Saturday, August 30, 2014

Day Five

Getting up early and grabbing some buns with jam and cheese on them for free is a great feeling when you are trying to save while spending money! All four of us rented some bikes and took off into the crowded city dodging trains cars and mostly people. We got out of the main city of Munich and headed into a park where we saw people surfing. Yes you heard me correctly SURFING in Germany. They used the river to create a swell high enough to surf on it:
Whe continued riding for many many kilometers and saw the worlds second biggest beergarden. As you can imagine after riding around for a long time we were starving. Well the true question would be when am I not hungry? We came back to the main part of town and I saw a sign that had my mum's work on it:
It was a flea market with a bunch of shops with fruits and vegetables but also some cheap restaurants with Snitchel and Bratwurst. And afcourse a mini beer garden: 
We continued to explore by parking our bikes and walking to let the food and beer digest. 
Our first stop was St. Peter's cathedral which we only saw from outside yesterday, and wow did it blow our mind when we went in. The ceiling was so high and there was so much detail to every sculpture and painting:
Our second stop was at the main plaza where there was a restaurant in the middle of a cathedral and we could go up the tower for €2.50. Sounded expensive at the time but it did provide me with this view from atop of Munich:
This above is St. Peter's from the outside 
The cathedrals weren't the only good views when we stumbled upon this BMW i8:
We had already seen the main city so we got our bikes and headed in the "general" direction of places on the map. We finally got to St. Paul's cathedral and it looked like this: 
We also got to see where they were setting up for Oktoberfest and saw this ginormous statue right next to the venue:
As night time came around we wanted to check out the famous beergarden in the main plaza but didn't end up getting a seat because it was so packed! When we walked back outside I heard two guys talking Afrikaans and then ended up staying and talking with them for a bit. They weren't all that great to be honest. 37 year old men who smoke cigarettes. But no complaints about talking afrikaans again. That's the biggest downfall to Europe is that EVERYONE smokes! 
Germany was a lot of fun but now we've reached our halfway mark of our trip and next up is Italy! 











Friday, August 29, 2014

Day four

As our time in Freiburg came to an end we got up ready to move on to Munich! The one thing we've realized so far is that Germans don't have a word for sorry... Which is very odd because we saw people bumping into eachother and not say anything or as we have so jokingly played around with the common phrase : UUUUps (oops in German). 
Our hostel luckily was only 4 minutes away from the train station and we got checked in pretty quickly. It seemed like a great place for college students! It was called Hostel 4you.... Here's the thing tho: everything seems fine other than the fact that our room which we shared with 8 other people smelled SOOO bad. Idk what it was but somebody must have left a dead animal in this room. We quickly walked out and went for dinner in the city and grabbed some beers: 
The beer was called Radler and it was one of the sweetest beers I've tasted! It had lemon in it and man was it good. The place we ate at was nice and right outside the picture above. Our waiter was English and he basicaly told us to not have sex with the waitress because she doesn't look nice without clothes on, for us to go to a sketchy pub to watch football and pick up a woman(or a man), and he might have mentioned doing heroin. He was from London. A proper jokester I would say, but completely off his trolley. The glasses were really nice and light and Calvin and I wanted to grab a pair so the guy told us to nick them. Yes the waiter told us to steal the beer glasses: 
We might have taken them... Might not have. 

We asked for meatloaf but instead we got balony which wasn't bad, just not what we thought we were getting. 

The city of Munich was so big compared to Freiburg and we figured we'd rent bikes the next day and explore. So we returned to our hostel and our room smelled worse... Idk how but the smell was unbearable. We asked to switch rooms and they said the best they could do is switch us the second night. Yikes we will see how it goes! 

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Day Three

Exploring time! We got up early and grabbed some sandwiches and croissants from a local bakery which gave us some energy to start the hike of Schlossberg which wasn't going to be hard we thought. The first steps we took were probably at a 65 degree angle and somehow got steeper the higher we went up. There was a beer garden at the first stop and a jungle gym which looked like it was designed for a chimpanzee enclosure at a zoo. After finally reaching Schlossberg we weren't disappointed at all with the view: 
The place we were standing on for the view had 186 steps in a spiral staircase which led to not only a shaky structure but a home for about 800 tiny bugs (nats) that made it really hard for us to be up there long:
We started our decent back and found some pretty neat places along the way: 




When we arrived back into the city we went to the flea market and then into a massive cathedral which was unbelievable structured in the heart of the city: 
And then after walking around inside this cathedral we found the Chamber of Secrets: 
We ended the day by taking a nap in the park and grabbing some cheap ice cream after enjoying an amazing Schnitzel dinner with some sliced potatoes. 

Day Two

The morning of the second day Mrs Prentice drove us to the US military base in Kaserslautern and inside was a big mall with mostly American shops such as Taco Bell, Subway, and Johnny Rockets. The one German restaurant we went to had my favorite German food which was Currywurst and it looked something like this: 

After our lunch we fooled around while our money was being exchanged into euros which involved Calvin wearing this: 

We got back to the house in Kaserslautern and grabbed our backpacks to start our adventure as "modern day explores" as we quoted Matt Damon from "We bought a zoo": 

We figured riding trains would be our ideal time to catch up on sleep or so we thought when all we could do was talk about movies and make stupid jokes that made us laugh and be obnoxious on the train to Freiburg: 
When we got to Freiburg we settled into our hotel and then walked around the Altstad (old town) and grabbed dinner at a Turkish place. I know Turkish place in Germany why would we eat there? Well 2 reasons: 1. We were starving and 2. We were starving. The food was fantastic and the waiter was so nice to us even suggesting to us which beer would be nice to try first in Germany. The thing about this beer was that you had to turn the bottle upside down for a minute then flip it over and serve it. You learn something new each day. 

Day One

To start off my trip abroad I got a surprise from the check in lady at O'hare airport to tell me that I got bumped up to business class for my 8 hour flight to Germany. Once I landed in Germany, Brandon, Calvin and Alex were waiting for me and Brandon's mum drove us to their house in Kaiserslautern. It was late afternoon and before dinner started we decided to go for a hike in the backyard towards an old castle where it took us an hour and a half. We were starving. But it was well worth it.