Munich

Munich, or Munchen, capital of Bavaria, is best known for bratwursts, bretzels, and beer... which makes it kind of ironic that the first meal Sean, Kate, and I munched (no pun intended) upon was Italian in origin, though the lasagna special couldn't be beat for taste or price at the little restaurant we found in the University area.
Besides, we were in no hurry to gorge ourselves upon the three Bs of Bavaria, nor were we in any hurry to get to the city center as we had a couple hours til the scheduled meeting of our friend, Alex, who you might remember from our Argentinian (or, as some might say, Spanish) language school. We wanted to combine this reunion with attending a local festival that happened to be going on a the time, but things did not look good when Alex was a) conscripted into organizing a weekend of camping while we'd be there and b) forced by his new job to spend his weekdays training in Cologne.

We were, however, undaunted, especially when Alex invited us to come along on the camping trip. So we met up with our favorite Munchkin (and his friend Nicole), headed to his parents house for a brief smorgasbord, then loaded ourselves with all the blankets, beer, and delicious homemade crumbly plum breakfast cake we could carry, and began the two hour drive out to Ettal, arriving in the parking lot, which meant that we had about a 20 minute walk to the cabin. Not a big deal, right? Emphatically wrong, in fact. Indeed, this hike was physically one of the most difficult things I think any of us Americans (that spying bastard Sean included) had done, certainly in recent memory.
Let me try to set the stage for you armchair travelers; you're carrying about 30 kilos on your back, hiking up a 60 degree incline of loose rock that's constantly slipping out from under your feet, in near pitch black, carrying a heap of bulky blankets in one arm and another 15 kilos or so of beer or water in the other. It was the sort of thing where you're only able to finish because you know there is no other option. But we did make it to the cabin, which meant that we a) were handed a delicious Bavarian brew, and b) were introduced to a bunch of drunk German tire engineers and one especially drunk Irish tire engineer who had worked in Germany with them.

Fast forward through the inebriated introductions (and the Irish guy falling asleep in the living room because he "didn't realize there was another room"), and we found ourselves waking up to a beautiful day in the German Alps... and an enormous breakfast (crumbly plum breakfast cake included, of course). This hearty repast turned out to be quite necessary as, once it was finished, we ventured out on what the Germans called a stroll,
what I would call an epic hike, and what Kate would refer to as proof that we are not in as good of shape as we hoped. But the forest was beautiful so we "strolled" our way up the mountain for a few hours until coming to a fork in the path where Alex told us that one way led to a lodge and the other led to the very top of the mountain - and both were only about 30 minutes from that point. Kate and some others chose the lodge but Sean and I pushed on with Alex and the few, we happy few, who climbed to the top of Ettaler Mandl.

Alex had, to be fair, warned us that it got a little hairy at the top, but we weren't quite prepared, I think, for what Sean later referred to - quite accurately, I might add - as "Death Mountain." Indeed, this last half hour to the top was only accomplished by climbing a vertical rock wall with the use of chains, often dangling yourself over a drop of perhaps 50 feet with absolutely no supervision or safety measures in place.
I honestly can't believe it was legal. But like most things that shouldn't be legal, it was ridiculously fun... once you made peace with yourself and prepared for the great unknown, of course. We considered ourselves lucky to reach the summit with but a single casualty (and we didn't really like that guy anyway), but it was a great feeling to get to the top where we paused for a much-deserved snacking and soaked up the stunning views.

The climb down was, if anything, even more difficult and pants-wettingly terrifying, but we did reunite with those of our group who apparently take freedom for granted to find they had been casually enjoying a hearty lunch of various brats and beer. We put our differences aside and trekked back
to base camp where we napped, read, and whipped up a mountain of pasta that could feed 20. Which was fortunate as there were about 20 of us. We then passed around never ending bowls filled with every sort of gummy imaginable and drank Romanian firewater (which, incidentally, pairs quite well with the cola flavored gummies).

But alas, our little haven of alpine bliss had come to an end and we took off the next morning after a traditional breakfast of sickly looking, but delicious, white sausage and pretzels and then got a ride to the train station from Alex where we said our goodbyes,
failed in an attempt to pay him for the food, lodging and beer, and were finally forced to board the train and be on our way.

