Germany

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Sorry guys, no photos yet, my camera battery has died again so I can't retrieve them! Will add them tomorrow.


Frankfurt
Mum and I flew from Istanbul to Frankfurt am Main, Germany, to meet up with Ness, who I would be continuing my travels with when Mum went home. To be honest nothing much happened in Frankfurt. It's a big city that people fly into or out of, but not one for sightseeing. Possibly the most 'interesting' thing about our stay in Frankfurt was the location of the hostel. It was located in the red light district, which they explained to us in a polite email AFTER we had booked there :P
From what I heard from some of the guys there, we had it easy, being female. A guy just trying to get back to the hostel would have to deal with people harassing him and trying to pull him in to their 'establishment', even in the middle of the day!
Mostly we just relaxed in Frankfurt and tried to get some plans together for the remainder of the trip. Mum was around for a few days, after which she scooted off the to airport to catch a plane home and Ness and I got ready to head to Munich....

Munich
....Yes, for the one and only Oktoberfest. People keep on asking why its called Oktoberfest if its in September and I honestly don't know anymore. Someone said its probably just held earlier in the year so that it's not so cold and more tourists will come and drink beer and spend lots of money. Maybe it used to be held in Oktober? Does anyone know?
Anyway, regardless of WHY its in September, it is, and thats when we went. We arrived in Munich on a Friday afternoon and made our way to “The Tent” where we were due to meet Toby and Smiley - friends from Perth, who had been travelling for almost a year. Sorry Chris, I figure more people will know who i'm talking about if I call you Smiley :P
They had a tent with them, and had kindly offered us sleeping space in it. So, we figured we were all set. In Munich at the time of Oktoberfest, check. Somewhere to sleep, check. Beer drinking shoes.... hmmm. We didn't have any on that night - we were too tired from travelling and both Ness and I were not feeling too crash hot - we had some sort of flu-y thing. So that night we went to bed really early in the hopes of being well rested for beer drinking the next day. It was now that we discovered another flaw in our plans. It was incredibly cold. I do not recommend sleeping in a tent in Munich in September with the sort of sleeping bag I have (I think its only rated to 5 degrees C or so). And it is super thin - good for packing away small, bad for acting as a mattress. The worst thing was probably that the cold came up through the ground and we didn't have any sleeping mats or anything to put underneath us. As well as tent space, “The Tent” had big rooms full of bunk beds and floor space, for other last minute Oktoberfesters. What they also had were blankets!! So, after one night of ridiculously cold pseudo sleep we went and asked if we could hire/borrow some blankets. And... have a guess?? We were 'not allowed', because we were staying in our own tent, not in their crazy big room. And get this, we were paying exactly the same amount per night as the people in the big room!! So. Needless to say we were not very happy, and decided some beer might help. Ness, Smiley and I headed into the Oktoberfest grounds to meet up with Toby and some of his friends, who had already been there for a couple of hours, having left earlier in the morning. We thought it would be too late to try to get a seat in a beer tent, so we wandered around the grounds for a while and instead stepped into a 'carousel bar' for a pint or two. I don't really think I need to explain a carousel bar do I?... The only thing that could have made it more awesome would have been little horses to sit on instead of regular chairs. But we made do with ordinary chairs, and rotated slowly whilst drinking delicious Bavarian beer.
We were determined to experience a proper beer tent on Sunday, and had heard a few recommendations depending on what we were looking for. Hofbrau, the one everyone would have heard of, would be full of Australians and tourists, we were told, and Augustiner was one of the most traditional and popular with the locals. With this in mind we decided on Augustiner and arrived at 9am on Sunday morning to secure a seat. We needn't have worried being QUITE that early- I guess its not as busy on a Sunday as the rest of the weekend. But I'm kind of glad we got there at that time, since it was pretty novel being served our first litre of beer at 9.15am. The tav wouldn't even be open yet!!
Well, did we ever have a good time in this tent!! We bought massive 'festival sized' pretzels, kept up the beer drinking and eagerly awaited the arrival of the Band... I imagine its similar in every tent - in the middle they have this raised stage area where the band plays and some stereotypical german men sing hilarious drinking (or otherwise) songs that we don't understand but attempt to sing anyway. Omg and the traditional dress was EVERYWHERE!! I was very jealous of the girls and women in their Dirndls (I tried in vain to find one for myself in the various stores but none were quite right...) and maybe even a little bit sad that I'm not a guy and therefore couldn't wear Lederhosen (although some women did, so maybe there is hope...). Anyway, to cut a 6 hour beer-addled story short, we had an AWESOME time in the Augustiner tent. The atmosphere was just amazing, so festive and fun!
The next day we went on a NewEurope walking tour of Munich, since we'd heard there was much more to the city than beer. Turns out the Adelaide contingent of our Contiki tour (Chris, Jono and Niall) were going to be in Munich about the same time as us, so we organised to meet up with them before the tour, and all learnt about Munich together! On the tour I also randomly met up with some old school friends - Geoff and Ben. What are the odds! On the tour we took in some interesting sites and learnt some Munich history, but nothing exciting comes to mind to tell you, unfortunately, so I'll continue on to the next day, to when Ness and I were planning to do another tour - of Neuschwanstein Castle. Its like THE CASTLE TO SEE, I think, and was commissioned by the slightly nutty Ludwig II of Bavaria. We had been told the entire second level was a pond, so we were very much looking forward to seeing it. However, this day was our last in Munich, so we needed to leave of packs somewhere. We were catching a night train to Berlin so figured it would be nice and simple to lock our bags in lockers at the main train station and meet up with the Neuschwanstein tour, which conveniently, left from the main train station! Easy!!
Except that when we got to the main station, with just enough time to lock up our bags and get to the meeting point, we found that all the lockers were off limits, and noone was allowed to use them. “Leave your bags in hotel, lockers not in use”, we were told, apparently due to 'security reasons'. Well, this was obviuosly a big problem for us: 1)we were not staying in a hotel 2) even if we could go back to The Tent and find empty lockers, by the time we got back to the main station we would be too late to go on the tour. damn damn damn.
There went our only chance to see this awesome castle, so we decided to drown our sorrows in beer (after leaving our bags in Adelaide's hostel room - thanks again Jono!!). So, here we were again, back at Theresienwiese - home of the Oktoberfest grounds. After being turned away from one tent because we had little backpacks and bags with us, we ended up at the Hofbrau tent. We'd been told this tent was full of Australian's and other tourists, which I think was pretty accurate. And what do you know, we ran into Geoff and Ben again! Ness and I had one beer here, but were not as impressed as we were with Augustiner (both in terms of BEER and atmosphere). Still, it was a good bit of fun for the morning, and I tried some delicious food (some kind of veal stew with butter noodles or something - very weird side dish...)
After leaving the Oktoberfest grounds Ness and I had a lot of time to kill, before our night train to Berlin. A large chuck of this was spent sitting in the grounds of what was presumably a castle or sorts, named Schloss Nymphenburg, taking photos of waterbirds.
Later that night, to the amusement and interest of a cleaner, we sat with our bags all around us, playing as many games of cards as we could handle, still waiting for that damn night train to Berlin. Eventually it was time, and on we jumped, and went promptly to sleep!

