Day 8: Zurich => Munich

Nope, didn't manage to wake up from my nap last night. I do wake up before our morning alarm though. Unfortunately, we're unlucky; my fears of the clothes not being totally dry (why I was going to "nap" rather than "sleep") came more than true. I split up the clothes to dry in batches. Most of them ended up at least not drippy wet by the time we had to leave.

It took a bit longer to leave since we had to return the apartment key to G, but we made our train - so yay!

Munich...


V said her kids liked the sausages at the train station, so I pick one up to eat for a bit later.

We're staying at a hostel near the station, but not in a dorm room... in a double. And this double turns out to be the largest double we've ever seen or expected in Europe! It even has it's own bathroom.

The girl checking us in looks a bit surprised when she sees our reservation -- 5 nights?? According to her, the average stay is 1.5 days (at least at this particular hostel). Maybe that's upon checking in though; after all, some people don't have their detailed itinerary entirely set when they arrive at a place and end up staying more days than originally planned... a way of travel seemingly more common in the backpacker circuit.

Dropping everything off, we head off for the Englischer Garten. Huge park, bigger than NYC's Central Park. We never really thought about what an "English" style garden is... but if we use this as an example, it's probably informal, let-things-grow-as-they-grow type of landscaping (unlike the sculpted French gardens).

A section of the park's river has small swells and a bunch of surfers who surf them. They line up on both sides of the river for their chance. If they're good, they get the waters for longer; otherwise, they fall pretty quickly after they start their turn. It's quite a sight to watch!


I could be mesmerized for a quite a while, but I was getting hungry, so we didn't stay too too long.

We'd actually bought some lunch items at the train station to eat at the park. We were going to visit the beer garden but not stay too long and then find a nice bench in the park to eat. The thought was that the beer garden would be too alcohol-smelly for K and too smokey for both of us. Neither turned out to be true (maybe we just got lucky on the smoke part), so we kind of regretted buying food already.


It didn't keep us from buying a yummy desserty-type dish though... fluffy, sweet, with applesauce and plums ^o^

So, we ended up sitting at one of the beer garden tables eating lunch that would surely do some artery damage if not for all the extra exercise we're getting. Surprisingly, the beer garden had free wifi!

Halfway through lunch, we felt drops. Luckily, we were sitting next to the Oriental-style pagoda in the garden and followed everyone else sitting nearby in dragging the table and benches under the pagoda. The rain only stayed a drizzle though ^o^


Marienplatz. *The* square to visit in Munich. It's kind of odd... there's these old-looking buildings surrounding it, except they're not old! After the buildings were destroyed in the war, the city voted on whether to rebuild in contemporary or old style. They chose old style. (Frankfurt voted the opposite, but we won't be visiting there this trip.)

The evening light is already setting in... minus the shadows, it gives a nice warm glow to the buildings. We walk back to our hostel from here. On the way, a short ways from the square, we stop to listen to some music. Definitely better than your average street musicians, but K is unimpressed. "You'd get better quality in a concert hall." Yes, but this is not a concert hall, it's the street, and it's like a free outdoor concert for me. They only play one or two songs though, and then it's a five-minute break until the next one.

Back in our room, K makes a trip to the train station to buy some of the tickets we'll need for the first few train rides of our trip. He comes back surprisingly happy. We probably totally overpaid on our Zurich-to-Munich tickets. That's not the happy part. The happy part is that there's all these special fares that you'd only know about if you did some very detailed, specialized research (and still might not even find then), or if you visited a Deutsche Bahn counter. These were for the Germany tickets. The DB rep said we should wait until Poland to buy our Warsaw-Krakow ticket (and others) since DB doesn't know about the specials deals for over there. We already figured we would save more by not getting a rail pass this time (unlike our previous Europe trip), but this is even better. (Even if we had bought all our tickets and totally overpaid in Zurich, we probably still wouldn't hit the price of the rail pass.)

Turns out there *is* a downside to this room -- the shower. We're familiar with it for sinks, but it's the first time we've ever seen this type of mechanism on a shower. You push the knob, it runs water for a while, and then automatically stops. Is it on the shower to save water? The water doesn't run all that long with one knob press, so you have water turning off intermittently during your shower! Makes the whole shower experience quite annoying.