The Black Forest & Munich

After a busy week of 10+ hour work days (I have to drink coffee now) combined with evenings of beach volleyball, cooking for all my roommates, German board games, banking, a haircut, and a few bars, I had an awesome long weekend. I left work on Friday around noon and came back here where I met two of my roommates, Marius and Suman, along with one of their classmates, Carmen, and we piled in Marius' car, a small cabriolet convertible, and headed to the next town to pick up some groceries as we were heading to Marius' parents house outside the town of Neustadt in the Black Forest. We bought a lot of stuff and had to pile it on ourselves to fit it all in the car. It was only a 20-30 minute drive, and we were really in the Black Forest, I was impressed. We hung around for the afternoon, went for a walk and saw the amazing view in the pictures I'll hopefully be able to upload. We had a great barbeque as people showed up, and had a bonfire, guitar playing and singing, and lots of beer. It was starting to get light out as I went to bed, I think it was around 4:30am. I slept for a few short hours and somehow managed to wake up around ten after eight. I had to catch a train from the middle of town, a 10km drive away, at 8:35am. Thankfully another of my roommates at the party, Sascha, had agreed to drive me and was awake when I got up. I got to the platform with only few minutes to spare. I felt horrible and smelled like a campfire, but was happy I made it to the train. 

I slept for much of the first train ride, which was 2-3 hours long, and found out Danielle, a UNBer, was on the same train again as we were leaving, so we sat together on the next train from Ulm to Munich. The second train was an ICE (Intercity Express) train so it only stopped once which made it a fairly quick trip given the distance we went, so we arrived in Munich at 1:30pm. Turns out there was another UNBer on the second train, Carolann, so we found her in the train station and headed to the hostel but not before there was some shopping for Birkenstocks, I didn't buy anything the whole time in Munich except for beer and food. I meant to get some souvenirs, but has absolutely no room. We checked into the hostel and I was able to change and get cleaned up a bit since I had not been feeling too great. Danielle, Carolann, and I walked around a bit and planned to meet up with some others for supper later as they had arrived on Friday and were out visiting the concentration camp Dauschau. We saw a little bit of Munich on our short walk and had some ice cream that tasted like it had alcohol in it, not as good as it might sound. We met up with Breagh, her sister Danielle, and a friend, Keegan, that was just beginning a 4 month trip around Europe, and strangely enough I had met him at the Cellar, the pub at UNB, a couple of months ago. We had doner kebaps for supper, and set out to find some beer and wine as we only had 2 hours before the pub crawl was to begin. We finally found some cold beer (not an easy find in Germany) and got ready to go out for the night, Breagh and Danielle bought some awesome traditional Bavarian clothing, the Dirndl, to wear for the night. We ended up going to three different beer gardens on the pub crawl, and the one liter beers really hit me with the lack of sleep, so I don't remember everything too clearly, but I know I had a good time.

Saturday morning I had breakfast at the hostel and put the pieces together of the previous night, and also went to Starbucks for a second coffee, before a few us went on the walking tour of Munich like the one in Berlin. I think I liked the Munich tour even more than the Berlin one, we had another awesome tour guide and was incredibly knowledgeable. We saw and learned so much of Munich, it was crazy to think we were standing in the same place Hitler once stood. Below are the pictures of the tour.

After the tour we took a walk through the English Garden, a massive park in Munich, and came upon a field full of people with a crowd on the opposite side. We decided to walk though the many sunbathers, but there were way too many completely naked people we didn't make it to the other side, we turned around, nearly dying from the awkwardness. We made our way out of the garden, with a few more laughs, and ended up seeing the playing of the Glockenspeil, which doesn't sound all that great, I was more amused by the number of people recording it. We then headed to the Hofbrauhaus, the most famous and oldest beer house in Munich, for beer and supper. It was a great time and we had quite the crew as we met up with a bunch of the others. 

After we ate we headed back to the hostel, and we ended up partying in the hostel all night, playing drinking games, going to Burger King, meeting lots of other travelers, it was a great night. Monday morning we woke up and headed to the train station for the journey back, there were 6 of us travelling together and it ended up taking nearly 7 hours to get back as we bought cheaper tickets to save some money so we couldn't take the fast trains. It was an awesome weekend, definitely one that won't soon be forgotten, well the parts that I remember anyways!