Day One
When Nora and I arrived at our hostel in Munich we found out we were only booked for one night. In mid-May I had sent an email to the hostel asking to cancel our reservation for the second night; I had realized it would be good to do Munich to Venice as an overnight trip, since it's eight hours by train. I waited to get confirmation of the change from the hostel before I booked the train--but I never did. I emailed them again and waited some more and still didn't hear back, and eventually I was just going to book the train whether or not we had the hostel for that night. But by then it was too close to the travel dates for me to be able to book it.
the glockenspiel |
It was a huge mess and I was super stressed and I ended up having to book a flight for 6:20 the next morning, because it was of course quicker to fly and I assumed we still had the second night at the hostel. But we got there and we didn't, and it turned out they actually had sent me an email way back on May 17, which for some reason I had never received (I was having some weird email glitches around that time). But they had room the next night, so we just booked it then and everything was fine.
Unfortunately the wireless internet there was down, so we went out looking for internet and food. We walked all over the area, searching for either, and finally paid to use the internet at a cafe. I didn't mind paying, really, because I could use an actual keyboard (rather than Nora's iPod Touch, which was convenient but hard to type on) and spend a little more time emailing than usual.
We decided to just go into the city center and find a place to eat there. It was after 4, and all I'd eaten so far that day was the roll from breakfast in Vienna and two chocolate cookies of Nora's at the hostel, so I was starving and had been for a while. In the city center we found a festival going on, with people selling food and clothing and jewelry and crafts everywhere and live music all around too. In the Marienplatz we listened to a band play "Hey Jude" and then watched the Rathaus-Glockenspiel strike five.
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The audience was enjoying their beer. |
We wandered around a lot, stopping at some churches and seeing the festival, which was all over. It was something like Sommerfest Residenz; we saw a poster. There were people in traditional costume all over. I got a crepe as a snack sometime after five.
We walked around quite a lot and finally decided to find somewhere to eat dinner. We went to the oldest restaurant in Munich, where I got tomato cream soup.
After we finished we waited and waited for the bill (I didn’t really mind, because it was nice to just sit), and since the waiter was just standing around we finally asked and he brought it to us, and then we got out the money and waited again, and he didn’t come, so finally we got up and brought it to him. He gave Nora 10 cents too few in change. It was good food, and a cool place, but the service was just weird. (At least that's what I thought until I was back home, when I found out that in at least some places in Europe it's considered pushy to bring the bill; you're supposed to ask for it when you're ready. Oops.) There was a dumbwaiter thing where the food came down from upstairs, which was cool.
It was after 8:30 then, and we were ready to go back to the
hostel. We rode the U-Bahn illegally
because we didn’t want to spend money on tickets; it was really easy to ride
without a ticket there, because you could just walk right onto the train. Apparently people checked if you had a ticket sometimes, but they never did while we were there.
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courtesy of Wikipedia |
There were two other women in our room with us (it was a women-only room,
which was nice), who spoke mostly (what we eventually figured out was) Finnish. Our plan for the next day was to continue to
take it easy.
Day Two
They also had this cool three-key box. |
We slept in till 9:15, ate breakfast at the hostel, then
walked into the city center. Except we actually didn't, not at first, because I
led us the wrong way--the opposite direction, in fact. I took me longer than it should have to check the map and realize my mistake, and I felt really stupid. But we made it to the center fine after that
and found the Stadtmuseum, a museum on Munich’s history, which was free. It was interesting; they had
booklets with the text in English, which was nice. The thing I most remember was a section
upstairs with lots of creepy puppets and stuff from old amusement parks, some
of which moved or talked or made noise as you went by. They kept startling me.
Then we walked to the Deutsches Museum, a huge science and technology museum. Student admission cost three euros, but only if you had a student ID, so I had to pay the full admission of 8.50. But it was a cool place. We saw the big marine navigation exhibit, then a fake mine that went on and on. We saw so much mining stuff, but the text was only in German, so we didn’t really learn anything. It was cool, just endless.
When we finally got out we had to sit down and recover for a little while before exploring more of the museum. Around 4:30 we were both done in and sat around till the museum closed at five. Then we walked through a light rain to the Marienplatz, where the band was once again doing songs in English, and bought sandwiches before again illegally riding the U-Bahn back to Hauptbahnhof, our stop. It was cold, and I was tired of walking, and it was only one stop.
in the Marienplatz |
nearby (towers in the background are the Frauenkirche) |
The unlabeled black dot = Venice. courtesy of Google Maps |
As we were leaving our room we met the Chinese woman just
coming in; she still seemed wide awake.
She was very nice and friendly.
We made it onto our plane completely fine, no problems at all, which was kind of surprising. Unfortunately, before going to Venice we had to fly to Cologne, which is not only in the opposite direction but also farther from Munich than Venice is. It was the only way I'd been able to get us there at the last minute, though, and despite its ridiculousness, it worked--after a bumpy landing in Cologne, we were actually off to Venice.
Back to Europe 2010
Back to Europe 2010