Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayern

Because Sweeney is a lazy, lazy boy, I'm (Bode) going to blog about Munich before he talks about his trips to Croatia and Salzburg.



On Friday night, we went on a beerhall/beergarden tour of Munich, a city that is known for its expansive and numerous establishments. Our tour guide, Troy, was a very cool Australian guy who told us some great stories. We learned that Munich was originally a cluster of monastaries (Munchen means the monks... the region Bayern, Bavaria in English, means "by the", so Bayern Munchen means by the monks). Medieval monks were famous for their brewing exploits, so the city was basically founded on beer itself. Its specialty, wheat beer, was invented in the middle ages because the peasents weren't able to eat during Lent. Because of a loophole in the bible, they sat around all day and drank beer instead of eating food. However, they found that they became too skinny only drinking regular beer and were starting to get too drunk. Thus, they began making beer out of wheat in order to sustain themselves. At each different hall, he would tell us a different fun fact about the history of beer and the beer gardens. First, we went to Augustiner beer garden, which is the largest inner city beer garden and the third largest beer garden in the world, holding 5,000 people at its capacity. We also were able to tour Lowenbrau beer garden and brewery. Finally, our tour ended at Augstiner Keller, an indoor beer hall. When the tour was over, we took celebratory jaeger shots outside.



Saturday was a significant day for Munich because the biggest soccer team in Germany, Bayern Munich, had their last home game of the season. Bayern had already secured the Bundesliga championship, so it was a huge party for all of Bayern's fans throughout the day. We walked through Munich to the city hall in order to go on a free tour of the city. Bayern fans were EVERYWHERE walking through the city and singing and partying all night long. Once we were at the city hall, we found our tour guide and took the tour of Munich. Big Mistake. It turns out that we ended up with the worst tour guide of all time... guess you get what you paid for. The stories he told were very boring due to his inability to be entertaining. We still learned a few fun facts about Munich. It was, as the other tour guide said, basically founded on beer. It didn't really start growing until Henry the Lion was given the region by the Holy Roman Emporer as a gift for his loyalty. Naturally, he rode down to Munich and celebrated this gift by getting hammered and burning down another ruler's bridge. He built a second bridge by Munich, and the town started to grow... so Munich's rise is partially attributed to a drunk deciding to destroy a bridge.



After our root canal of a tour, we headed back to the hostel to recharge our batteries. We happened upon two brits watching soccer in the bar, so we decided to buy some beer and keep them company. Afterwards, we went to the most famous beerhall in the world, the Hoffbrauhaus. It was basically the disneyland of beerhalls: full of tourists and highly overrated. We couldn't even get a table, so we decided to go find another place to drink until we were Bayern fans. As we were walking to another beerhall, we happened upon this small hole in the wall bar (comparable to the Illini Inn) and decided to go in. It was filled to the brim with older local Bayern fans drinking and singing victory songs. Naturally, we decided to stop in and stay a while. There was this one guy who started talking to us who was wearing a Cologne jersey and kept requesting Cologne's song (the only words we could remember were "Viva Colognia"). The whole bar would sing the song at the top of their lungs with this guy. It was an incredible experience.

As we were walking home, we passed by the town hall again, where an official party for the Bayern team was. It was an absolute wasteland with glass and beer and pretzel pieces all over the place. Since we had been around singing fans all day, we had picked up a Bayern chant or two, so we started leading chants with fans.