Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Munich, Germany - If it's at the train station: we will eat it.








Monday, September 22

We had grand plans of visiting Dachau but unfortunatly they are closed on Mondays. What to do, what to do???

First of all: Sleep in.

Then: Lay around and hang out with the fun german guys

Next: Catch up on emails.

Ok enough of that.

We did get somewhat productive!! We did our laundry which if we do not do every 4-5 days will will be arrested for public nudity. While that was brewing we walked down to the grocery store. Of course it was raining, freezing and we had no umbrella. But no big deal, it wasn't as bad as the walk home one night in Amsterdam. We were in search of a traditional german meal but with no restaurants open Charlie was in charge of cooking. We still are shocked by the low prices in Munich, only 15 US dollars for a bottle of grand marnier ... that's about 1/2 off. We got some german brats, sour kraut, tiny potatoes and the best mustards in the world, yum! Oh I should add it's our duty as american's (and our loyal blog readers) to try as much chocolate as we can in each country.

We got back to Florian's and cooked a great meal, did a lot of planning for the days ahead when we'd be traveling to Austria and Italy.

A little later in the afternoon we decided going back to Oktoberfest was a capitol idea! So on the train we hopped. We made a quick stop at a store called C&A which is maybe like a big Old Navy or GAP. Heather got a red fleece because she was freezing.

As promised we went to a church. Not just any church: St Paul's Cathedral! After a few days in Germany it was very much in order. The church was very different, clean whites and almost no colors but still very nice.

Ok on to Oktoberfest again. It was a completely different crowd this time. We walked in to the paramedics strapping a young (we assume american) man to a stretcher who had enough to drink till oktoberfest of 2010. Mostly we wanted to try out some of the great food we had passed up the first time we came. Kaiserschmarrn was in order to start with as you read in our earlier blog we haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Heather even took a picture of the menu so we'd remember the name. Yum it was heaven, like a toasted pancakes with sweet raisins topped with powdered sugar. If that didn't nearly melt in our mouth there was a creamy apple sauce on the side with cherries. We each had a liter off beer taking our total count up to 11 liters from the other day. While we enjoyed our dessert we saw another guy giving "the bums rush" out the door and thrown on the street. Better luck next year buddy.

We took a stole down the main drag of Oktoberfest stopping to get some candied cashews and laughing at anyone who thinks rides are a good idea after even having 1 liter of beer.

Oh and we found something that really puts the "about a foot long" hot dog to shame at the Mn State fair: The ONE METER brat. Yes you heard right, 3 feet of brat goodness. No we didn't get it but did drool over it.

Our favorite tent was the Lowenbrau tent with the lion the roared and took a swig of beer after his roar. We split one beer there just to say we'd been there and called it a day before we started dancing on tables and making more international friends.

So back to the train station. Here we are in the magical train station finding ourselves hungry (yet again). Heather had a scoop of amaretto gelato, charlie had a fruit and cream one... and the trouble began. It's like once we started eating we were addicted... everything was wonderful and finally cheap! We found chocolate filled croissants, waffle filled raspberries and cream cheese, mini spring rolls... oh my!

After enough stuffing ourselves we got on the train and headed back to Florian and Andreas apartments. Florian was out for the night seeing a band but Andreas was up and ready for fun. Andreas is going to school for engineering and spends most of his time at home "learning" which we think is really cute. Before we left he said, "make sure you drink beer in Germany." Yes as if we would forget to do that. So we finally drank our 12% world's best and most rare trappist monk beer. All we can really say is yes, it does live up the hype. We'd like to save the other for our "best meal ever" in Italy. We shared some of our beer with Andreas who was happy then to share more of his beer with us. The hours past and we laughed the night away. We showed pictures of our dogs and families from back home and asked him more questions about those crazy german drinking songs. Asking about german drinking songs turned into him getting out the songs and all of us singing along... including the huge germans hits: Country Roads and Hey Baby.

As long as we live we will never forget one of Andreas stories. He is on a table tennis team that goes on a yearly trip up to the mountains. Andreas had a special job and shirt: he had to teach the younger guys how to drink hard liquor. Well as you can imagine the story just got funnier and he brought out his computer to show us all the pictures to go along with it. He said the next day on the way back it was tradition for them to keep drinking. He said once he "lost his mind" and remembers nothing but what his friends told him, including how he was dropped off at his parents house and he said: "they were not impressed." We laughed so hard and so long as this that the neighbor downstairs came up to tell us to be quiet. Soon the neighbor was laughing too. We both thought... yeah I doubt our parents would be "impressed" with us if we came home in that state.

But the silver lining to his story is after that day he does not drink hard liquor anymore. Except: mixed drinks and anything under 20%... we also had a very good laugh about this.

Andreas told us about german schnapps which is NOTHING like american schnapps. This is not sweet and will nearly kill you we think cause most likely was made in a bathtub of sorts. We declined shots which was a good thing and headed off to bed where we laughed for another 20 minutes recalling the stories Andreas had shared with us.

Heather said, "Can we please take him home, he's so cute and he won't be any trouble... I'll take care of him, I promise!!!!"

1 comment:

Unknown said...

The food is endless and without culinary limits! MMM!! Glad you went to church - how about Mass? Don't forget to floss!
MOMu