Grüß Gott Bayern

For the past couple of weeks I'd spent every spare moment sitting at a computer trying to cram as much German into my cluttered brain as was physically possible. It didn't go all that well, but for what we paid for our copy of Rosetta Stone, If I learned anything at all it would be worth it. Filled with a few German words and big dreams, we piled into a plane on Wednesday with travel buddies Dave and Kathy and made our way to Germany. W's employer has recently upgraded some of their vehicles, so we got to play with the new video games and on-demand movies that are available in Business class. You can play Tetris against another passenger, which turned out to be pretty cool or hold em against several others, but it wasn't working that well. Unfortunately for me, I was so entertained that I didn't sleep very much on the new lay flat seats and arrived nice and tired. We landed in Frankfurt, and decided we'd grab the short flight from there. On a 45 minute flight Lufthansa manages to get you a nice little meal in business class, and we were suddenly on the ground in munich. It's a 45 minute S-Bahn ride from the airport to the Hauptbanhopf (main train station), and only a short walk from there to our destination. We rested and freshened up at our hotel, The Courtyard Marriot Munich City Center. Not much of a view, and the service isn't spectacular, but it is only 2 blocks from Munich's Central train station. Plus, it's right next to a discount clothing store and an Aldi. The Kik is particularly handy if say you forgot to pack your long underwear and need something to stop your legs from freezing at night. After a little time for rest and a refreshing shower we wandered off to the train station and took the S-Bahn to Marienplatz. The Christmas market hadn't opened up yet, so we made our way to a restaurant that Tanta Rosita recommended for us. We sat down for dinner at Haxnbauer and had some really delicious roasted pork products. Kathy who had originally turned up her nose at the idea of pork knuckle but was a good sport and ordered it anyway. It was worth taking the risk. Dave had what turned out to be the best Weiner schnitzel of the trip. We enjoyed the first of many tasty beers, and had a really fabulous apple strudel for dessert. W and I dropped them back off at the hotel and made our first trip over to the Tollwood festival. On our visit last year we thought we'd just happened upon the timing of this festival, but it turns out it lasts most of December every year. We even recognized a rude crepe vendor from last year (we got our crepes elsewhere). No pictures the first day, except for the restaurant, we didn't see anything we hadn't seen on our first trip.