Wed: We went to the zoo!!! (after checking out etc.).
We had all our gear/backpacks and though we would dump them in the locker room. Bad move, the lockers were tiny, and so we had to take them round the oldest zoo in the world. There were koalas and a whole menagerie of other animals, but in comparison to say Bristol Zoo, it wasn't much better (apart from the fact it was cheaper). Lugging bags around was not fun. We then, after finishing the zoo split up, with Joel unsuccessfully going back to the hostel to find our lost railway map, and with me going to find the Kurt Gödel Institute of Mathematical Logic (that's how cool I am.)
We met at the station, and got on our 4 1/2 hour train to Munich. Our train was delayed (yes, delayed, and clearly this a very big thing of the continent, as they were many announcements, and they held connector trains at stations, so people on this train could get them). The journey was uneventful, and we then arrived at Munich, and walked to the nearby hostel. Our hostel was an awesome place, full of people gearing up for Oktoberfest (as one Australian said to another in Bratislava, 'there's no point going out tonight, you've got to be on tip-top form for Oktoberfest). There were alot of Aussie and people, and we spent the night getting food and in the bar with our free beer.
Thursday: We walked into town in time to see the ornate Glockenspiel (a clock) strike 11 in an ornate ceremony (it was better than Prague’s famous clock), and then went on free tour of the city, encompassing beer halls and such. We then went to the English Gardens (which were English in the sense they there were ‘not organised’. Fair enough...). We decided we want to find a nice, beautiful Bavarian village, as in our experience Germans are lovely (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/8018436/John-Cleese-says-he-always-loved-the-Germans.html) and we wanted a nice beer hall. We got on a local train to Tegernsee. This is where the fun started:
BOB (that was the name of our train company), does not like interrail tickets, and they were not valid, we both got chucked off in the middle of nowhere (Schaftlach, a town so small it’s not even worthy of a Wikipedia page, not even in German...)
We both didn't want to spend 9 Euros on the train back
I went into the station room, only to find the guy there, did not speak English, had nothing to do with trains, and was told ‘Please leave NOW’, and was shown the door.
We both ambled round the deadest village. It was peaceful and beautiful, but not one was around.
Joel suggested to try to hitchhike
I wrote the sign
...Joel held the sign
I thumbed
We both waited 10 minutes being passed by many cars
The nice doctor man (specialising in the heart) in the jeep pulled up and took us as far as he could (a 15 minute drive), even taking us to a legal train station
I was very excited and had to sit in the back
We then got the train back to Munich, and it was beautiful
We got back, got food and went to a local beer hall for a pint. Bavarian Beer is awesome, and then we met a Brit who was there on business (he was in the clay pipes business), and he was great fun to talk to, (he had 4 1-litre glasses of beer, that night)
Friday: We packed up our stuff and put it in the luggage room. We then headed off to a very big museum- the Deutches museum. It was massive. You could have spent days in there. Thankfully it wasn’t just clay pots and bits of rock. It had a big physics experiments section (Mr Gregson would have loved it) and a maths section. We spent a long time getting there, before getting lunch (a pork sandwich, literally, we went into a butchers, they cut a 2cm bit of pork, and but it between two bits of bread, it was really nice). We then went up a tower and saw some amazing views of the city, before strolling back to the hostel. We still had time before our 11pm sleeper and thus went off the main Oktoberfest site to see hoe preparations were going for the big start day, tomorrow. It was awesome, though strange how beer was mixed with fairground rides. We then went back to our local beer house for a pint, before getting our stuff and on a sleeper to Paris. It was cleaner than the other sleepers, but still pretty cramped.
Songs of the day
Wed:
Thurs:
Fri:
