Gut Bier!

I came to Munchen knowing..8 words of German.

1) gut
2) bier
3) ja
4) nien
5) danke scheun
6) guten tag

Gut and Bier ended up being the most helpful.


Caroline, Jessie, and I (after having been home in Roma for all of 3.5 days) hopped onto our overnight train to Munich on Thursday totally pumped for some meat, beer, and pretty city-seeing. Check, CHECK, check. I LOOOOVE MUNCHEN, and all of Germany for that matter.

So we roll into Munich at 6,30 on Friday morning and decide that we are going to milk our Eurails and go to Fussen to see King Ludwig's Neuschwanstein Castle! If you are not aware, this castle in Bavaria was THE inspiration for Cinderella's castle in Disney World. Ohhhh YEA. So we spent Halloween training through Bavaria early in the morning, during which tons of thick forests, spiky white snowcapped mountains, rolling fields of grass, and bright yellow and orange fall leaves appeared from the fog. Stunning. So then we got to Fussen, the town where the castle is located, and we were kind of shocked. It looked fake. Disney World fake. Except it was legit, totally REAL. Nothing fake about it... straight out of a fairy tale. I kept looking around, half-expecting to see some prince on a white horse gallop past us up to the castle.. or for dwarves to peek through the trees at us, or for a princess to be locked in the tall, tall, taaaaaallllll tower that topped the castle on the side of that mountain. So cool. It looked like Happy Valley or some crazy made-up storybook land. Every little girl's dream is to be a princess.. and I totally felt like I had stepped into a fairy tale. So I was a princess for Halloween this year :)

We stayed for a few hours and trained back to Munchen in time to walk around a bit and find dinner. We wandered (with our hostel's map and recommendation) toward a restaurant that they said was off the beaten tourist track called Augustiner Brau Stuben. OMG. So there are 6 kinds of German beer, and sub-beers under the 6 main beers' umbrellas. Augustiner is one of the 6, so by the name we could tell that that was the house specialty. We go inside this place and it is PACKED. With GERMANS. It was soo loud and boisterous and completely chaotic with waiters and waitresses wearing Bavarian clothes juggling liter steins of bier as they weaved through wooden tables and benches full of 15-20 people each. The food smelled incredible and we were shooed toward the bar by a large German woman.. so the 3 of us are standing there and somehow end up with half-liters of a light wheat beer in front of us. YESSS. And it was so good, and so smooth, and delightful. Finally another large German woman communicates to us that we should follow her so we can sit down and eat! We follow, pick up the menu.. everything is in German... so we point to rando things on the menu and ask the friendly white-haired man sitting next to us if this is "GUT??" or if that is "GUT??" and somehow end up with the most amazing food in the world in front of us. Sauerkraut, 3 kinds of meat/wursts, potatoes, grease, yesssssss. All with bier (gut bier- at this point I'm on my second 0.5L) and brezen (soft prezels). :D

That night was slightly fuzzy but so so so so so so SOO much fun. The bier hall was just so fun and friendly and loud and happy. And delicious. And it ended up being very cheap. SUCCESS.


Saturday was November 1. November 1 is a national/religious holiday for ALL OF EUROPE. Everything is closed on November 1. Haha. Totally neglected to note that. Oh well- Caroline and I walked around alllll of Munchen, popped into some gorgeous churches and gardens, and window shopped almost all morning and early afternoon while Jessie toured the Dachau Concentration Camp nearby. So whoever said German food is terrible has obviously NOT been to Germany. It's been one of my favorites so far. I've been sick since midway through Paris, so in the morning we went to a bakery (Muller) near our hostel for pastries and tee, and the mamdgoiehdhrys0ussss that I pointed to and got was amazing. Kind of like a streusel-frosting-cranberry danish thing. Saw the Glockenspiel, which is a very famous clocktower performance in Marienplatz during which little cuckoo-clock type figures dance around to pretty belltower chimes. And then mid-afternoon we decided that a snack was necessary, so we went to another bakery that was totally packed with people speaking (yelling) German and ordered a huge breze and a white chocolate raspberry mousse cake thing (Caroline) and a chocolate covered mousse cake looking thing (me)..... and, acclimated to the Italian concept of no free table seating EVER, took everything "to go" and snuck our way into the outdoor seating furthest away from the door.... and ate these glorious cakes with our FINGERS. So hilarious, so delicious. I bet we didn't even need to pay extra to get forks. I bet all the Germans were laughing at us, the dumb Americans. But it was so fun and I would do it ten more times. Mmmmmmmm.

That night we went to Haufbrauhaus. Umm. It's a biergarten. We ordered our 0.5L of Haufbrau and then the evening continued into
1) Americans joining us and buying us 90E of alcohol and food
2) Our table and the surrounding tables noticing that I had over half of my bier left and demanding that I chug it in a race [against some Mexican guy, for 50 Euro]... so I did, and I WON. It was epic- there were about 30-ish people [some French guys, some South Africans, a lot of Germans] screaming and cheering when I won. Peer pressure at its finest.
3) much love
4) cheese noodles, kuchensomethingsomething- very delicious
5) new friendship with 2 girls, Alana and Lizzy, who we had hung out with all evening before the biergarten. Alana is Australian and is dating a ukie guy who lives in London and Lizzy is an American au pair currently living in Switzerland.

Sunday- I found the Ukie church in Munchen and checked out their hromada. Pretty awesome. I miss my people a LOT. For the rest of Sunday we hung out with Lizzy and went to Café Trachtenvogl, which has no fewer than 35 flavors of hot chocolate. <3 mmm. I ordered the darkest dark hot chocolate on the menu... and a real chocolate chip cookie. First one since leaving the States. YUM. Then, since in Munchen all state-owned museums are 1E on Sundays, we went to the Deutsch Museum-- of science and technology!! Then we walked around Munchen, then went to dinner, where I tried a Radler, which is light bier mixed with lemonade soda....actually really good. We walked around some more, enjoyed Bavaria, sat in Marienplatz eating real German apfelstrudel at night, and then hopped on the overnight train back to Roma.

YAY GERMANY. I LOVE YOU.