St. Peter's Church

One day last week one of my classes got cancelled, but of course only half the people checked their email, so about five of us showed up and then figured it out and decided to go to Marienplatz and walk up the tower of St. Peter's Church, since I was the only one that had been up there so far. Marienplatz is the main city center so I've been there a million times, always it seems on a Saturday when giant crowds of tourists are about, but anyway this time there are pictures to show you :)

The day we went was relatively clear, so you can actually see the Alps! Hooray!

You can barely see the Alps, but that's also why the Munich skyline is so flat. There's some city ordinance that doesn't allow tall buildings in the south of the city for that very reason. In the bottom right of the picture you can see a little street market with tents and such, that's the Viktualienmarkt. They sell fruit and veggies and bread, and a friend got soup there one time haha, but it's nice to just walk around. There's also a Milka "World" nearby, which is why we were there in the first place :) haha.

Now my pictures are gonna go in a big circle from the first one, to the left. This is the old town hall, that steeple thing. Currently I think it's a toy museum, and from the display case outside it's rather creepy.

Here you can see the beginning of the Englischer Garten and the Theatinerkirche in the distance, and part of the Rathaus (the new town hall):

The Rathaus with Glockenspiel :)

and the Frauenkirche:

The main street in this picture has lots of shopping on it, there's an H&M and a new Forever 21, which has a U.S. section containing a lot of denim (gross), and other department stores/higher class shopping where I can't afford anything. I also bought my dirndl on this street :) 

In the very bottom left corner you can kind of see a balcony beneath a greyish/black roof. That's the Glockenspiel Cafe, you have to go through this little arched walkway in one of the buildings and take an elevator (there were also stairs, ha!) up to the cafe. We went up there while meandering about one day when it was nice outside. You can't really see anything except the inside courtyard of the other buildings, but you can see the sky and enjoy the fresh air and delicious hot chocolate :) They do have a fancier, inside part of the cafe thats looks down on Marienplatz and at the Rathaus, which is to the left of the picture. Some day we're gonna go back for some cake in this fancier part, they all looked glorious when we peaked in at them.

Weisswurst Fruehstueck and Deutsches Museum

I forgot something! In between the days we went to the Alps and the Englischer/Hofgarten, the International Club had a Bavarian Weisswurst Fruehstueck for us :) this is the English spelling, since my computer has neither umlauts (the two dots) nor the Beta "ss" character.

This breakfast is complete with weisswurst (white sausage), pretzels :)), radishes (kinda random? haha), sweet mustard, and weissbier. Here is a picture of the lovely combination:

My beer is covering all the radishes, haha but I ate some of those too. Traditionally the weisswurst skin is peeled off, but that's kind of a hassle so I was told you can also just eat it. However, old Bavarian men will look at you strangely and might comment on it. In my opinion, the weisswurst is really just a vessel with which you can eat sweet mustard, haha but they also had other kinds that were longer and thinner and flavored a little stronger, and I liked those better.

After the breakfast I went to the Deutsches Museum with some other Mechanical Engineering students and spent about three hours in there. I probably didn't even see an eighth of the whole museum, but I lost all the guys in the first ten minutes and went about all the exhibits in super nerdy fashion. I saw shipping, mining, oil and gas, machine tools, welding and soldering, and metal casting. I spent wayyy too long in the machine tools room looking at all the old mills and lathes and reading everything there was to read in English. There was a whole U-boat on display in the shipping section, and the mining exhibition was literally just an entire model underground mine that you could walk through. Sooo cool :)) I also got a free entrance ticket to the Mobility and Transport center of the Deutsches Museum, which is in a different building altogether, so definitely going to that soon!! 

Englischer Garten and Hofgarten :)

So if you haven't noticed yet, Englischer Garten is one of my favorite places ever :) but it's also massive, so I've only seen a small portion of it. It basically stretches from the city center to a little north of where I live, which takes ten minutes on the train, so I don't know how long it would take to run/walk, but plenty of people do!

