We were united with Eric at our hotel
Huge beers and a forkful of
sauerkraut - what a way to start the trip
Day 3: Saturday, April 7, 2007
London to Munich to the Beer Halls
We all took sleeping pills on the flight to London and managed to catch a little shut-eye. The plane touched down at about 6:30 a.m. and our flight to Munich was scheduled to leave around 9:30 a.m. We got into Munich at about 11:30 a.m. and headed down to the baggage claim. We had a bad feeling ever since our first flight got delayed that our baggage wouldn't make it along with us. We were right. Shea and Tommy got their bags but our two were missing along with another bag that Shea and Tommy had brought along for Caitlin. The lady at the Baggage Tracing Office wasn't very sympathetic as we filed our claim.
We left the airport and took the S-Bahn into downtown Munich. Our hotel, Le Meridian Munich, was right across from the train stop. We checked in to the hotel, met up with Eric, and got ready to go explore the town. Naturally the first place we headed was a beer hall. We went to a place called Hofbrauhaus München — one of the oldest beer halls in all of Germany. This place served liters of beer and each of the boys had 3 of them. The girls drank something called Radler — a concoction of beer and lemonade. Despite sounding incredibly weak, it still gets you drunk. The Hofbrauhaus also served pretzels as big as our faces and some traditional Bavarian fare. We got sausages with sauerkraut and potatoes.
After finishing our beer and food we were all feeling like true Germans. We decided to try and find this little restaurant listed as a "Hidden Gem" in our guidebook. When we located it, we decided that the beer had made us a little too rowdy to be welcome guests in this type of place. We opted for a place called Ratskeller which seemed like the kind of place that could keep pace with us. We followed our hostess through multiple rooms as we found our table. Ratskeller had low ceilings and what seemed like hundreds of tiny rooms, each one was a place to eat. We ordered our food and most of us barely remember what we had, but we do remember it being pretty good. I guess we found our way back to the hotel that night. We (Courtney and Nick) recall the strong disappointment that we felt when we discovered that our luggage still hadn't arrived.