stumbled upon a classic car show, which was pretty neat. There were old Jags, BMWs, Rolls Royces, etc. We had dinner at this little bar/restaurant and had some AMAZING beer. It was a dark pilsner and had a sweet, caramel aftertaste. If I can, I am going to try to find it in the states. The restaurant was really good except for the fact that they charged us just to bring bread and condiments to the table...neither of which we ate or used. We found that really odd, but I guess it's just the culture difference.

We had a bad hostel experience (drunk guys talking loudly at 6 AM and not shutting up) and a bit of a hassle traveling (having to buy the tickets, going to the wrong train station twice...we went to the wrong one while trying to leave Prague too. This time it wasn't completely our fault) but we are both very glad we went because it was beautiful.

On to Munich...the train yesterday was packed so we sat in a full cabin. Two of our fellow passengers were 20-something Irish girls who were really nice and good company. We also got to overhear some frat boyish guys talking about their random night in a beer hall. “Dude” and “fuck” were their favorite words. We made a game out of counting how many times they said it within 5 minutes. (Hey, it was a long train ride, we had to amuse ourselves somehow!)

When we got to Munich it was raining yet again. Rain seems to follow us throughout our trip, but we don't let that get us down. It was funny because as soon as we walked out of the train station I saw a big sign for Hacker Pschorr beer, which is the beer that my pappaw used to specially order, so I thought that was really cool. We checked into our hostel and hit the town running. We had dinner at the Augustiner-Keller beer hall, which is allegedly the oldest beer garden in Munich. We split a plate of “traditional” Bavarian food which included: roast duck, suckling pig, pork knuckle, sausage, saurkraut, and a spoonful of veggies. I tried it all and as much as I hate to admit it, the suckling pig was pretty good Pork knuckle was fatty. We also had some good beer (we're in Germany, of course we had good beer!) While I paced myself only drinking half a liter, Andrew had a half liter, then had a liter to top it off. The liter beer steins are bigger than my head and I had to use two hands to pick up his beer!

After our wonderful dinner, we wandered around the city and stumbled into a Gay Pride festival, which was interesting. We continued to wander and walked around just seeing the city for an hour or so then happened to wander into the Hofbrauhaus...Munich's most famous beer hall. Being a Saturday night, we figured we should check it out and see what the big fuss was. (We heard that locals only go there when they're forced to). The place was packed with people. We found a spot in front of the “German” band that was wearing lederhosen, playing tubas and accordians, and drinking liters of beer. A really cool couple from Canada joined us at our table and they seriously were us in 40 years. Greg was a retired government worker who had an undergraduate degree in History and a graduate degree in Geography. Mary was a high school guidance counselor/former middle school teacher. They love to golf, they're not into the museum type traveling. They were just really great company and I think the 4 of us all stayed longer than we'd intended because of the great company. 2 liters of beer (a piece) later, we closed down the place at midnight and came to the hostel and went to bed. Tami, I still plan on having dinner there before we leave and having a fest chicken for you :)

Today was fun. We went to the BMW Welt (which we decided a welt was a high tech show room). It was really neat to see the different things about the cars. We were going to go to the BMW museum, but we decided that we want to take the tour of the plant instead so we are probably going to go back Wednesday to do that since the plant tours are only given during the week. We went to the Deutches Museum of Science and Technology too. Not being museum people, we figured we wouldn't need much time there so we only went about 2 hours before it was supposed to close. The place is huge and our 2 hours only got us through one exhibition hall about Marine Navigation, so we are going to go back tomorrow and probably spend the majority of the day there because there is a whole lot more that we want to see there.

We wandered around the city some more and happened to catch the clock tower “show” at the Rathaus. It was way more impressive than Bern's “famous” clock. We had dinner at the Augustiner Beirhalle. We split a plate of sausages and a plate of cheese and of course had beer to go with it. It was raining when we got done eating, so we decided to come back to our hostel, do some laundry, and hop online.

Munich has definitely been both of our favorite cities so far and we've only been here a day and a half. We still have 2 and a half days to spend here. We may try to go to Oberamagau (?) on Tuesday, but it will just depend on if there's anything here we want to see.

Andrew sends his regards and promises that he'll do the updating next time, he's just being tired and lazy tonight (his words, not mine).