Wochenende in Munchen!

Hostel Easy Palace!
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So in February (it seems like ages ago), my roommate Taylor and our friends Pete and Matt and I embarked on a weekend excursion to Munich (Műnchen) in Bavaria. Before this trip, if you would have asked me if I could ever go on a 3 day trip and only pack a bookbag, I would have said, “Most definitely not!” However, I supposed I underestimated myself before because after this trip, I’m pretty confident I can do almost any three day trip in the future living out of a bookbag with no problem J. Taylor and I were fairly proud of ourselves.

Our bunkbeds in the hostel room :)
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So not only was this our first attempt at living out of a bookbag, it was also everyone’s first hostel experience. We had booked our hostel online ahead of time, and compared to the rest on hostelworld.com, Hostel Easy Palace had a good reputation for being clean and the staff being friendly and seemed like a good buy for the right price of €18 a person per night. After the 4 hour train ride to Munich on Friday morning, we walked a couple miles from the train station and were pleasantly surprised to see that at least the outside was nicer than some of the hostels we had been passing along the way. Once we got inside, the lobby was nice and the staff was great and we were really pleased with our private room for 6 people that they allowed us to only have 4 in, complete with a private bathroom. J The only problem was that Taylor and I had only brought handtowels, thinking that there would be towels for some reason, but we made do with no problems! Also, once we went back home and as Taylor and I were falling asleep in our dorm room, we realized that even the beds in the hostel were actually a whole lot more comfortable than our dorm beds!

Glockenspiel at the Rathaus (Town Hall) in Marienplatz
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After leaving our stuff in the room (don’t worry we had the only key… we think), we grabbed a map and headed out to explore Munich. We took the U-bahn (the underground train system) to Marienplatz where a big castle-like building is with the huge Glockenspiel (the big coo coo clock),which I think was a former residence and now the top apartments probably still are but the ground level is shops and boutiques. From there we walked around, and around just about every corner was something breathtaking. Huge cathedrals, monuments, Maximillian’s castle, really neat Bavarian architecture, and so much more. We walked around for about four hours and still didn’t feel like we had seen everything, and that’s without stopping to go inside anything either.

Theater... I think
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By this time, we were fairly hungry, and we had passed by a restaurant earlier where a woman was eating outside by herself and caught us reading the menu on the door. She put down one of the two glasses of beer in front of her and told us (in german) that this was the best restaurant in town and that we should eat there. We told her we’d come back later and stayed true to our word. Our meals were absolutely delicious. I had a dish of vegetables baked in a cheese sauce that was really amazing, one day I’ll learn to cook and be able to whip up something like that! The only downside was that once we got the bill we realized that we had been charged for the basket of pretzels that she had placed on the table without us ordering them. We later found out that this is normal, but we were still pretty upset that we got charged a euro for each piece of bread we’d eaten.

Theatinerkirche, Baroque style cathedral... that was orange
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We decided that the next day we would wake up early and make the trip to see Neuschwanstein: the castle that Germany is perhaps most famous for and that the crazy King Ludwig II built just before he was declared insane and put under house arrest. It was my third time to the castle, but it was neat reliving childhood memories of hiking up the mountain with a wooden cane bought at one of the giftshops at the bottom of the mountain with metal German crests nailed to it. I remember Mom having to keep motivating us by telling us that we were going to see Sleeping Beauty’s castle, which was partially true because Disney did model Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disney World after Neuschwanstein. Hiking up the mountain was interesting because of the snow, most of which had turned to ice, but we had a good time and got some good pictures.

Taylor and me with a big monument... can't remember what it was for ;(
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The only unfortunate part of that part of our trip was that coming down the mountain, we realized we only had a short bit of time before our bus left to take us to the train station to catch the train that left every 2 hours, so we raced down to the bus stop and just as we arrived, the bus was pulling away. While we considered hitchhiking, we concluded that there wouldn’t be a European car big enough to fit all four of us and it would be highly unlikely that anyone would be going that way, so the only choice we were left with was to wait for the next bus and catch the next train in 2 hours.

Munchen im Abend
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Once we got back to Munich it was dinner time, so we at a restaurant on Marienplatz that had part of the menu in English for tourists, but it was probably one of the worst decisions we made during the trip. The food was really bad and cold, and I don’t remember the exact name of the restaurant, but if you’re ever in Munich, avoid the really attractive big restaurant on Marienplatz with a menu in English.

The next morning, we woke up early again and headed out to the Olympiaparc, where the 1972 Olympics (as well as the Israeli Olympic team massacre) took place. While there was no monument or remembrance for the later event, the architecture itself in the parc was incredible. Huge structures of glass were made for the fields and the pool house, and everything was still in use. We watched an indoor track competition for who we assumed to be high school students and just imagined how cool it would be having high school track competitions in an Olympic building.

Me and part of a statue for Maximillian
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We left Olympiaparc and headed to the Hauptbahnhof to catch our train back to Freiburg, concluding our nice adventurous getaway from Freiburg for the first time without being on an organized IES trip. It was nice to feel the freedom from the structure of IES organized trips, although we usually are granted a lot of free time during them. I think I’ll definitely go back one day, probably not during this trip but Munich is definitely someplace I would like to make a return trip to in the future!