Since we are civilized people and because we appreciate our livers and all that they do for us, we decided to do some sight-seeing and see more than the inside of the beer tents on Thursday. Blake had gone to the Neuschwanstein Castle last year, and I saw pictures and really really wanted to go this year. He had gone with a tour group last year, but thought it might be more expensive and that it would be easy enough to go on our own. We got a somewhat late start, but hopped on a train before noon. We are on the train for about an hour, and we get to some random stop and almost everyone gets off, but Blake said that last year he didn’t switch trains, so we stayed put. Over an hour later, we get to the last stop on the train and find out that we should have switched trains an hour ago when everyone else did. Opps. So we had to get back on another train, explain why we didn’t have tickets for that train, and take it back to the stop we missed an hour or so back, and wait for another train to take us to the castle, which then was another hour on a train. We finally got there a little after 4 pm, it was rainy and foggy, we were pretty tired from being on a train all day, but at least we were able to book a tour for the castle before it closed. So we walked up a pretty big hill, but it felt good after sitting on the train all day. The castle itself is pretty amazing. It was built by a crazy King, it was never officially finished, it was used as a model for the Disney World Castle, and it is set in a beautiful setting surrounded by mountains. Here is our group after the long journey:
The best part was that on the way down we stopped and got some Glühwein (hot spiced wine).
We had checked the time that the last train was leaving from Füssen (the closest small town to the castle) and we were very close to missing it, which would have meant staying the night in Füssen with none of our stuff. We then had to take that an hour back to where we transferred to get to the train that took us back to Munich. Because we were rushing around missing trains and running to other trains all day, we hadn’t eaten all day and it was already 8 (except for Jason trying a hot dog from a vending machine:)
So we ran around some small German town during our 30 minute stop looking for food. Luckily we found some Chinese Buffet which was able to satisfy all our respective dietary restrictions. So we filled up some take away containers and ran back to the train station, and finally, we were on our way back to Munich.
We had originally planned to hit up Oktoberfest again Thursday night after getting back from the castle, but that was when we thought we were going to get back around 7 pm. We didn’t get back until after 10, but we tried anyway. As we were walking to the fairgrounds, we noticed there were many, many drunk people heading towards us, away from the fairgrounds. Turns out Oktoberfest ends at 11 pm, and it was almost 11 pm. So we didn’t get to go to Oktoberfest that night, but we did see what few people get to see- the close of a night at Oktoberfest sober. It was pretty amusing. We were pretty exhausted from the frustrating day anyways, so we went back and just decided to watch a little German TV. This pretty much sums German TV up:
After we got bored with boob/word search game, we found a little tofu guy (Note: We are just guessing it was tofu, other guesses include a loaf of bread, what's your guess?) that didn’t make any sense to us (it is all in German, which turns out, we don’t speak):
So the day didn’t go as planned at all, but somehow we still managed to have fun with it. And that kids, is the real lesson here.
2 comments:
For those curious about the mystical german hotdog thing from the vending machinge:
The Bifi is a salami stick wrapped in some sort of hardtack like substance. Although the wrapper makes it look like a corndog, I can assure you that it is not! Using the Overheimer Rating Scale (carefully adapted for food and normalized for the metric system) I would rate this food item as follows:
Moistness - 2.1
Meatiness - 4.2
Texture - 0.1 (an all time low score, tied with Lima Beans)
Nutritional Value - 1.2
Taste - 3.5 (which exceeded initial expectations, I might add)
Aftereffects - Wicked stomach ache, acne, ability to speak german
Awesomeness - 10, because it came from a vending machine in a train station
That photo is classic. I love Kathleen's judgemental stare.
Also worthy of note is how Mr. Tofu really hated balloons or something. Balloons kept coming on the screen and he would hit them away followed by gleeful giggling from the four of us.
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