Yesterday, I did a free walking tour of the city. I guess they have them in a lot of cities. You don't get to really go into anything but it was a three hour tour and the guide was awesome. He had a ton of good stories and history about Germany and Munich. They have these may pole things that people always try to steal. The one in Munich is really large and no one had ever stolen it until 1996. Stealing the may pole is like a big game between cities. Once you steal it the city or whoever has to pay a ransom which is usually like free beer and a party for whoever stole it. The guys that stole the Munich one didn't want the regular ransom, they wanted a permanent table with free beer and food for the rest of their lives at Oktoberfest!! So freakin smart! The airport also has a may pole and one day it went missing. The security guys were really worried bc if you can take a tree out of the airport and no one notices what else are they missing. So they called the cops to get them to help. Come to find out it was the cops that took it!!
A long time ago when a guy wanted to ask a girl out, he would cut down a tree and carve and paint it. Then he had to take it over night and put it up in front of her house. If she wanted to go on a date with him she went outside and danced around it. If she didn't, she went and got a case of beer and put it outside. So I guess it's a win win for guys!!
We saw a lot of important places and churches. I think the creepiest ones were the places where hitler had given speeches or seeing the building he was in when he decided to have his people go out and destroy Jewish property. I don't know how to spell it in German but it's crystal night. Munich has a lot of memorials that are really subtle. Near the end of the tour, we went down a street that had a gold walkway down the middle. When the nazis were taking over, they had signs put up on the building and had two guards by them and if you walked by it you had to salut it. The Germans that hated the nazis would stop before they got there and turn and go down a different street to avoid it. The nazis started putting an as officer down that street and he would take names and if you lived on that street you were ok but if you were just avoiding it you got sent to dachau and you died. So the walkway is a memorial to those people that resisted the nazis. The guide while telling us this story had to stop in the middle and tell us to not even think about doing the salut bc it's a 2500 euro fine and if you are a foreigner you can't come back to Germany for 8 yrs.
Do you know why Oktoberfest started? I forget the name of the guy but he got married and the party after the wedding was so awesome that everyone talked about it every year and then just started having a party that evolved into Oktoberfest. I want my wedding to be so awesome that the party after it is world famous forever!!
The tour was awesome and at night they also have a beer tour. There weren't enough people for us to actually do the tour which was sad so I went back to the hostel to figure out what I wanted to do. I got a message from Colette saying she got to Munich so I went and met her and we went to a beer garden!! Holy cow those places are so cool. I want to open one just do I can have all the beer I want! It was huge I think they have a capacity for 5000 people. It's outside of a brewery so you get to drink all of their beer and the guide from earlier had talked about how Augustine had the best beer. They also serve food so hey have chicken and wings and chicken nuggets and fries and just good drunk food. Colette said she wanted to have chicken but the guy thought she said half a chicken. So she literally got half of a chicken. It was huge! So we had our dinner and some beer and these guys at a table near us had a guy who was just hammered and falling all over the place. They saw us laughing and invited us over. Of course the hammered guy decided to talk to me and ask me ridiculous questions all night. They were really nice and asked us to go have drinks with them at one guys apartment. We said sure but first we had to go to my hostel to get something. So the guy that had a thing for colette made her give him her number just in case. I guess he had an idea that we were lying and weren't going to show up. We went back to the hostel just laughing. We got a beer and her stuff she had left at my hostel and I walked with her half way back to her hostel. She said the guy called her all night. Right now we are on a train going to the neuschwanstein castle. It's going to be so pretty! The only thing is that stinks is that it takes two hours to get there and so it's kind of an all day thing. I'm supposed to leave tomorrow but I think I might stay an extra day bc I still really want to go to Dachau so I might do that tomorrow.
Also, both of us are pretty sure that our bodies are just running off of beer now and that there might be some blood in our alcohol stream.
Did you know that the fridge was invented in Germany just so they could have their favorite beer cold in the summer??
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