We woke up around 9-9:15 this morning and leisurely got our stuff organized and repacked before heading to the train station to go to Munich! We had granola bars for breakfast and got to the train station right on time to board the train and leave. We got to Munich around lunchtime and went in search (carrying our heavy backpacks) for a place to stay! We wanted to stay close to the Hofbrauhaus (famous beer garden) so we took a tram to the city center to begin our search! After about 30 min of walking and getting a quote from "the cheapest hotel in the area" for 160 euro/night, we decided to take a tram back to the main train station and find a cheaper place to stay there! We succeeded and found a youth hostel for 13 euro per person/night! The hostel was fairly nice but sharing a room with 10 other people is not easy and neither of us slept very well. However, it was cheap and near the tram so we were happy! After locking all our stuff up, we went to a thai restaurant nearby for lunch. IT WAS SOOOO GOOD! We had sweet and soup soup, mini spring rolls, and thai curry chicken. After lunch, we found an internet cafe to wish our wonderful mothers who we love SOO much a Happy Mothers Day, then walked to the Hofbrauhaus! We were there a loooong time... Around 5 hours! We originally sat next to a man from Romania and a women from Norway (in their late twenties) who met in the middle to catch up, and made friends with them! After about an hour, a big group of people from a month long tour came in and 4 of them asked to sit at our table so we made room for them. There were two couples, one married and one in a long term relationship, all from Australia. We made friends with them fast and learned that their tour consisted of 12 countries in 28 days so they only had a day or two in each country! They were very interesting and we learned a lot about the cost of houses in Australia, the differences in education for teachers, dogs, and much more! For example, a teacher in Australia is required to have a bachelors degree in the subject they want to teach and have a starting salary of 50K (big difference). On our right, there was a couple from Texas that said "we kept getting all the good people" and wanted to join in on the conversation so we made friends with them as well! When they couple from Texas left, we moved tables to sit with the rest of the people from the tour. There were 45 of them (all best friends since it was at the end of their tour) and they quickly welcomed us into their group! 4 hours had passed by this point and the amount of beers and in my case, pretzels with beer cheese, was getting large. The group we were sitting with was also getting rowdy so the waitress cut us off from beer (which i found strange being that it was the famous Hofbrauhaus and IIII had only had two half liters) but we were about ready to leave anyways! We got back to the hostel around 10pm, read some, and went to sleep!
Monday, May 13
Neither of us slept very well in the hostel so we woke up around 7:45 am when everyone else was getting up! We quickly got ready and left for the center center to rent bikes for the day since it wasn't raining for the first time in days. On the way to the train station, we stopped for hot chocolate, a muffin for me, and a pretzel with cheese and bacon for Blake (very average breakfast). We got to the bike rental place around 9:45 (right when they opened) and rented bikes. The owner of the shop was from Hawaii and was very cool! He recommended we go to the English Park Gardens first followed by Olympic park! It took us about 20 minutes to get to the English Park Gardens and by the time we got there we were freezing. The park was beautiful though! It was a nice change riding bikes in the beautiful park as opposed to walking around the city center. At the beginning of the park there was an artificial wave in the river where people could surf! It looked very hard to do but the people we were watching were good at it and made it look pretty easy (Blake got a video so we will show you later). We went further into the park and came across a pond FULL of ducks and swans! There were cute little baby ducks i followed around for a while to take pictures... until the mama duck started hissing at me. Thennn it started raining. Cold and wet are not a good combination so we decided to eat at a relatively close by mexican restaurant for lunch. We definitely need to teach Germans how to make mexican food because it was pretty bad! After lunch, we ventured out into the cold long enough to return the bikes, shop for a stein, and then head back to the hostel to do laundry! A couple hours later, we headed to the train station to meet up for the Beer Challenge tour, which was supposed to take us to a few different bars, tell us the history of the bier garden, and buy us a few beers. However, Blake and I were the only two who signed up for the tour and there was a five person minimum so it was canceled :/ the tour guide was really nice though (he played football at UGA and got a coaching job in Germany) and gave us a free beer anyway and told us a few non-touristy bier gardens to go to! We met up with one of Blakes fraternity brothers and his girlfriend we ran into and decided to go on our own beer crawl! We went to four different bier gardens and drank way too much beer for having to wake up before 7 (Blake especially). The first beir garden we went to, the Augustiner, was recommended by the tour guide so we decided to give it a try! The second bier garden was built in 1455 and all their beers were still brewed at the monastery! The third bier garden was all wheat beers and Blake got a half liter of beer that was 12% alcohol! Aside from hofbrauhaus, that was my favorite bier garden of the night because I got wheat beer mixed with lemonade and it was delicious! We ended the night at hofbrauhaus and somehow still made it home safe!! Overall, great night :)
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