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Published: September 14th 2009
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First night in Rosenheim, Barbeque!
Dennis and Dani always cooked us the best meals! Hello,
Well what to say about our time in Munich and Rosenheim. Awesome. A friend of mine, Dennis, is living in Rosenheim now with his girlfriend Dani (Daniella). He said he would be finishing a trans-alp hiking trip and still had a couple weeks of vacation when he returned home on the 4th of September. So from Paris we decided to beeline it straight to Munich and meet up with him. Dennis is in fact German and I had met him during my surfing days in New Zealand after undergrad. We had only spent 3 weeks or so together in NZ but it was a good group of us in our vans all living next to eachother and surfing everyday, some of the best times of my life. We arrived in Munich and Dennis said he'd come meet us around 2pm. We still had a few hours so we walked around and had a beer in front of the Glockenspiel (Spelling?) It consists of twirling dancing figures high up on the town hall building, which itself looks much like a big church...it's
Immagine 050
Dennis probably explaining something about German engineering. famous, trust me I guess 😊). Dennis arrived armed with ideas. He took us to the Hofenbraus (sp?) first. It's a gigantic beer hall where the waitresses dress up like St. Pauli girls and the dudes wear traditional lederhosen and play brass instruments (pics on claire's camera unfortunately). Then we went and checked out this river where the locals get a little bit of surfing in (again, Claire has the pics, it's cool).
Rosenheim is just an hour train ride south of Munich, right in front of the Bavarian alps. Dennis had a great setup with his own house and big yard (they say garden). The first night we just hung out and had a barbeque with beers. Delicious.
Dennis and Dani had great plans to show us a good time. They thought we could go on a hike the first day. Should we sleep up in the mountains in a Bavarian hut or just do a little day hike? We decided on a day hike so that we could go river paddling the second day. As we were driving into Austria (not too far from the house) Dennis points out that we're going to climb "that one."
Immagine 046
Climbing "Chicken" Kaisar. It's the lower of the two Kaisar peaks but still damn high we thought - 1,733 meter climb! I look at Claire (we're in the back of Dennis' VW van at this point. He has continued our appreciation for the awesomeness of vans by buying his own in Germany) and chuckle, "shit, this might be pretty hard, I hope we're ready for this." Check out the views for yourself and than imagine how much better they must have been in person. On the way down we ate at a Bavarian hut. Delicious spinach balls, bluberry crepe type thing, and great beer of course. I do not think we could have asked for a more authentic experience in Bavaria (Southern area of Germany). So yea, casual day hikes that these Germans take on a whim = let's climb a mountain from dawn to dusk.
The second day we went paddling down the river in Dennis' Canadian canoe. It only fit three and Dani had to prepare for school (She's a teacher. Dennis does social work with HS age kids) so she stayed behind. We brought a few beers and some food with us, stopped off at a little restaurant on the river to buy more of both, and enjoyed a great sunny day on the
river. We took turns floating behind in a tied off inner tube...as some know, floating down a river in a tube on a sunny day, beer in hand, is very hard to beat.
After river paddling, we went back and got ready for Herbsfest, Rosenheim's version of Octoberfest (which is technically only the Munich celebration). Again, like the beer hall in Munich, most guys wear the traditional lederhosen outfits and the girls all wear the bavarian dresses except that these seemed to purposefully accentuate, well, some things, sometimes in almost cartoonish fashion - it pretty much rises to the level of contest among the girls, so Dennis tells me. What a great time. It's very much like an American carnival except that everyone is wearing the Bavarian outfits...that and the huge beer halls. Everyone gets up on the benches, clapping, dancing, and singing long into the night. The steins of beer are gigantic and it's a huge merry drunk fest. They of course have their own songs, but it's pretty hilarious to see them get as pumped about American songs in all English just as much.
We were sad to leave the next day but it was time
and Dennis and Dani had more visitors arriving the day after! We cannot say enough about the visit though. D&D cooked us the best meals everyday, for breakfast and dinner and they showed us the most authentic and fun things to do in Bavaria. More than any other place we have visited (and I think it will be hard to top in this regard going forward), I felt like we "did" Bavaria. And I don't mean we just saw stuff. I think that's always the battle when travelling, that which involves what it means to have experienced the place. And of course, it's always different for individuals. Claire and I noticed some taking pictures of every Monet in the museum (when you can google at home), like they were somehow collecting something valuable. Was it to bore the hell out of their friends when they return home and proclaim how worldly they are because this photo was taken by them? How about just "seeing" everything so that you can say to someone, or yourself, "I saw that in person, I was there?" Limited resources require allocation and striking that balance between quantity and quality of experience (and even defining the
two) is difficult. Whatever the case, we do know that when we think back, we will truly be able to say that we experienced an important part of Bavaria. And since that goal is important to us, we can't thank them enough for making it possible.
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Marilyn Zavoskey-Davis
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Spectacular!
What gorgeous pictures! And, Ryan you are definitely a great blogger. I'm enjoying the updates very much.