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Published: December 24th 2007
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We travelled much of the day, on three separate trains, and finally made it to Munich in the early evening. Our hostel was next to the train station in what turned out to be the "hostel district". After touring our surroundings and getting lost, and met some very fun Canadian girls who were some of our roommates at the hostel. We all made plans to meet up at a jazz bar with an open mic night later that night.
Dave and I headed out that way, and after again getting lost, found the hidden away basement bar. Dave had brought his harmonica, hoping to jump in on the open mic. Unfortunately, all of the musicians were friends with each other, and meanly didn't let him join in. Still, they sounded good, and the atmosphere was very cool - many music-lovers nestled in together in a candle-lit basement with huge mugs of beer.
The next morning, we met up with the widely known Mike's Bikes tour. We weren't the only ones that knew of it, there must have been over 100 people there waiting for the tour. We were given bikes and introduced to our relatively obnoxious host. The tour
was a bit disapointing. The people on the tour weren't that cool by and large, and the tour guide payed more attention to making us yell at Germans with mullets than actually telling us about the sites. Dave and I reasoned that Mikes Bikes had probably gotten too big for its own britches, as it felt very commercialized - we could hear the other groups guides (we were split into 3 groups of 30-some, and each group started with a 5 minute offset) repeating the exact same spiel our guide was finishing delivering - word for word. We heard later from other people that the smaller rival company's tours were a lot more fun and smaller - word to the wise...
The bike tour did us in though, so we took naps, and then got ready for a Munich pub crawl we had heard about. We were truly an international group on the pub crawl, Brits, Canadians, some other Americans from Chicago and California - probably the person from the farthest away was this girl from Zimbabwe who insisted on calling the country Rhodesia and kind of sounded like a South African. The only issue with the pub crawl
was the guide. He said that he wouldn't be waiting up for people, so we had to pay attention when we exited from bar to bar. He wasn't kidding. We lost Dave at the second bar after he started talking politics with a local, and I lost the group a few stops later when I went to the bathroom. Dave and I rendezvouzed back at the hostel eventually.
The next day, we checked out the sites around Munich that we had seen on the bike tour, and actually got a feel for them. As had been dogging us through much of our tour of Europe - the Glockenspiel, a key site, was inside scaffolding and under construction. A notable highlight was the Residenzmuseum, the residence of the Bavarian royalty. There must have really been a lot of money flying around Bavaria back in the day. We then again walked around the awesome Englischer Garten (3 times bigger than New York's central park), and had some Masses (the big Oktoberfest-style glass stein's) and big soft pretzels with sweet mustard at the Chinesiche Turm, probably the most famous beer garden in Munich. We finished the day by dining in Augustiner, a
several-century old beer hall, and then getting some Masses at the Hofbrauhaus, Munich's best known beer hall. The rain that started quelled any later plans.
The last day, we headed to Dachau, the first concentration of the Nazi regime, which is about 45 minutes away by metro and then bus from Munich. The entrance to the site was free, but from many people's recommendations, we joined a tour group for 10 euros when we got there. We were happy we did. Although we didn't get to see everything (the camp, and the amount of artifacts and displays is astounding), the tour guide really brought the site to life with stories of what happened on the steps that we were walking on. It was sad, but also morbidly fascinating, and we learned a lot of interesting and unexpected things, like the fact that the camp had been started for political prisoners, had held several priests who had spoken out against the Nazi's, was the training school for the Commandants of the other concentration camps, and had functioned for several years after the war as a refugee camp. I think that it filled in a lot of gaps about the Holocaust
that had been existing for me from the movies and books I had based my understanding on. There were people from all over the world there, and I think that the site is something that must be witnessed for everyone in Munich that has the time.
We quietly made it back to Munich proper, picked up our bags, and went to the train station for our late night sleeper train to Amsterdam. We stopped into an Internet cafe in the train station, where a very drunk German man started to talk to Dave and I, and offered us beers. He apparently loved Americans, but I couldn't understand his German very well because he was slurring his speech and speaking in the Bavarian dialect. We made a hasty exit in the direction of the trains when he started stroking Dave's hand, mumbling about what nice hands he had.
For some more details, check out Dave's blog:
Finally made it to Western Europe...and am dealing with the crash of my travel blog ----------------------------------------------------
The events in this blog occurred in the period when TravelBlog was down. Luckily, I kept a personal journal off which I am basing this write-up. Although writing in the moment is preferable, I think that the photos, people
we met, and story are worth sharing.
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