München or Munich

Last weekend, a few of our friends decided to take a trip to Munich, so MB and I figured we'd tag along. There are a number of ways for us to get to Munich, but we decided to go the most cost efficient route (aka: the longest). That meant we had to get up really early to catch the really early train so we'd still have a good part of the day left once we finally got to Munich 5 hours later. Of course that didn't even work out as planned. We missed one of our connecting trains, ended up spending a couple of hours in a random small town called Osterburken (I think), and didn't get to Munich until about 3 pm.

Once we made it, however, it was great. The hostel was much more than I expected. We even had a room to ourselves. Then we hit up a pizza joint, which was alright. Certainly no Pronto though. After having a bite to eat, we went to the BMW (pronounced bay-em-vay in Deutschland) museum. I couldn't wait for this and it didn't disappoint. The place was designed to be very futuristic with an interesting design that was organized by different design concepts of the vehicles. It was certainly really neat, however I found that I was much more interested in the engines than the cars themselves. But, that may be because it's only a matter of looking out the window to see a beemer here in Germany.

After that, we went to have a look out the TV tower. That was neat but the guys weren't allowed outside to get any really good pictures, so I didn't even bother going up. On the way, however, we ran across a Munich version of the Walk of Fame. There were quite a few famous molded hands that I recognized such as Metallica, Shania Twain, David Copperfield and Bryan Adams. Then, there were even more than I had never heard of, but it was still cool. MB was pretty excited that she put her hands in Shania's mold... she wasn't so excited though when her hands came out wet.

Once we had finished with all that, we headed on back to the hostel. I was ok with that because it had been a long day. Not that it was over though. Once we got back, there was a band playing in the bar downstairs. So, we went down there, had some beer and chilled out for a few hours before calling it a night.

The next day was another early rise. The guys were heading to the Dachau concentration camp. The girls weren't so interested, so they just stayed back and did their own thing (which included visiting some crazy royal residence or something). Dachau was fairly interesting. It didn't evoke any crazy emotions or anything that I thought it might since it was really just a lot of open space with some old buildings here and there. But reading some of the articles was a bit of a learning experience. I wouldn't consider it the highlight of my trip, but it was worth doing once.

The camp was a little outside the main part of the city, so once we got back we got some more food (I had my first döner) and then had a look at the old part of the city. There were some cool buildings and stuff, but I'm learning that all the 'cool' buildings kind of end up looking the same after a while... unless they're really something special. The best part about the old part of Munich for me was the guy who was rocking out Bon Jovi's Runaway on the accordian. He was definitely one of the best street performers I've ever seen.

And that was pretty much our trip. I'd love to go spend a few more days in Munich if I get a chance. Of course, I'd probably find a better way to get there because we ended up spending another hour in Osterburken on the way back. But, I guess there probably aren't too many people who can say they've spent three hours in Osterburken.

Here's a slideshow of some of our trip. I'll probably put some better pics in there later or at least on facebook when I'm not too lazy to look through all six or seven hundred of them.