Munich Day 3

---

Travel Blog Day 11: Munich

Alrighty, sorta went 2 days without writing there, but no worries, my memory is top notch. Sorry I have not loaded in a while, it is just so hard to do here because you have to go and find a café, and then its still not easy because the café’s signal is very weak. Last time I believe that I left you after Dachau, so we’ll go from there.

That night was Josh’s birthday, so we took him on down to the largest beer garden in all of the world (in terms of the # of people), which is the Augustiner Beer Garden, we had a good time talking with other groups, and enjoyed the soccer match that they had on the large TV screen (Spain beat Italy in penalty kicks). Then we headed out for a while longer to a local sports café. They showed a lot of soccer, but then I saw something beautiful… an American sport. The IRL race was being shown live in the café, no sound and they actually switched it back to another soccer match before the race ended, but it was still good to see the fast cars go round. We met a crazy Finish guy that we talked with for a long time. This was one intense man, he was very funny though. He wanted to talk with us about everything and we talked to him for several hours. He spoke of sports, cars, politics… we discussed the war and the economy and all kinds of issues that we were told to avoid, but that was really interesting to get another slant on things. This Finnish man told us that what we hear on our TV about how the world doesn’t like us or our policies were not true… he basically said the only ones who really don’t like it are the French, and everyone else is more fair about it. There will be some who hate us, but he asked us not to judge all of them from those few… pretty interesting.

When we got up the next day, Josh wasn’t feeling the best, and wanted to go on the internet for a while, so Kyle and I went down to the English garden since he hadn’t been there and it really is quite the site to see. So we headed on down and grabbed some lunch and a beer. Well, about 10 minutes later the sky got dark and the clouds opened up a nasty storm. Usually here, the rain is very weak and typically at night, but this was similar to a downpour in NC… there were too many people hiding under the sheltered pagoda, so we just stayed under one of the giant chestnut trees that they have with a British couple. Kyle was closer to the tree and stayed relatively dry, which I got much wetter, but it wasn’t too bad… those trees are pretty amazing at stopping the rain.

So then to dry off we grabbed another brew and headed out into the sun (which can be dangerous for Kyle because is a very white Irishman). We quickly dried out and headed on back home to pick up Josh, who was still down at the internet café. We scooped him up and went to dinner, not too much more exciting to report that night because we had an early morning today, we were going to see Crazy King Ludwig’s fairy tail castle.

We booked our trip with a company because they provide a guide and the transport (a 2 hour train ride plus a 20 minute bus ride). Our guide was a spunky Irish girl who was very friendly and is basically traveling around the world working… she said she wants to spend about 6 months to a year at each city and then move on, but that she didn’t have the money to do it without working… she’s headed to Sydney in a few months to do it there, and wants to continue this life for about 10 years or so… You would never see that in America, not a chance. Unfortunately, I did not properly charge my MP3 player before the trip, so it lead to a rather boring plane ride for me, and I can’t sleep on moving objects for the most part.
But we continued to climb slowly into the Alps, near the German town of Fussen. From the train station we could not see the castle, but we could see the alps, which were pretty amazing. Apparently these are just the baby alps, which is scary considering we were 3000 feet above sea level. When the bus brought us near the castles, it became a great view… I took video of this as well and will post it. The only problem there is that they only allowed video and cameras when outside of the castle, while inside you could do neither. The castle is also almost entirely unfinished because Ludwig was possibly murdered/ basically a strange coup… I’ll tell you more if you want to know, but don’t want to bore the non-history readers. But only 12 rooms that we saw were finished, and the rest of the castle is just giant empty rooms (finished on the outside). They were really elaborate and gorgeous, everywhere you looked there was some kind of art, all the walls were cover in rich tapestries the floors were covered in mosaics and the ceilings were painted with elaborate portraits and stories being told. Each room had its own theme and story board, mostly centered around the operas of the composer Richard Wagner.

The castle was a really neat experience, but it took forever to get to… kind of a see it once in your life only kinda thing. We are just now back from that and ready to head out for our last night in Munich. Tomorrow we will get up and go to Salzburg for 3 days before reaching Croatia. The food is starting to get to me a bit here, my stomach isn’t doing too great with all of it, but I am getting by, I just don’t feel like eating as often because of the different things that they use that I am not used to. I love sausages and bratwursts, but right now I don’t think I could eat another one for 3 months or so (but I have had about 10 already, maybe I’m just sick of them). There is not the wide American variety here and that could be some of why not too much sounds overly appealing. Well, its off for the night to grab some food and a few more unique German beers. See ya soon, I should have photos and maybe video posted within a week because I’ll have internet in Croatia.

---