Hi,
I first want to say I’m sorry that I haven’t finished all my Benelux-Germany blog posts yet. I was too busy #WINNING. But seriously, Charlie Sheen doesn’t apologize to anybody, so neither do I. I’ve got Tigerblood going through my veins, so it’s time to get down to business.
We left off last time with a specific number in mind, 220. I will get to that in a second. Zach and I find our sleeper car in Berlin that will deposit us in Munich around 7:30 AM. At first, there is barely anyone in our car, so we kind of just chill for a while. A South Korean kid about our age gets on and I start talking to him. For some reason, he decides to give me some Korean and Chinese currency as a souvenir. I told Zach to pull out his wallet and give the kid a dollar. After having to pay Zach to give me the dollar bill to give to the kid, we all split some Reece’s peanut butter cups and eventually went to sleep.
Zach set an alarm for 6:45 AM, so we could wake up and have enough time to get ready before we had to get off the train. Usually, the conductor will come by wake you up in the morning, but we wanted to make sure. Come 6:45 Zach’s alarm goes off, but the conductor is nowhere in sight….
After getting dressed and brushing our teeth, I hear over the loudspeaker in German that our train has a delay of 220 minutes. That’s almost 4 hours, which is absolutely ridiculous for a train ride in between Munich and Berlin (which generally only takes 5 or so). They gave us some connections to Munich via Wurzburg as to save time.
Finally, we arrive in Munich around 11:00, which seriously hinders our plans for the day. We get to the city center right in time to hear the Glockenspiel at the Neues Rathaus (new town hall) play. We also went to the top of the town hall to get a great view of the city, as well as climbed the 297 stairs to the top of Old Peter’s Tower to get a similar view.
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| Neues Rathaus |
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| Frauenkirche from Neues Rathaus |
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| North of Neues Rathaus |
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| Neues Rathaus from the Alte Peter Tower |
I want to preface the rest of this post with a little refresher course in my Munich experience. In the summer of 2005, I took part in a small exchange program in the area of Munich. I saw all the sights, ate all the food, drank all the beer, and had a great experience in the city. In the summer of 2008, I did the same exact thing again. We did a few different activities around the city, but things didn’t change that much.
Come 2011, I am a better tour guide than tourist in Munich. Maybe I don’t remember the history of all the old buildings, but I do know where they are. Being in Munich trying to be a tourist is not a normal role anymore. Showing Zach all of the cool things about my favorite city was fun, but doing the same things for the 3rd or sometimes more time isn’t as exciting.
Nonetheless, we strolled around the city a little and grabbed a bite to eat for lunch at the Viktualienmarkt. This open-air food market has traditional Bavarian eats and beer that the city prides itself in.
We found ourselves in quite the rush to get over to a landmark that holds a special place in my heart. It isn’t so much a landmark as it is an important religious site for me. No, it’s not a synagogue…
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| ALLIANZ ARENA!!! |
It’s ALLIANZ ARENA! Home of FC Bayern Munich, the Fußball (soccer) team I obsess over, Allianz Arena hosts 69,000 fans every weekend. Zach and I scheduled a tour (something I have already done, but wouldn’t mind doing everyday for the rest of my life) into our plans at 1 PM. It takes quite a while to get there from the city center and I was pretty worried we wouldn’t in time. As soon as we get off the train, I dash over to the stadium and try to buy us tickets, while Zach nonchalantly moseys on behind me. I go up the wrong staircase and have to make my way over to the correct entrance. At this point, lazy Zach has caught up and we make it to the counter in time for the tour.
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| Your's truly near the field |
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| Changing Room |
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| Media Background for post-game interviews |
After the tour came the thing I anticipated most about our entire trip, the fan shop. The FC Bayern fan shop is where you can get everything FCB that you could ever dream of. I could spend days in there and they do even have small food items, so I could probably live there. I limited myself to just buying a personalized goalie jersey, a soccer scarf with my favorite player’s face on it, a car sticker, coasters and a keychain/bottle opener. My wallet left the store relatively unscathed compared to what I was prepared to purchase before I walked in.
From there, we struggled to find the Oktoberfest and Beer museum. After finding it just in time, we learned about the major breweries of Munich. Today, most of them have merged and now the Big 6 stake a claim as the best beer in Munich and perhaps (definitely, in my opinion) the best beer in Germany (or even further, the world). They have old mugs and items from Oktoberfests of the past.
Afterward, we went to the train station, got our things from the locker and checked into the hostel. We found a chic Italian place, which had quite a long wait, but was definitely worth it. From there, we caught up a little bit from the time lost in the morning,. We went by a few of the old churches and the university, LMU.
Ludwig Maximilian Universität is known for the original White Rose Society. During World War II, a group of students printed anti-Nazi fliers and handed them out around campus. Famously, they threw their fliers off a balcony at the University, only to found out and turned in to the Nazis by a janitor. They were tried and executed within the same day. Sophie Scholl, her brother and the other students now have a memorial at the school and are praised for their resistance to Nazism. They were also mentioned at the German Resistance Museum in Berlin that we saw a few days prior.
