We knew the 160 person, giant Tent hostel would either be our favorite or least favorite. Let me tell you, this was a tiny, hippie fairytale land. There's ping pong tables, beach volleyball, hoops, a cafeteria, giant campfire, and unfortunately for us REALLY cold temperatures. It doubles as a hangout, made lots of great friends, but absolutely froze at night even in all our layers. Throughout the day we went to outdoor markets, and saw some nice churches and old buildings. Munich is much smaller than Paris or London, but has great transit and was a nice stop. We walked through the huge English Garden park, went to some of their famous outdoor beer gardens and ate bratwurst and pretzels. Snuck (mostly accidentally) into their national history museum, and saw some Picasso and Van Gogh at a great abstract art museum, only 1 euro on Sundays! The Residenz Palace is where their royalty used to live, but wasn't anything like the size or grandeur of Versailles. It did have the Antiquarium and a huge statue that took upan entire wall, made outof seashells and other sea things. Of course we did a famous beer pub crawl, and since we were 2 of the first 3 girls on the tour we got in for free. Found Pope Benedicts favorite beer as a young man and drank it! At the end of this drunken night one person is awarded the Beer Champions Cup, a huge, heavy glass Munich beer mug; for one who was friendly, fun, and just generally an awesome drunk....drum roll... I won!
After 4hrs of sleep we went on a day trip to Neuschwanstein and hohenschwangau castles out on a huge mountain. This is the castle that inspired the Disney castle, so I was reverted back to childhood, having never lost my fierce love for Disney. We climbed up and down the mountain, saw a raging waterfall, and walked onto the very high bridge connecting two peaks together. We did a free Sandaman tour again in town, where we visited the hall Hitler created the Nazi party in, his favorite beer garden, and other WWII historical sites of revolt and importance. Germany students have to visit 2 concentration camps as part of school, and are taught that the International community may never forgive their country for their tainted past. They also lost over 70 percent of their city that was turned to rubble, so they only have a few tall buildings left standing from before the war, and only because planes used themselves landmarks to navigate. So the moral of the tour was to ease up on Germany, they're definitely making sure their new generations know their country's past.
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