Berlin
Many hours later we arrived in Berlin and made our way to our hostel - The Heart of Gold. Hopefully some of you recognise this as the spaceship from Douglas Adams' Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy - which was the theme of the entire hostel. I was very tempted to buy a 'heart of gold berlin' towel, primarily because it had “DON'T PANIC” written on it in large, friendly letters, but also because my travel towel is kind of crap. Anyway, when we left Munich Toby and Chris were trying to find a cheap way to get to Berlin, and apparently they did, because they rocked up that night at the Heart of Gold. The next day I went on a walking tour all alone, because Toby, Chris and Ness had all been to Berlin already and done the same tour. It was raining and freezing and a little miserable, but our tour guide was good fun and knowledgable. We visited the place where Hitler's bunker was located, where he eventually killed himself, and places like Checkpoint Charlie, the Holocaust memorial plus bits of the Berlin Wall, obviously. It is a lot smaller than I imagined... *shrug*
After stopping at what used to be Checkpoint Charlie we stopped for a coffee and I heard someone shout my name. I turned around and there were Jim and Jack, from my Contiki tour! I was very surprised to see them, thats for sure. That night we had decided to go on the NewEurope pub crawl of Berlin. It started on pretty good terms - free beer for an hour and €1 shots of Jager. As far as pubcrawls go it was pretty fun, but not really anything special (sorry guys!). And they took us to a club kinda far away from the main town and then the metro closed and didn't open again til 4am. So when Ness and I bailed - too hungry, cold and tired to wait for the metro to open - we got a taxi back to the train station near our hostel, in the hopes of finding some food... I can't forget this part of the story, because I was rather amazed at my discovery. There was one little bakery open at the train station, where we ordered some delicous pastry based snacks for the walk home, in rather bad German. Now, I would never have believed how GOOD an idea it is to put a sausage inside a croissant and call that some kind of food. But it was sooo good, you have no idea. Good enough to tell you about, anyway :P
The next day Ness and I decided to get our science fix at the Natural History Museum. We spent a good few hours in there, reading English signs when we could, or otherwise looking at things and wondering what they were because the only explanation was in German. Unfortunately (for us anyway) there was a Deep Sea special exhibit, and of all the things they had moved into storage to make space, they'd moved all the BIRDS and all the insects!!??! What the hell, honestly. Did someone tell them Ness and I were coming? Useless. We'd seen everything else, so once we found out this sad news we decided our museum time was over. Out in the real world again we realised it was freezing cold, so we got some delicious hot chocolate and AWESOME PASTA (which was more exciting at the time because we were craving it like mad) and headed slowly back to the hostel. And on that note, I'm done with Germany!
Next stop, Czech Republic :-)

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