I forgot to mention that on the first day, I also did the Beer Challenge.  Now, that does not mean that the drunkest person wins.  It was quite the opposite.  This beer challenge was about remembering the most facts about Munich’s different beers and breweries.  The lack of beer in my life resulted in me not winning the challenge.  Oh well.  The group I was with was relatively small (only about twenty people) and we all bonded pretty well.  There were these five Scottish guys in my group whom I had met earlier in the day at the free tour.  I LOVE those guys.  At the end of the night, everyone was toasting and singing and just having an all-around great time.  No one was sloppy drunk.

On Wednesday (day two in Munich) I decided to go on the beer challenge again since I had so much fun the night before.  That was a poor decision.  Seventy people showed up, and a good-sized group of people from Texas were already drunk when they got there.  I think they were expecting a pub crawl, which the beer challenge is not.  I ended up hanging out with these really cool newlyweds from Boston and a few other people older than me.  People don’t believe I’m only twenty when I tell them.

Wednesday during the day was nice.  I wandered around the city trying to find the things I wanted to go back to.  One thing was the Tower of St. Peter’s Church.  So, I think I walked past this church at least six times.  I kept asking locals for directions and they all looked at me like an idiot because this church is huge and one of the symbols of the city.  Well, I found it, and I climbed up all 336 stairs to the top.  SO worth it.  That is the #1 best view of Munich.  I highly recommend it.

I also ran through traffic when I saw a gelato shop, took a picture of a Glockenspiel that actually works, went inside a church that was almost completely destroyed during the war and was rebuilt with the help of the whole community, saw some really creepy dolls at the toy museum, and contemplated stealing the Maypole.

Munich was awesome.  On my first day there, I decided to do the New Europe free tour (shocking, I know).  My tour guide Michael (from IRELAND of course) was really entertaining and knowledgeable.  He had all the answers to all the questions and showed us a lot of things we would never have known otherwise.

One cool thing about Munich is the way they do memorials.  In Berlin, the Holocaust memorial takes up basically an entire city block.  In Munich, memorials are small so they’re there for those who want them and out of the way for those who don’t.  The memorials are often small plaques with very few words like “Until 1946 here stood the Something Something Shopping Centre.”  What’s interesting about this is that it forces you to become actively involved with history, similar to the Jewish Museum in Berlin.  These plaques make you think “Hmm, what was this shopping centre, and what happened in 1946?” in hopes that you might go and do a little research of your own.

A spot you need to check out is where a memorial used to be.  Near Theatinerkirche, there’s a wall where you can faintly see the remains of two plaques and two wall hangings.  In 1923 Hitler and a group of Nazis marched down this street during the Beer Hall Putsch and were met by German police.  Shots were fired, Hitler hit the deck, twenty people died including fifteen Nazis, four police officers, and one innocent bystander.  When the Nazis came into power they placed a plaque and hung two wreaths to commemorate the twenty “Nazis” (they spun a story claiming that the other five were also Nazis), and everyone who passed by this memorial was forced to raise a Nazi salute to the guards on staff twenty four hours a day.  Many people passively resisted this gesture by turning down a nearby alley to avoid the memorial.  Eventually, Nazis caught on and began beating and killing people who went down the alley more than once.  After the war, the memorial was taken down, and a very subtle bronze trail of bricks was placed amongst the cobblestone in the alley in remembrance of all those who were willing to give their lives in order to protest the Nazi authority.  What did they put where Hitler fell?  A sewer.  Well played, Germany.  Haha

Another interesting fact about Munich is that almost all of the buildings are only about fifty years old.  Munich was a major city for the Nazis, and as such it was very heavily bombed during the Second World War to the point where practically the entire city had been destroyed.  Now, Germans are smart.  Munich knew what was coming, so prior to the bombing, the people of Munich took photographs and made extremely detailed sketches of the city so that after the war they could rebuild it.  And to this day, it looks exactly the same as pre-war Munich, thanks to the help of different parts of the community coming together.

So, I have, without fail, managed to get the time wrong for almost every tour I’ve tried to do.  Haha but that’s not a problem!!  Sometimes I get there early

Yesterday I did another New Europe free walking tour.  I will never cease to be amazed at how great these tours are.  I’ve been recommending them to everyone.  All of my guides have been extremely knowledgeable and nice and just genuinely love the cities they’re working in.

My guide, Michael, was great, and an Irishman!  Although those qualities usually go hand-in-hand.  The tour ended up being almost four hours, but it was so interesting that I didn’t even notice.  I got to see all of the “old” buildings (Munich was heavily bombed during WWII and most of the buildings you see now are concrete reconstructions of what the city looked like before the war) and Michael pointed out a bunch of really interesting memorials that I otherwise wouldn’t have even noticed.  I can’t get over how great the tour was.

I also did New Europe’s Beer Challenge last night!  No, it’s not what you’re thinking.  It was nothing like Beer Fest.  We went around to a bunch of different beer gardens and the beer museum and learned a lot about the history of beer in Munich, and we sampled all of the different kinds of beer brewed in Munich.  Everyone there was just there to have a good time, unlike pubcrawls where most people just want to get sloppy and embarrassingly drunk.  The challenge part of the Beer Challenge was actually to be the most knowledgeable person there.  I didn’t win, obviously, but I met some really great people, including some kilt-wearing Scotsmen and a Gaelic-speaking Irishman from Tipperary.

I’d like to apologize for the lack of photos lately.  The internet here takes freaking forever and a half, but I think I’m going to set aside some time tonight to upload my pictures from Salzburg and what I’ve seen so far in Munich.

Also, I’m thinking about reformatting the layout of my blog.  My posts are getting wayyy too long for the front page.  Expect changes in the near future!