Anywhooo, everyone was always talking about "the surfing place" on the Isar River, which winds through the Englischer Garten, so we went on a Sunday afternoon to check it out. I was picturing an actual establishment on the river, like one of those indoor wave pools or whatever, but that's not it at all.

Where the Englischer Garten starts there is a mainish road that the river flows under, and when it comes out of the tunnel under the road it makes a wave, which people then surf on. It's actually kind of frightening. Because the river is flowing so fast in that section and it's pretty narrow, I kept thinking the guys were going to hit their heads when they fell, but they were all pretty decent surfers and no one wiped out too hard. I'm not really sure how they learned to surf, it didn't seem all that beginner friendly, but it looked like fun. I took a few videos, but I'm having technical difficulties uploading them :( basically the surfers just took turns jumping off the levee onto the wave and surfed back and forth a few times, then let the next guy in line go.

There's also a Japanese tea garden that we tried to go to, but it was closed :( so we just meandered around and took in the beautiful autumn scenery.

After meandering around for a bit, we wandered down the street to the Hofgarten (mostly by accident).

The yellowish towers in the background of the last two photos are the Theatinerkirche, that really majestic all white church that we stumbled into before Oktoberfest. The garden ends at Odeonsplatz, where the church is, and there was a band complete with grand piano and cello playing a mini concert on the corner :)

Day Trip to the Alps

They have a day ticket in Bayern that's only 5 Euros each for a group of five and you can go anywhere you want on the trains and buses, so we rounded up some friends and took a trip to the Alps :))

It was a GORGEOUS sunny day where you could actually see the Alps in the distance, and we were all sitting in actual seats again (yay!) so it was a quite enjoyable train ride. Our train took us to a cute little town at the base of the Alps, where we caught a bus that took us to the other side of the mountain by way of a winding road beside a lake that was as smooth as glass and through trees that were starting to change color :) It dropped us off on the side of the road next to another calm lake, so smooth I wished I could water ski on it, but I'm sure it was freezing.

We then had a short gondola ride that took us up to this magical view:

There was a short trail that led from here to a mountainside restaurant, which we stopped at for some lunch. I had the same thing here as I did my first meal ever in Germany aaand I actually took a picture this time! It's essentially the best meal ever, called "Schweinebraten mit Kartoffelknodel", which (sort of) translates to "Roast Pork with Potato Dumpling." 

I can't even tell you how delicious it is. Most of the international students I know are not particularly fond of the potato dumpling, due to the very strange texture. It's kind of...gooey, haha but I love it so much! I'm attributing this to my German ancestry. 

Back to the hiking. We hiked passed the restaurant for about half an hour to the peak of the mountain, and in the shaded parts there was snow on the ground! but it was rather warm and sunny, by the time we got to the top I was just in my t-shirt. On the way up we saw the CUTEST Husky puppy of all time, and also this woman carrying a pug in a backpack, haha but I learned how to say "Your dog is adorable" in German: Ihr Hund ist niedlich. BOOM, so useful. Now I can pet puppies.

Snow :)

View towards Munich, with the cute little town on the lake we caught the bus from.

View towards the rest of the Alps.

We hiked back down to the restaurant and all shared a dessert of strips of pancake covered in powdered sugar with apple sauce on the side. It has a specific name that I've heard a few times now but can never remember. I'm sure I'll be having it again though! 

On the way back our bus driver was craaazyyy. The bus goes in a big loop so we didn't go back down the way we came, we continued along the road through some more very cute towns on VERY narrow country roads with cars going in both directions and through streets with buildings on both sides and no sidewalks and he just sped along around curves and corners like it was nobody's business. A BIT frightening. We did make it to our train on time though, so we were grateful. 

I was facing the back of the train and could see the Alps out the window almost half of the way home, before it got dark. I kept seeing this one section of mountain in between the buildings of the towns we passed through, and I felt really nerdy but it was cool to see the change in direction of the train the farther away we got :) ALSOOO on the way home my Cal Poly friend started singing Hakuna Matata in English, then a friend started singing it in French, then another friend sang it in Finnish. Definitely one of the greatest things to have EVER happened :))