Now, as some of you may know (and as others must have guessed), this regional festival to which we were a-headin' was none other than the (in)famed Oktoberfest. But what you may not know about Oktoberfest is that it's all about drinking beer. And what you also may not have realized is that everyone dresses up in funny traditional Bavarian garb. So we sat next to a foursome of Alpine milk maids on our train ride into the city and then on our tram ride out to our hostel. We found spots last minute at The Tent hostel for only 19 euros during Oktoberfest which is, quite literally, amazing given that the average dorm bed price in other hostels is about 70 euros... and you have to book months in advance. Anyway, The Tent was, also quite literally, exactly that: a giant tent with about 150 bunks and lockers set up inside. This may sound nightmarish, but it was actually awesome; comfy bunks with three thick blankets, huge and clean bathrooms, a cafe with free wifi, and perhaps most surprising of all, it was perfectly quiet during sleeping hours.

Our original plan was just to lay low that first evening and get up at 8AM the next day so we could get a spot in a tent when they opened at 10AM (the Oktoberfest beer tents are notoriously difficult to get into), and put in a good, solid 12 hours of drinking. But we figured it was still early enough that we might as well check out the scene, which I'll try to describe in the following haiku:

Real big carnival
Delicious beer flows freely
Too awesome for words

But I'll try anyway.

Picture this: you are inside of a tent the size of two football fields. A band in lederhosen plays songs everyone is singing along with - maybe "La Bamba" or perhaps "We Are the Champions" - while barmaids carry maybe 10 liters of beer in a single fistful of golden liquid. Most people are standing on the tables, and most people have their arms around each other. Another barmaid comes by offering to sell you a pretzel the size of a hubcap. You buy it and it is delicious. And then, suddenly, you are waking up on the ground somewhere, wondering where your shirt went.



I think that actually describes our experience pretty accurately (combined with the pictures and videos). I'll throw in a couple more things for some added flavor, however - things like the be-ledered bands playing the "Ein Prosit" song, which roughly translates to "A little cheers," which, itself, roughly translates to everyone sings a goofy oompa song while slamming mugs together and then drinks.
We also (allegedly) bought and subsequently devoured half-meter bratwursts from the carnival outside. And I ran off the tram back to the hostel a few stops early at the very last minute as the doors were closing and Kate had to wander back to find me and lead me home. All in all, an excellent night.

And, actually, the second night was just about as good. We didn't end up going for the full workday of professional beer drinking, but we did pretty much do a repeat of the
first night. So I'll leave that one alone description-wise and leave you with this picture of what we probably would have looked like if we had started at 10AM.

What we did do on our second day in Munich, however, was to venture out to the Deutsches Museum, which is an enormous and all-encompassing museum on, well, everything (I think that is the definition of all-encompassing, by the way). We marveled at ancient clocks, peered into fighter jet cockpits, tried to figure out why farmers would need such vicious looking tractor attachments, and studied models of breweries. We also watched a super-intense display of electricity where they shot several thousand volts at all sorts of things, including a metal cage with a living human baby inside (OK, it wasn't a baby, but imagine how hilariously inappropriate it would be if it was).

That about covers our time in Munchen, sweet Munchen - however, speaking of "time," there is one last thing we sadly must relate before we leave this fair city. You may recall that Germany, as we said in our last blog (I told you to pay attention and that it would be important later - well, the time has come, oh yes, the time has come at long last!), is an hour later than Ireland, where we had come from. We'd been in Germany about 10 days by this point so we obviously weren't thinking about this time difference anymore... HOWEVER, we had never changed the time on our clock as we'd relied solely on Sean's cell phone for time. Because of this oversight, when we arrived at the airport for our flight to Athens - which, by the way, we got there in what we thought was plenty of time after saying goodbye to Sean's prostrate (sleeping) body - we found out that we made it just in time to see our plane leave. So we shelled out a small fortune to buy another flight later that day, tried desperately (and unsuccessfully) to get in touch with Kate's family, and waited in the Munich airport (which is, incidentally, rated as Europe's best) for a few hours before finally boarding what would turn out to be the most luxurious flight (Aegean Air, operated by Lufthansa) that we'd been on in years...