Germany, 2011

I believe from my lack of recollection that all I managed to do on my first 12 hours in in Munich was buy a bier and a bag of chips from the grocery store and pass out in my day-clothes in the bunk bed that I was sharing with an older Asian lady. She was vacationing there with her two teenage-esque kids, and they didn’t speak a word of English. She ordered them into the bathroom to brush their teeth, clean their bunks, and read out of thick books (this I gathered from her high-pitched tone and hand gestures, along with their silent compliance). Happily for me, she and I were sharing a bunk-eb. Needless to say, she won the top bunk in our sleeping arrangement.

My best friend Stephanie had stayed at this hostel 3 years before me and had already recommended to me the hostel itself and its free walking tour of Munich. It was a brisk, windy, sub-zero day in Munich. Our tour guide claimed he had no nationality (because he had traveled so much throughout his life… yeehaw for you, bro) and had a strong attitude against anyone who didn’t know what the difference between Germany and Bavaria was. Learn it, love it; it might save your life from an angry non-national German tour guide.

We naturally started at the entrance to old town Munich. We stopped at the home cathedral of the then-current Pope, Benedict XVI. We stopped for lunch which consisted of the most Bavarian meal I could imagine: a sausage with hot mustard sandwiched in between two layers of thick pretzel bread, and a large bottle of beer, of which we were told would lose all integrity about 15 minutes after its opening. Commence chugging ice cold German bier on a day when there were already icicles forming in my nostrils. One of the Australians on our tour threw away a half-full bier, and I’m pretty sure she is outlawed from the region altogether now.

We continued on to my first real bier hall, which ended up being the site of the first meeting of the Third Reich, as the Nazi regime was born by Hitler in Munich. It was everything I had hoped it would be. Large, sweaty and unnecessarily loud German men were strewn everywhere, eating giant sausages and drinking out of oversized steins at hours of the day that are vaguely inappropriate to be drunk during. Being proudly German, and having been loud and full of bier myself, who was I to judge? We also visited the site of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, the failed revolution in 1923 when Hitler unsuccessfully tried to overtake Munich and subsequently the rest of Bavaria. I later was invited out to bar hop with my Australian friends that night in Munich but declined due to my early morning bus to Prague. Unlike Budapest, they didn’t get me with the “When will you ever be a single woman on a night in Munich again?!” question, and my body was still ridding itself of the memory of Becherovka. Instead I went and lurked in the subway system long enough to find the sites for Oktoberfest (Theresenwiese) and the site of the 1972 summer Olympics in Munich (Olympiaplatz), with the iconic Olympic Tower and Olympic Stadium. It was dark by the time I got there and thus opted not to find the balcony of the Israeli team that was taken hostage and killed that summer in the Munich massacre; I could only take so much creepy in one day.