Meandering around München

21.6.13—München

After a delayed train, Anna and I made it to München around 12:30pm.  We quickly found our way to our hostel.  It is located directly across from München’s main train station, which is a huge plus! No one wants to carry luggage around a city! 

We wandered across the street, well, under actually, and made it to our hostel.  It’s a small thing, with basic amenities, but it works for Anna and me.  There was some confusion between booking the room online through hostelworlds and the actual booking, but we were able to straighten it out.  It’s located right by the old city center, which is wonderful for us! 

After getting settled in, we decided to grab a quick lunch.  There are lots of street café’s, and there is one that operates right outside of our hostel, so we stopped in for a bite.  I wasn’t feeling very hungry and neither was Anna.  I settled on potato soup and she had a salad.  I enjoyed my soup, but Anna’s salad had a little too much corn on it.  It looked like someone had poured a can of corn on her salad.  I thought it was odd and Anna ended up not eating it all—for shame!

After lunch we ran up to the room to use the wifi, let everyone know we made it, etc.  Wifi is 2 euro’s a day, which isn’t terribly expensive for a hostel.  After a few quick posts, it was time to go exploring.  We didn’t have much of an itinerary today.  Some people may say we’re crazy for not having everything planned out, but we enjoy it.  We walked around the city for something like 4 hours.  Anna wanted to go to Alte Pinakothek—an art museum.  Since we are going to tour Dachau tomorrow, I figured it would be a nice trade off.  We figured out where our hostel was and quickly decided that I would be the keeper of the map.  We headed off through the old city center to the museum. 

Upon arrival at the museum, we entered, ready to pay.  We approached the cashiers and both wen to different people.  Anna got a middle-aged gentleman and I had a very pleasant grandmotherly woman.  When they asked for our student IDs, we both presented ours.  Somehow I received the student rate of 5 Euros while Anna was charged full admittance of 7,50 Euros. I found this slightly humorous.   After nearly two hours in the museum—where I found found art museums are far more enjoyable when you get the audio—we decided to head out.

The next two hours was simply us strolling through the city center, trying to find the Hofbräuhaus, we decided to call it an evening.  While we saw lots of beautiful churches, the old royal residents, a really fascinating building (now my blog’s picture) in a platz (plaza, I think), we were unable to find the Hofbräuhaus.  Much to our dismay, when we made it back to our room after dinner, we realized we had missed it by one street—a street we nearly turned on, but instead we decided to stick our course.  So, tomorrow after Dachau, we will head to the Hofbräuhaus for dinner.

For dinner we ate at the Anna Hotel café.  I’m not really sure what I had, but it wasn’t bad.  It had bread, roast beef, some sauce, lettuce and pickled onions (I picked those off).  Anna and I decided to split an apple streusel for dessert, and it was delicious!  We both also had Pilsner’s with our dinner. Despite the second try at a beer today (I had a Beck’s for lunch) I still don’t enjoy the taste of beer much.  I suppose I’ll keep trying since we are in the beer capitol of the world or something like that. 

After we wrapped up dinner, we came back to the hostel (just 3 doors down) and settled in for the evening.  Anna decided she needed a nap, and I played on facebook, looked up the nasal spray the apotheke (pharmacy) gave me, and started planning out the fine details of our trip tomorrow.  Anna decided to finally wake up, but couldn’t quite pull herself out of bed.  She’s currently reading (after playing Candy Crush until she ran out of lives on her iPhone) and I’m wrapping up my blog for the day.  I suppose I should get some studies in before I call it a night.

Tomorrow we are headed to Dachau to tour the first concentration camp of the Third Reich.  This is the camp that was the model for all future camps and home of the SS training grounds.  While I had hoped we could make it to Auschwitz’s I am prepared to be sobered and awed by the camp that laid the foundation for Auschwitz.

Until tomorrow, Gute Nacht!