Munich Highlights

On our last morning in Prague, we made it to the train station, got our Eurail passes stamped and activated, and found our train to Munich. I have realized that I love train travel. I love how they are very reliable and pretty much always on time. I love the ease of just being able to hop on board without the hassle of security and things that flights have. I love seeing the countryside and different sights pass by the window. I love how the little snack cart always comes by even though we never bought anything from it, because each time I think of Harry Potter and hear “Anything from the trolley?” in my head. So yes, I enjoyed our various train trips, even though a few were more stressful than others.

When we made it to Munich, we had a little difficulty locating our hostel, but eventually found it. The hostel in Munich was probably my favorite of the trip. It just had a really fun atmosphere and was pretty well located. That first night in Munich we walked a really long ways, just seeing what sort of things we would want to check out during the next three days. There was a bar on the main floor of the hostel that was pretty busy when we got back, so we stopped for “one beer” and thought we wouldn’t stay very long since we were pretty tired. Well, at 3 am we were still there, and it had been a lot of fun. I had thought that there would have been mostly American students staying there, but most of the people we met were from Australia, and we talked to some guys from Holland too. When I first started talking to the guy from Holland, I thought he had said he was from Ireland. So I was all excited and was talking about how I was going to be living there this semester, and he couldn’t believe it. I thought he seemed a little too surprised, and then sort of confused when I talked about where I was going to be, which is when I realized he had said Holland and not Ireland.  But it was very fun talking with people from all over the world and hearing about where they had traveled so far and where they were headed next.

The next night as Erin and I were headed out to find something for dinner, we had a “small world” moment as we were waiting to cross the street. The girls standing right in front of us looked really familiar, and we realized they were our friends from St. Ben’s. We probably made sort of a scene on that street corner because we were so excited we had just run into each other. We joined them for dinner, realized they were staying in the place right next door to us, and we ended up spending most of the next two days seeing Munich with them.

Some of the highlights:

The free walking tour we took, which was very informational.

Trying some German beer.

The HUGE, lovely park.

Our day trip to the Dachau concentration camp Memorial was very informative, disturbing, and pretty depressing, but definitely and memorable and worthwhile way to spend a day.

Some other various photos:

(Yes, they are surfing in the middle of a city park!)