Welcome to Munich – Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

So our first adventure (barely) outside of the airport was figuring out what metro pass to purchase to get ourselves from the airport into the city. We walked up to the transportation desk, and told the no-nonsense lady at the counter what we were interested in doing. She immediately suggested a set of passes for us. Ten minutes of Deb-driven negotiations later, including various alternate permutations of passes, we walked away with exactly what the agent had originally suggested.

We found our way down to the “S Bahn” and hopped on. Munich has two metro systems the S and U Bahns. Shockingly, the U-Bahn is the underground subway. The S-Bahn is their regional rail system. About 40 minutes on the S-Bahn and we arrived right at the central transportation hub of Munich, Hauptbahnhof Station. One or two conversations with some locals later had us heading right to our hostel, Wombat’s. In reality it was about 200 feet from the station…we had just gotten a little turned around.

We piled into our first hostel room which was a 6 person dorm. It seemed like the room was empty when we got there, but while we were unpacking a few new folks popped in. We met John, a 20 year old from Modesto, California, and Francesca, a 20-something from near Bologna, Italy. We promptly passed out for a 3 hour nap since I couldn’t fathom going site seeing in my state. By the time we woke up a mid-twenties New Zealander couple, Kaylee and David had arrived. Their accents were really awesome.

We headed on down to the hostel’s bar and cashed in our free drink coupons. Deb got a wine and I got a beer. Then we spent some time catching up on email and Internet reading. Once we were done, we wound up heading out with our roommates for dinner to the Hofhaus, a historic beer house. We later learned that this particular beer house is largely filled with tourists these days, but was a favorite haunt of Hilter and his Nazi friends back in the day. In fact, it was the site of the pivotal Beer Hall Putsch.

Deb was actually nervous heading there, not because of its history, but because she feared the menu would consist entirely of sausage and beer. Turns out she was able to order a very tasty potato casserole. It tasted like a potato lasagne. I ordered a liter of beer (just like 90% of the rest of the people there), some sausages and a pretzel. The beer was good, but nothing spectacular. What was more impressive was how the waitress was able to carry 8 of the full one liter beer-stein’s at a time. It made her pretty scary…particularly when we apparently failed to follow protocol and order all of our food at once. We had a very good time with the gang, and the general scene was a caricature of what you would imagine with a bunch of hostel-ers in a beer house to be. The live traditional music completed the scene.

After dinner we took a stroll back toward the hostel with a pitstop to see the hotel we’d be spending the next two nights at. The establishments adjoining our prospective hotel provided some entertainment for the crew (if you’re curious, check out Google Street View for our hotel), and then we walked the one block back to Wombat’s and crashed for the night.