Munich... Prost!!!

Guten Tag!

We arrived in Munich on Sunday morning, after catching an eaaaaarly train from Interlaken with our two friends Scott and Kate from William & Mary. We checked into our hostel- the WOMBAT, oh yeah. We picked this one because we actually discovered that our UVA friends we met back in Nice (check out that post if you missed it) were going to be in Munich at the same time, and so we decided to book the same hostel.

After checking in, we were famished and in dire need of some authentic German beer and brats, with a side of HUGE pretzels. So we headed to one of the best beer halls in the city, Augustine Keller. They were the first Munich brewery and are still known as serving the best beer in the city! Our waitress was dressed up in traditional Bavarian clothing (just picture your mental image of a beer maid at Oktoberfest- that was her). We got all of the aforementioned food and I even tried sauerkraut for the first time! Hey, if you're gonna try it, it might as well be in the country that invented it. It actually was pretty good. The best thing about the food (even though I think by the end we had had about as much as we could handle) was that it all went so well with beer! We tried lots of different kinds... the regular lighter ale they serve everywhere, as well as a darker Weissebeir- a wheat beer with a really foamy head- that was my personal favorite.

Another awesome and unplanned timing of our visit- Germany played their first World Cup game on Sunday night. For those of you that saw it, it was sick, wasn't it? Imagine watching that team play that well in a German beer hall surrounded by Munich locals, wearing Germany colors with a German flag painted on your face. Well that's exactly what we were doing Sunday night! It was pretty surreal and awesome. We tried to watch the game at the famous Haufbrauhaus beer hall, but the only TV they had set up was in the beer garden and it was raining. (By the way, we have had our first slew of rainy days- a bummer, but pretty lucky that it's our first set of bad weather for the whole trip!) Any way, we ended up just going back to the place we had lunch, one of the 28 Augustine Keller beer halls in Munich. We picked up our German garb at a store on the way and a random German girl on the street painted flags on our faces! We piled into an upstairs room with lots of locals and a few brave Australians, with wooden tables in rows running perpendicular to a huge projection screen. And yes, the viewing did come complete with huge, liter-sized beer steins full of delicious German beer. Needless to say, it was an awesome experience.

The next day, we got up and hit the streets of Munich for a guided walking tour through the old city. Fun fact: Most of Munich is only 60 years old. It was completely bombed out in WWII, because it was the capital of the Nazi movement. But Hitler loved the city so much that his subordinates were careful to meticulously photo-document the inside and outside of countless buildings so they could all be rebuilt after the war (which they assumed they would win). Well, win or lose, the photos have helped the people in Munich rebuild their city. They have deliberately built new buildings to look old, so you can get lost in the city and believe the whole time that you are walking in 200 year old streets, when in reality some of the cobblestones were hand-laid just last year.

See, I learned a lot on our tour! We also got to sample some more beer and brats. The brats were a little spicy for me and Nicole, but Tricia enjoyed them, and we all enjoyed our half-liter of beer at 11:30 am. That's how they do it in Munich! The average local drinks a liter and a half of beer per day. In fact, the city provides one liter of beer a day to all of the students living in their "perfect student" housing- you have to have the equivalent of a 4.0. That's one way to motivate students to study!

After our walking tour on Monday, we headed back to the hostel to meet up with Nate and Tyler (Arthur headed home to the States earlier this week), our friends from UVA/Nice. We all grabbed a free drink (voucher provided at check in) at the hostel bar, and also enjoyed the sweet happy hour from 6-7 pm before going out to the Haufbrauhaus (the most famous beer garden in Munich) for dinner. The Haufbrauhaus was actually one of the central meeting places for Hitler and his original Nazi supporters during the beginning of the socialist movement. There are Bavarian flags painted on the ceiling, but if you look closely you can tell that they actually cover up four swatstikas. But don't make any jokes about Munich's Nazi history- you can be arrested on the spot for doing the Nazi salute in public in Munich.

After checking out several beer halls, we headed back to the hostel bar then went on a hunt for kebabs at midnight! Yum :) To bed that night (an interesting night in our hostel dorm, but that's all I'll say about that), then up the next day to catch a tour of Dachau, one of the original concentration camps outside the city. This tour was incredibly sad, but really interesting and definitely a must-see if you're in the area. We weren't super excited, but we new it was necessary to check out such a pivitol part of our world's history. Seeing what human beings are capable of doing to each other only confirmed to me the reality that we face true evil in this world, but hearing the stories of solidarity amongst the prisoners of the camp renewed my hope in human beings and the stronger powers of good at work around us.

After we got back from that sobering tour, we hopped on a train to Vienna, Austria! That's where we are now, but I'll leave our adventures in this city for another time. For now, we love you all and we miss you terribly! A quick rundown of the things we miss from the States:
Tricia- my duvet, slippers, and watching movies
Nicole- a larger closet (scratch that, a closet.), cheap candy, and Frappacinos

And of course, all of you!!

Love you, bye for now!
Christie- hoodies, my puppy, and sleeping without earplugs