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| White Rose Papers |
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| White Rose Papers |
We went to sleep in preparation for another long day.
Waking up early was the most effective way of getting everything done. Our second day in Munich was no exception. We hit S-Bahn around 7:30 to get to Dachau, a concentration camp turned memorial and museum.
Upon arrival, we got an audio guide and took to walking around on our own. Concentration camps are obviously very somber places for all people, but Dachau no longer incites those feelings for me. Going there for a 3rd time made me apathetic to the exhibition itself, but obviously not to the Holocaust in general. I don’t want to detract from the place, so if you want to go see what a concentration camp is like, I definitely think Dachau is a place of note.
I didn’t take any pictures there. I decided I had enough from there already and that it is a place I will always have a clear mental image of.
From Dachau, we moved on to our tour of the BMW plant in Munich. I had done this back in 2008, but I decided it was worth it to take Zach and do it again. How often do you get to see the production of luxury cars? Unfortunately and expectedly, pictures are not allowed of the factory. I swear that I had the same exact tour guide back in 2008 the first time. Afterward, I asked him if he had been doing the tours that long and he said yes.
We walked around the rest of the BMW Welt (BMW World), the business center and showroom of everything BMW. There are a few cool games and driving simulators. The best part of the building is the architecture itself. Here is what it looks like:
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| Inside BMW Welt |
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| A classic BMW |
Just nearby to BMW Welt is the Olympic Park from the 1972 summer games. The stadium and surrounding areas function as places for daily sporting activities. The TV Tower has an outside deck and a rather expensive restaurant. We went to the observation deck and snapped some shots. If you zoom in a lot to some of the pictures, you can see Allianz Arena.
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| BMW Welt (left) and the Headquarters Building (middle) from the Olympic TV Tower |
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| Allianz Arena from the TV Tower |
Back at the hostel, we tuned in to coverage of Hosseni Mubarak speaking to the Egyptian people. Our TV had CNN so we watched that. My oh my, CNN had possibly the worst commentating and reporting I have ever seen. I had no idea what actually happened until I went online later. Mubarak said he wasn’t stepping down that night, but by the time we would get back to Freiburg, he was gone.
Again, we knew we had to be up early again, so early into bed again.
The main difference between our time spent in Munich and our time spent in Berlin was that we really never spent more than 2 hours at the same place in Berlin. In Munich, we were doing tours and activities that lasted quite a while longer. Our final day in Munich was no exception.
We boarded the S-Bahn en route to Andechs Brauerei (Brewery). Once you get off the train, you take a 4 km hike through the forest to the monastery and brewery. There was a threat of rain, which made the hike pretty risky. We waited an hour for the bus instead, and decided meanwhile to check out the beautiful Ammersee.
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| Ammersee (SW of Munich) |
We get to Andechs pretty early in the morning, quite the inappropriate time of day to drink beer. We walked around, peered inside the monastery and went to the gift shop, which is pretty much filled with Christian keepsakes (no thanks).
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| The Andechs Monastery |
Eventually, the restaurant opened and we grabbed lunch and beer. I started with a liter of Weißbier (translated to “White” beer, but refers to the use of wheat in fermentation)
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| Andechs Weißbier |
After trying a half-liter of the Doppelback Dunkel (strong dark beer), I capped my drinking off with an additional half-liter of Weißbier. We were done…but still had a museum to see in the afternoon??? Oh god.
Zach passed out as soon as we got on the S-Bahn back to the main part of town and I drifted in and out of consciousness during the hour ride. The Deutsches Museum is a world-renown science museum with spectacular fighter plane, U-Boat and Nanotechnology exhibits. Having arrived at 4 PM, the info desk lady tipped me off about not security not checking tickets at the gate after 4. We “snuck” in and spent the last open hour of the museum checking these exhibits out. Definitely a place to go to if you have even the slightest interest in history or science.
Not having much time before our train to Freiburg, we hit up the same Asian restaurant as the night before (delicious again) and ate quickly. We said goodbye to my favorite city and were off into the night…
And so ends my Benelux-Germany Trip Series. The good news is I am travelling a lot more right now. I have already travelled to Hamburg for a few days last week and am currently on a train (11:00 AM CET, Thursday, March 10, 2011) en route to Vienna via Nurnberg to visit Max 1. After a few days there, I will be visiting some friends on an alternative Spring Break trip to Budapest. Finally, my current travels will end in Esbjerg, Denmark on March 25th, on my trip to the Women’s World Curling Championships. I am really excited about everything coming up in the next two weeks (ESPECIALLY CURLING and Madeleine Dupont).
I will also include a small post about what I have been doing in Freiburg since coming back from Benelux-Germany. My weekly routine has changed for the better I would say, with a few new things in my life.
Adam
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