Munich, Germany

This is the last back post and then I am all caught up from my week of no Internet. On May 4th we parted ways with Rachel as she went off to Pisa for a day before flying home to New York and we got on a train to Munich. While I very much enjoyed our time in Italy, the train ride made me realize how much of the country we missed in our short visit. The train wound through mountains, small towns, along rivers, and through vineyards confirming in my mind that another trip to Italy focusing on the countryside is a must-do in my future!

We arrived in Munich rather late and after checking into our hotel decided to go down the street for a drink. Erik being ever friendly decided to find us some friends and sat down with a group of people who we wound up spending the rest of the evening with. They were 3 Germans, a sister, her brother, and his wife. They were very nice and after chatting for a while (and yes lederhosen came up in conversation at least once) they invited us to join them at a club, as the bar was closing. The music was. . . different but we had a nice time and enjoyed talking with our new friends. We finally had to bail as we were falling asleep, and made our way back to the hotel. We had a lazy day and didn’t do much as Erik had caught a virus and wasn’t feeling well. It wound up not being such a bad thing to catch up on our sleep as everything seemed to close down on Sundays.

The following day we wandered around and saw a bit of the city, ate a lot of pretzels, bratwurst, and beer. We went out again that night to the same bar and wound up sitting next to a large group of people who were speaking in English and talking about the US. Erik once again made friends and we spent the next few hours talking to 2 Germans, and an Irishman. They all worked together at a company down the street and went out for a few drinks and those 3 wound up spending the rest of their night with us. They were a lot of fun and when it was time to leave, one of them, Lars, who also was the boss of the company paid our tab which was very nice of him! He went home and we went around the corner to another bar with the remaining German and the Irishman whose names I cannot remember. We again had a great night and met some wonderful people.

Our last day in Munich we spent exploring parks, seeing the remaining landmarks that we hadn’t gotten too, and enjoying the beer gardens before our night train to Budapest, Hungary. It was a really lovely day, one that we both agreed might be our favorite so far. The weather was beautiful and all in all everything was very relaxing. At 11:40pm we got on our night train, a night train that we believed we had a sleeper reservation for only to discover that no we did not! Luckily Erik went to explore and found us an empty cabin. We moved out of our fluorescent light normal seat car into this cabin, pulled the shades down over the window, closed the door, turned off the lights, spread out each over 3 seats, and attempted to sleep for the 9-hour trip to Budapest.