Starting in Munich!

Polly and the old city walls in Munich
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After spending a night in London, one in Oxford to do laundry, and back to London to catch our early flight, we were finally on our way to Munich!  My friend Polly from school here came with me, which was a lot of fun.  So after a short flight, we were in Munich.  We walked around downtown for a while before we were allowed to check into our hostel, which was fun.  After eating dinner, we had to go to the obligatory beer garden, so we made our way to the really famous one, the Hofbrauhaus.  It was superpacked in there, and we walked around kind of awkwardly for around 10 minutes before we found a seat.  We were with a bunch of German people, so we didn't really meet anyone, but we conquered our steins, so it was all good, even if they cost an arm and a leg.

Random warthog statue
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The next day we decided to take a trip out of Munich to see Bavaria, and more importantly, the Castle Neuschwanstein.  It's the castle that inspired Walt Disney in making Sleeping Beauty's castle, and we'd seen it before in pictures and things so we really wanted to go.  We didn't really plan anything, so we made our way to the train station and got on the train thinking it would take about 30 minutes to get there.  Turns out it takes about 2 hours to get there, but it was definitely worth it.  There were two castles there, so we first went to the first castle, Castle Hohenschwangau, which was pretty,but small.  After that we hiked up the mountain a good 30 minutes to get to the other castle.  They had horserides you could take, but we were cheap and the walk was nice.  So we finally made it to the castle and went on our tour, and I have to say that I am in love with that castle.  The guy who built it, King Ludwig II, made it an homage to Richard Wagner, so it was really cool.  It was never finished due to his death, but it had the most amazing things in it, like a stage meant to look like a forest, secret doorways, and the best part was a room he had made to look like a cave.  I thought it was the best thing ever.  Plus, the countryside around was really gorgeous; the Alps are amazing.  So after we saw the castle, we made our way back to Munich.

My turn with the random fish statue
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The next day we walked around some more and made our way to the Residenz, the house of the old Bavarian royalty.  We went on the tour, which included an audio guide, which ended up being torture.  For each room there was at least a 10 minute speech on the audiguide about it, and as there were about 77 rooms you had to go through, we got bored real fast.  The worst part was, the place was bombed during WWII, so almost nothing in there was actually original.  Plus they managed to say things like "exquisite furniture" and "inlay made of both local and tropical wood" about 5 million times.  So basically, the rest of the trip we were wary of audioguides, ha.  After the Residenz, we decided to go to the park, the English gardens, because it was the first day that the weather was nice.  The park was crowded, but we manage to lay by a little river and hung out for a couple hours.  The park was nice, but a little weird, as there were at least 20 naked old men sunbathing, so that was an experience.  We stayed and lounged in the park until around 4, and then we made our way back to catch our train to Salzburg.