Fun in München.

The people have spoken and apparently ... I have a mullet.

It seems like every time we jump on a train it takes 6 hours to get to were we are going. The ride in first class goes by surprising quick and these lengthy trips ensure plenty of time to pad the cribbage scores. Currently total is 28-21 in favor of me.

We arrived late afternoon to our German friend Kerstin´s. Kerstin, as some Mauinians will remember, was the first person we hosted on couch surfing and someone who we had continue to stay in contact with.

Kerstin took us on last Saturday night to a house party. Imagine 2 Americans who know little to no German thrown into a house with 50 chain smoking and beer guzzling krauts all this while a band played what amounted to shitty punk music. Suffice to say there wasn't a whole lot of lingual interaction forged on our behalf but the evening was not for naught. I joined into a spirit game of Nintendo Wii tennis and Colette and I made speculation as to which patrons where going home with one another.

Business first. We went to Dachau on our first day in München. Oprah had pumped up Dachau as a life alerting event. At the risk of sounding callused, I felt that the holocaust museum in Washington D.C was 10 times more powerful. Just sayins all.

We met some extraordinarily friendly folks at Dachau and they invited us out to dinner. What better way to washing away our depressing afternoon in Dachau then some beers at the Hoftbrauhaus. What is it about mass genocide that really brings people together anyways? These are 1 liter beers in exceptionally heavy beer steins.

The obligatory beer wench photo. Well actually she is carry pretzels so I guess this makes her a pretzel wench.

This is Kerstin and Alex. They are fantastic!

They took us up to Cinderella Castle (it does have a German name but I can´t remember at this juncture)

View from within the castle.

This is the view of the beer "isle." It is more like a beer square. Each of these bottles is 500 ml which equals roughly 16 ounces. The price you ask? Wicked cheap. Beer runs about 1.2 Euro per 1 liter for the good stuff!!!

This is a really cute photo of Colette surveying her eating options. The food is quite different and quite good. The yellow things on her plate are dumplings and I have never had anything so tasty and so filling. This restaurant was deep within Bavaria. Alex and Kerstin ordered for us and it became pretty obvious that the waitress became kind of nervous after they had ordered. Kerstin said that the waitress was really excited/nervous to serve foreigners that were really excited about having true German food. It became quite obvious that Colette and I were mini celebrities within the restaurant when the table full of old men would glance over not so subtle and then one by one workers in the kitchen would make their way out of the kitchen to take a peak.

This is blaukraut. It isn't as nearly sour as normal kraut. Its my new favorite food ... besides Kebaps, of course.

Here are a couple of random shots from within München.