Advertisement
Published: September 6th 2008
Edit Blog Post
Chaos at the Airport
Some of the emergency vehicles surrounding our plane What an amazing city! It reminds me of other European cities, but at the same time it's so distinct. I especially like the German culture; I didn't think it would impress me so much. Out of all of the countries that I've been to, Germany is the only one where they actually wear traditional clothing. I see all kinds of people wearing Lederhosen, and whatever the female equivalent is. They're being sold in all kinds of stores, but I think that's only because Oktoberfest is happening in a couple of weeks. Too bad we won't be here then! Speaking of mass amounts of drinking, beer is everywhere!! They even have depictions of hops and such on historical monuments. It's great because everyone casually drinks at all times of the day, and it's not a big deal. We went on the Beer Challenge I mentioned before. There was a group of about 30 of us that met in Central Station for our first beer, which was a "travel beer". It's not against the law to drink in public, so on the metro on the way to our first beer hall, we drank. Our first stop was the famous Hofbrau Haus, where we
had a pint of beer. Then we went to two other really cool beer halls where we also had more pints. Our 4th stop was the Augustiner beer garden, which has a capacity of 8,000! It was HUGE! There was hundreds of picnic tables set up in this park area, and people filling all of them. Our group was really awesome, everyone got along so well and just had a great time. I met an awesome girl, Jean, who is from Scotland, and also a couple of guys from Brazil. I love hostels because you always meet so many cool people from other countries. It's great learning about the little things that are so different from culture to culture. For instance, Kara said "your mother!" to someone, and the Brazilian guys were so confused. Why would we be insulting someone's mother?! It was great. After the 4th stop, we ended up going back to the hostel for a free shot of Jägermeister and some more beer. Needless to say, we were all trashed! And I mean trashed. Wow. (Sorry mom and dad...... but you know, when in Rome. 😉 ). But really, it was such a traditional cultural thing, and
it was really fun to participate in it.
We had a very busy day today, and surprisingly it was not difficult to get up at all! German beer is so pure (only hops, barley, water and yeast... no additives or anything) that you don't get a hangover. Fantastic! I love European breakfasts so much, because all it is pretty much everywhere is a roll or some kind of pastry, Nutella, jelly, fruit, sometimes cereal and cheese. It's so simple, but so good. After that we went on a tour of Nymphenburg, a Baroque palace where the rulers of Bavaria went in the summer. It was beautiful. It reminded me of Versailles outside of Paris.
After the tour, some friends and I were going to rent some bikes and check out a few places. I was so excited for this because my feet are killing me, but alas all of the places we went to rent from did not have any bikes left. Sad story. We ended up going up a huge tower in St. Peter's church so that we could see the whole city. It was an amazing view!
Afterward, we were going to go to the
Beer Garden
A tiny portion of the massive beer garden English beer garden, but it was so far away and we were very tired, so we ended up just shopping for awhile. We had dinner at a very cute little cafe in the "Old Munich" area. Actually, I didn't really have dinner. The menus never have English translations, so we kind of have to guess at things. I've had weinerschnitzl a lot (breaded pork, SO amazing) so I wanted to try something different, but I wasn't in an adventurous mood, so I stuck with the one English word on the menu "spaghetti". Well, it turned out to be ice cream that looked like noodles with raspberry sauce on top. Weird! It was very good, but I wanted some damn spaghetti!
Well that pretty much sums everything up so far. I'm sitting in our hostel bar/computer room area right now, people watching and checking things out on the internet. Pretty much everyone is so exhausted from the 3 nights of intense drinking, and miles and miles of walking, so it's going to be an early bed time tonight, thank God. We're leaving for Salzburg tomorrow at 9am, and on the way there we are stopping at Dachau. WWII and especially
Beer Garden
Me, Heather, and our awesome tour guide on the Beer Challenge the Holocaust are a fascination of mine; I've read probably a dozen books on the Holocaust, so actually seeing one of the concentration camps will be amazing, in a very sobering way.
I'm going to try to upload some pictures onto the site, but if it seems complicated I'll try it later. I'm too tired to futz around with technology right now. Afterward, I need to try and cram everything back into my bags. Oy veh.
More later!!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.068s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0377s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb