Munich Day 1

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Travel Blog Day 8 Munich

We arrived in Munich and headed down to the hotel… a little disappointing, we were supposed to have AC and a king size and single bed… no AC and we have a single and a queen… it is warmer here too, getting over 80 today, so it was again difficult to sleep. Josh and I are both running on low energy, we tend to walk really slowly (but a lot of people do that here). Last night since we got in kinda late, we couldn’t do any of the guided tours, so we decided to just head up to the English Garden’s, which is the worlds largest beer garden (by acreage). It was basically just a massive park, but there were boatloads of people there just sunbathing and playing in the large grass fields… several brought beer and sandwiches, while others were getting their beer from the local suppliers.

There is a swift river running through the gardens, and the people were playing in it (and drinking), it tends to cool you down, we thought about it but didn’t want to be soaked without towels or anything (and no swimsuit with us)… some had swimsuits, but a lot of people just get down to their underwear and sunbath/swim. The English Gardens are known to be open to nudity (The others aren’t), but thankfully we did not see any. IT would take the whole day to see the whole garden, its that big, but instead we decided to figure out where the large beer garden was… it was easy to get lost in there because there is basically no sense of direction. Josh has a compass on his watch and we knew we had to go north, so we just headed that way… eventually we heard polka music and we figured that had to be it… we followed the music pied piper style and found a massive garden, it could probably seat 5000 or so (the largest is 8000 and we are going tomorrow maybe).

It was pretty neat, it was like a big dorm cafeteria where you went and got all your beer and food for yourself and then just went and found a table to sit at. As I am sure most know, you sit with everybody. When we sat, there weren’t many near us, but as the night wore on, more and more sat all around us and we made some new friends (including a bachelorette party that was dressed pretty funny in all traditional German waitress outfits). What we did not realize is that they were also showing the soccer game there on a large screen. We sat near the polka band, which was basically at 75 degrees from the screen, we could see, just a little distorted. It was Croatia v Turkey, and Turkey won in penalty kicks, they went crazy… there was actually some fighting between the two… people here don’t like Turks and they are everywhere. All night long, cars were honking flying the Turkish flag and screaming, it was strange to see in Germany.

The beer garden closes around 11 or so (they just stop serving), so Josh and I went to find another place to sample the local fare, but everything in the city centre was closed on a Friday night by 1 AM. I couldn’t believe that one because in Cologne, places were open until 6am, and the same with Heidelberg. No biggie though, we just wanted a pretzel or something, but burger king was open, so we tried some German burger king fries… they were similar, but not quite the same. They probably use a different oil. So we headed home to grab some sleep, today there will be much walking, we are going on a tour of the history of the Reich in Germany in about an hour and then an hour after that one ends, we are going to do a brewery/food tour where they take you around to all the old breweries, show you how they work, let you sample food and beer. It is a 4 hour tour, so I’m guessing we’ll get a lot of good info that I will love.

Kyle didn’t make it in yesterday, I guess he is coming today and we had a miscommunication. Haven’t heard from him yet though. WE are waiting on Kyle to go to Dachau and Fussen (the castle). So we will do that the next 2 days. See yah for now, but I have no idea when this will go up, no internet at the hotel again… crazy Germans.

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