München, Bavaria, Germany pt III

Day 42:

This is our first part 3 of the trip, but it was definitely needed. Today we had a little better idea of where things were and how to navigate the city. And there is so much to see here, we couldn't hope to see our fill in just a day.

We started off the same as yesterday, heading east towards the Englischer Garten. On our way, we picked up some pastries and coffee for breakfast. Jason got an apple cinnamon roll and Danielle got what looked like a nutella croissant, but the filling turned out to be the same strange, crushed up nut paste... it doesn't sound appetizing and is really hard to describe. So we had a hit and a miss for breakfast, but we got to enjoy it in the largest intercity park in the world, which makes it special anyway. From there we headed along the park to Marienplatz to see the Glockenspiel play for noon, which is supposed to be the best time to see it.

We figured out that the show is exactly the same, just seems to last WAY longer in the heat of the day will a million peoplw there... But its still fun to watch, even though we were too impatient yesterday and today to stay until the golden rooster called. Making it a short day, we walked around trying to find St Michaels church, but wound up at St Peters instead. It became quite apparent that the Germans are very comfortable with death... there were small cases on the sides of the church that contained bones on display. One was even assembled still, with a goblet and a crown and everything. Needing a bavarian pretzel, we went to Viktualienmarkt, which is basically a permanent farmer's market. We found a seat under a tree and had one of the largest preztels we have ever seen with some peach tea, of course.

Realizing that our internal maps were a little off, we mapped our way to St Michaels church to see Danielle's favorite, King Ludwig II. That brought us into our second crypt in 2 days. This one wasn't nearly as creepy, as it was just one room and smelled like flowers that had been placed around, rather than a ride at Disneyland.

On our tired way home, we stumbled upon Wolfsbrunnen, which was obviously not the biggest tourist attraction, but really caught Jason's attention. Its a fountain with 4 wolf heads around and on top of the middle column was a girl with a wolf behind her. Essentially, wolves are awesome and should be depicted on everything. Further research showed us that it is also known as Little Red Riding Hood Fountain. So the wolves weren't supposed to be nice or protecting her like it looked like, but still...

Heading back north, we came upon St Lukas, a large Lutheran church along the Isar River. It was built at the end of the 19th century as one of the first Lutheran churches in Munich, since the royals were Catholic and only allowed Catholic churches for hundreds of years. The domes were pretty impressive, but we are still pretty ruined by the Cologne Cathedral.

We went on our search to find the infamous river surfing and got lost for the better part of an hour. When we got there, we realized that these people are, in fact, insane. The wave is created by a bottleneck feeding the manmade Eisbach river hitting a slab of concrete, with concrete on either side. And they sure surf it!

We headed home from there where we ate way too much so we will have to carry less tomorrow. To Berlin it is!Read more