Jono's Travels

I guess if the past week was time to relax and take care of my body, my 4 days in Munich were there to bring it all down. Here I met up with Jill and Kristen, my roommate from the past year and a friend from UBC respectively. It was great to see some familiar faces and I had a blast with these girls for the past 4 days.

We stayed in a place called Euro Youth hostel. On the first day I just wandered around the streets of Munich. Think lots of churches, wide flowing streets and a good amount of greenery. That night I actually ran into the same group of girls I had met up with in the Cinque Terre. After meeting up with a group of brazilian fellows and Andrea, a great girl from Ottawa, at the hostel pub we took off to the Hofbräuhaus. The Hofbräuhaus is Munich's most famous beer garden complete with a traditional German band, lots of liederhosen, and steins filled with a litre of beer each. Had the brilliant idea to go running through fountains on the way there - we were worried that the fountain might be turned off on the way back. This made for a very wet and very cold beer garden experience but I still had a great time. On the plus side I even managed to catch the first period of the Ottawa vs Anaheim game on the way back before hitting the hay.

On the second day it was raining pretty heavily but we decided to make the best of it and took off on a tour of the city. I once again ended up very cold, very wet and quite happy by the end of it. The tour gave a lot of history on the city as well as some interesting local insights. Turns out Munich is such a safe city that the most common crime is bicycle theft and once the police even stole a something from the airport themselves out of boredom. After picking up some ponchoes we took the same group with a few more additions - including Jay and Mike, a couple of fun-loving fellows from Toronto - back to the Hofbräuhaus again.

Third day we went to a contempary art museum in the morning before going to the englischer gardens - the 2nd largest metropolitan park in Europe, complete with Germans surfing the river and nudist sections. Contemporary art was a nice change from the majority of artwork I had been seeing over the past few days and with Andrea being an art history major I was even able to understand one or two of the displays. Unfortunately I didn't run into either of highlights of the englischer gardens but did manage to chow down on some traditional bavarian grub in the beer garden in the park. At night Jill, Kristen, Andrea, her friend Greg, Jay, Mike and I all went on a pub-crawl where we had a really good time and met quite a few characters. The biggest of which was an aussie fellow named shaun - not only did he add a few good aussie words such as 'pissbolt' to our vocab he was carrying around the shards of a tooth that had been broken to send back to his ex-girlfriend stapled to a postcard. Guess you had to be there!

The 4th day was a more somber affair. We went to Dachau, which was the first concentration camp of the nazi regime and the model upon which the other camps were based. While it wasn't a death camp along the lines of auschwitz it was horrifying to see the conditions that the prisoners were faced with. While I had known a little about the concentration camps it was a shocking and surreal experience to visit the grounds in person and something I would recommend to anyone spending time in the area.

Off to Salzburg with Jill and Kristen to take in the soooound of music and run through the hills that are alive. Oh, I've never actually seen the movie.

Jill, Kristen and Mike at Hofbräuhaus

Me and Katie

Jill, Sarah and Andrea

Jill conducting the band

Us with the brazilians

Kristen and Jill chowing down on some German sausages

Giant german pretzel = great pubcrawl grub