Bavarian Vacation

Munich. Well. It is a rather daunting task to portray to you six days of traveling and sightseeing. I suppose I’ll start at the beginning and attempt to go in chronological order without going off on too many tangents.
The train ride there was about nine hours. The ride was long, but it was scenic and not at all stressful. Susan and I arrived at around 4:30 and checked into our hostel. We were assigned to a dorm on the second floor first, but when we got there and found someone else in our beds, we went back and they apologized and put us in a room to ourselves on the third floor. The sun doesn’t set until about 9:30 here, so we decided to see something. We just set out with a free map from our hostel and decided to head to the Englischer Garten, which we heard was quite nice. We saw a beautiful city on our walk. Munich really is gorgeous, and only rarely do you feel like you’re in a big city. And it was warm and sunny out! A change of pace from the Baltic Sea – I even put on shorts when we got there! We found a bier garten in the Englischer Garten and got sausage and potato wedges for dinner (and we may have been the only ones not drinking beer at the gigantic outdoor eating area) because they were cheap and pretty safe. There were bugs just swarming everywhere and it was kind of disgusting, so we finished quick and headed back to the hostel. Luckily our hostel was right next to the main train station (the hauptbanhof), so that was easy enough to find on the map.
The next morning we met Conny (a professor we have at Greifswald who is from the Munich area and offered to show us around) and she gave us a nice tour of the city, including the Olympic pavilion that’s still intact from the 70s. She brought us out to lunch at a traditional Bavarian restaurant and ordered us traditional food. She bought me a beer (what Bavaria is known for of course), but I let her down gently after a few sips, because to be honest, it was gross, as all beer that I’ve tried is. Though Susan assured me that the beer in Bavaria is delicious! (Guess I’m just lacking the alcohol gene) That night we shared our six person dorm with only two other girls, who were from Japan, and pretty much just kept to themselves, though they did speak a bit of English.
The next morning we met Conny and her boyfriend Ken (who is from Texas but who’s lived in Munich for years now) bright and early and they drove us about 2 hours outside of the city and into the mountains to see Hohenschwangau & Neuschwanstein castles (yes, I spelled those right – I checked). They were so gorgeous! Quite a hike to get to Neuschwanstein, but it was completely worth it. Hohenschwangau was the childhood home of “Mad” King Ludwig II, and Neuschwanstein is basically next door, and was completely over the top, just like King Ludwig, who built it, but died before it was finished, so it’s still not finished technically. We spent all day there, and then in the late afternoon, Conny and Ken brought us to two gorgeous Rococo churches near and in her hometown. After which we joined her sister and parents for a traditional dinner that they had prepared for us. It was so good! And her family was so incredibly nice! That night at the hostel we had a full room with Rita (from Vancouver), Sisters Meredith and Livia (from Auckland New Zealand) and a girl whose name I cannot remember (but she was from Estonia). We talked with Rita and “Mez” and Livia for hours and the sisters even spent all the next day with us. Rita just graduated from the University of British Columbia, is engaged, and is starting work for a mining company (she’s literally a gold digger as she puts it). Livia is graduated too, and is an interior designer at an architectural firm, while Mez is taking a semester off from school.
So the next morning we joined a tour to Dachau Concentration Camp, which was powerful, and seemed so odd when compared to the gorgeous day and its bucolic surroundings. Most of the former camp wasn’t open to the public, and the part that was is only partially original. After the war, the camp became a refugee camp, which completely changed everything because the refugees basically turned it into a town. In the 60s though, camp survivors wanted it turned into a memorial, so they bulldozed a lot and rebuilt things the way it looked (basically) when the camp was liberated. There I met a guy from Argentina who forgot his camera at his hostel and asked me to take pictures for him and email them to him. He told me that he felt a connection to the camp because about thirty years ago, Argentina was apparently ruled by a military government and they also had concentration camps which they modeled after the Nazi system, and he did point out that the U.S. supported the military government only because it was the militarists versus the communists. Sorry about that…
That afternoon, Susan and the sisters and I joined a free walking tour of Munich. Our guide was from Ireland (when I asked him how he got here, he said he followed a girl) and he was very funny and very knowledgeable, and the 3 hour tour was great. After that, the four of us wandered around until we found a restaurant and got pizza and crepes (strange sounding, I know, but delicious). The girls told us all about how they’re traveling Europe for two months, and they started in London and have been so many great places in France, Spain, and Italy, and next they’re headed to Austria, Turkey, and Greece if I recall correctly. It’s amazing how much they’ve seen and how much they’ve done!
The next day we spent in Rothenberg ob de Tauber, which Conny suggested to us. It is a beautiful preserved Medieval town but a huge tourist trap. Every other shop was full of souvenirs, but it was a nice day, and we saw some nice scenery and I got apfelstrudel at lunch!
That night we had new suitmates at the hostel: Joy (from China) and Jovana (from Brazil), and two older women who didn’t come in until after we’d all fallen asleep, so I don’t know who they were. Rita was there that night too, though it was her last night before she headed back to Vancouver (she’d also been traveling Europe for a couple months). Joy was rather quiet, and Jovana graduated college in 2008 and works as a translator at home (she knows German, English, and Portuguese).
Our last day was Sunday, and we decided to do another tour to Saltzburg Austria. The day started out rainy, and our tour consisted of only one other person, a girl, Anna, who just graduated from college in North Carolina. Our tour guide (a very nice and very talkative gay man who told us all about his partner that he met when he lived in Seattle, and how gay marriage is legal in Germany, which I didn’t know) was excited that there was only the three of us for his tour, so he bought us pizza for lunch! The rain cleared up, and the day was gorgeous and hot, but so worth it. He directed us on a hike that would take us up onto a hill where we would get a nice view of the Alps. Boy was he right! They were gorgeous! I took lots of pictures, but they just do not do them any sort of justice! They’re awe-inspiring. But our tour was basically based on where scenes from the Sound of Music had been filmed (which I was excited about) and where Mozart had lived and worked.
The train-ride back home was another very long day or riding, we took a later train, so we didn’t arrive back until a quarter past 8. Unfortunately, we also had to walk back to our apartment, in the rain, and carrying our luggage, so we didn’t get back to the apartment until almost 9, dripping wet and frustrated. But being back in Greifswald is nice after spending a week in the hostel, though we did get to meet some awesome people.
That is the abbreviated, but basically good information of my week-long trip to the gorgeous Bavaria! A highly suggested place to visit and one I’d like to visit again!
Gute Nacht.