München

I am writing the first weekend blog while on the train to get back to Bonn after our second weekend in Prague, and this makes me feel like a terrible student.  I am having such a great time studying abroad and though I am learning so much, it feels like I am on vacation.  I love Europe.

We spent our first weekend in Munich.  All ten of us stayed together like a cute little family and we all had a great time.  The hard part was getting around and having to be responsible for everything we were doing.  Olivia was missed.  We took a train leaving Bonn at 3:30 Saturday morning and although it was nice to get there right at breakfast, that early train ride threw me off and I had trouble staying awake and fully enjoying the Saturday in Munich.  When we got there, we dropped our luggage off at the hostel and then wandered around to find Mike’s Bike Tour.  Half of the group did a walking tour and the other half did the bike tour.  I was in the bike group and absolutely loved it.  We biked to some of the more famous historical sites but my favorite part was biking through the English Garden.  The English garden in Munich is about 1.25 times the size of Central Park in NYC and the wonderful weather made that bike through the greenery a beautiful site.  We stopped at the surfing spot and I fully enjoyed watching.  After the tour was over, we met the rest of the group at St. Augustiner and ate dinner and then headed over to Hofbrauhaus.  Hofbrauhaus was definitely fun to go but it was way overpriced and there were too many tourists.  There was a band playing and that was a lot of fun to listen to.

On Sunday I went to Neuschwanstein Castle with part of the group.  We took a train to Fussen early in the morning and walked around the town before taking a bus up to Hohenschwangau.  The town was absolutely beautiful.  I could have stayed there for an entire weekend to just take it all in.  The Bavarian mountains were breathtaking.  The only downside was that the proximity to the castles made Fussen populated with too many tourists.  Once we got to the castles, we visited Hohenschwangau before Neuschwanstein.  The major letdown of the day was that the beautiful picturesque side of Neuschwanstein that looks just like Cinderella’s castle in Disney World was covered in scaffolding.  I was definitely upset.  The other bummer was walking up an incredibly steep mountain to get to Neuschwanstein.  No wonder Europeans are so fit even after so much beer.  It was so exhausting.  The insides of the castles were pretty and it was interesting to learn about the strange life of King Ludwig but I thought it was unnecessarily overpriced.  When we went back to Fussen, we played in a playground for a good hour while we waited for our train to take us back to Munich and that was a definite highlight of the weekend.  It was a great playground.

The next day we took a train to Vienna prepared for an awesome week!