Munich: Home of the 1 Liter Beer

Our weekend trip to Munich was spectacular! It started off a little stressful but turned out to be a great experience. We left the Bonn Hauptbahnhof on Friday and made our way to Frankfurt for our connection to Munich. When we arrived in Frankfurt, we saw that our train was delayed 110 minutes due to something being wrong with the 22^nd cart (we are unsure exactly because the ticker was only in German so we picked out what we could). We went to the help center to see what we could do and he said there is a train coming in two hours that we could take but that they may bring one in to replace the broken train. John went back to check again with the help center and not long after he left, the ticker changed and said that the replacement train was coming into the station. I told the rest of the group to call John while I ran to get him before the train left. After sprinting through the full length of the terminal twice, we finally made it to the train and got on but there was nobody on the train…then out of nowhere an attendant started yelling at John and I and we had no idea what she was saying. We asked for English and she said to get off and go to the front of the train. We then proceeded on towards Munich.

That first night in Munich was pretty relaxing so we could rest up for a long Saturday! We basically went exploring on Saturday just trying to see as much of this enormous city as we possibly could. We went into the main part of the city and saw a bunch of random shops, the best one was the cuckoo clock store with a whole bunch of clocks, nutcrackers, and many other collectable items. We then proceeded to the big catholic church in the city (not nearly as big as the cologne church though). After walking around for a bit more and stopping for some pig knuckles (that still had some hair them), we went on the subway system to go to the Deutsches Museum which is the largest science history museum in the world. And I believe their claim. This museum was massive, we were there for over two hours and I don’t think I saw half of the exhibits they had in the museum. There were still two more wings and an underground area that I didn’t get to. The best exhibit was the Pharmaceutical/Medicine/Physiology/Pathophysiology exhibit. I think I stayed there for about thirty minutes refreshing myself on my VTPP 434/435 while also learning about the pathophysiology for quite a few diseases. After the museum closed at 5pm, we headed back to the center of the city to go to the famous Hofbrauhaus. This brewery lived up to its expectations and even surpassed them! We all had 1 liter original beers, and they were delicious! They had live traditional German music and there were many men and ladies wearing the traditional Liederhosen. I bought a 1 liter glass as a souvenir. After dinner, we went out on the town to celebrate Carson’s 21^st birthday.

On Sunday, our main goal was to see the Olympic park where Munich hosted the 1972 summer Olympic Games.  In the Olympic park vicinity, there was the BMW museum, show room and factory. We toured the show room for a good while just looking at all of the different BMW models and even their new line of electric cars. We eventually made our way to the Olympic park where we had a great lunch under the trees by the pond. The park was more crowded than I had assumed it would be, and there were a bunch of people in the natatorium enjoying their Sunday afternoon. We left the Olympic park and headed back towards town to go see the very large English Park. There were a ton of people here laying out and tanning, enjoying beer at the huge biergarten and playing various sports all throughout the park. We found a nice place in the shade that wasn’t too noisy and took a much needed nap! After this, we headed back to the hostel to rest up for our early four-hour train ride to Vienna!!