Munich!

April 18, 2010

"I think I'm still a little drunk." First words spoken by Hilary this morning, haha. Renzo was pretty hung over as well and me in true form felt fine. I do really enjoy my ability drink like a pro and not get hangovers. I'm sure my parents are really proud of me at the moment. :)

Our train was leaving at 12:10 for Munich so we dragged ourselves out of bed around 10:30/11, cleaned, packed and headed out. We usually take goodbye pictures with our host, but we had an entire photo shoot with him the night before so we figured we'd had the picture thing handled. Being sober is not a requirement thankfully. I think we left on a pretty good not and hopefully we changed Renzo's mind about all Americans... I'll be waiting for the reference he leaves us on CouchSurfing to see.

During the train ride when the conductor lady came up to us we gave her our passes and she informed us they didn't work. The pass we are using is only for Benelux, Germany and Switzerland. We thought this would be find until she told us that our train has one stop in Austria which isn't covered in our pass, so we'd have to pay. Great. Turns out it was only about 5 euros per person since it was only one stop which wasn't to bad. I had some Swiss franks left over so I wanted to pay in those. She did the conversation and charged us 16 franks. Turns out that was a crappy conversion rate, which the guy sitting next to us told us. This sparked a conversation with him and it turns out he is a professor of science who just got back from a trip to the states. He was really nice and helped Hilary with some German grammar. I love talking to random people and hearing about their lives and the country they are from.

We met up with our new host, Steph, pretty easily and headed back to her place. She's super talkative and really energetic which I love. Her place is pretty accessible from the station -- as almost everything is in Europe. I'm a little lost on how to get to her place easily, but hopefully we'll be able to figure it out quickly. She took us to a local cafe and had delicious hamburgers which I haven't had in a long time. It was especially nice because we'd be traveling all day so my food consisted of bread and potato chips. Meat was needed.

While at dinner one of her friends met up with us and then we all went out for drinks. The bar we were at had a big group of older and really drunk people at it who kept playing 80's music. Highly entertaining but a little hard to talk with all of the distracting action. Steph filled us in on a lot of history and information of Germany and where all the good places in town are. We left the bar pretty early since we didn't get much sleep last night and it turns out Steph didn't really sleep either as she was celebrating a friend's birthday. While we were standing outside the bartender was outside as well. He came up to me and handed me some flowers saying they were especially for me, haha. I think he was a little drunk and the flowers were fake but still pretty entertaining.

The rest of the night is full of planning on what we are doing the next two days. Steph has to work so she can't meet up with us until after that. Looks like it's going ot be another fun filled day of getting lost in a new city!