Munich

The train trip from Salzburg to Munich should have been straight forward as the two cities are not very far apart and there were many trains going between them. However, when we boarded our train we went one stop to the German border before the train terminated and we thought we would have to catch a bus as we recalled seeing something about a bus on the destination sign back at Salzburg station.

However, we couldn't find when the bus for Munich departed from and when we asked at the border station the person said it would not be covered under our Eurail pass. This meant we had to wait another 30 minutes for the next train.

Munich had another massive hauptbahnhof station with a large roof covering all of the platforms and lots of shops, eateries and lockers similar to most of the German stations in big cities. We didn't have far to walk to the small pension hotel we had prebooked several nights before.

The next day we took a 2 hour train trip on a branch line to a place called Fussen where we changed to a bus to go to Neuschwanstein Castle. Ross had really wanted to go to this castle as he had a picture of it on a 3,000 piece jigsaw that he had at Mt Martha. The weather on this day was terrible, but despite this we set off on a walk up a hill to the castle. We then set off on a tour with lots of other people where we got to explore the completed rooms and heard a bit about King Ludwig II who built it and lived in it for a short period before he died under mysterious circumstances.

The story of the castle and the king was quite fascinating and the rooms inside the castle were very extravagent. Overall we really enjoyed our time at the castle. After we finhished the tour the weather had cleared up a bit and we were able to take a picture of the castle from the famous viewing spot at the Marian Bridge. We then caught the bus and train back to Munich.

Unfortunately the next day in Munich was no better weatherwise, and despite our best intentions to see everything, the stroll in the pouring rain through the Enlishgarten was not quite what we had hoped for!

Like most German cities Munich has an excellent public transport system which includes S-Bahns, U-Bahns, trams and buses. As usual we managed to take all the rail based forms of transport.

Despite the terrible weather our highlight for Munich was doing a guided tour of the 1972 stadium built for the 1972 Olympics. We arrived at the stadium in the pouring rain 5 minutes before a guided tour was due to start (totally by chance) and decided to do the tour after we found out that the tour was undercover.

It was the only tour for the day and we were the only non German speaking people on the tour. But this was no problem for the tour guide who said everything first in German and then repeated in English just for us.

The whole precinct for the Olympics was built in just 6 years and covered all the major sports. The main stadium itself has a roof only on one side covering only half of the stands as there was not sufficient time to complete the roofing for the games. After the Olympics the stadium continued to be used for athletics meets and also was home to the two Munich based soccer sides that compete in the German league.

For the 2006 Soccer World Cup it was decided that Munich would be one of the host venues, however in order to meet FIFA regulatations the stadium had to be upgraded with undercover seating. Whilst the architect who designed the stadium was prepared to allow this, the soccer clubs based there wanted more to be done, so what ended up happening was a completely new stadium was built elsewhere for the World Cup and since then the two soccer clubs have been based there. Since this time the old Olympic stadium struggles to make money as athletics does not draw the crowds like soccer. The Olympic stadium now has to rely on major events such as concerts to keep going. It all sounds a bit similar to a certain former stadium which was located in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne that some greedy individuals sold off for housing. However, unlike Waverley Park, the Munich Olympic stadium is owned by the City of Munich who intend to keep and maintain it!

As part of the tour we got to go through the stands, the VIP area (where we got to play on a giant Fuseball table with 22 men per side) and go into the players dressing rooms which were still marked with the players names from 2005 when the stadium was last used for soccer. We even noticed the Australian Paul Agostino's name on one of the lockers who used to play for one of the sides.

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