Another Year. Another City.: Munich

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We woke up on Friday to some light rain and much cooler weather than we had the day before. We thought we were going to grab breakfast with Claire after her meeting, but it got pushed back an hour and we didn't want to wait since we had a four hour drive from Dresden to Munich.

Little did we know how long. Five and a half hours later we arrived in Munich.

Let's back up though because breakfast is a whole story in itself. We wanted to grab something to eat so that we could wait until we got to Munich for a late lunch. We first stopped in this cafe, but as Mike said "it was too hipster." They did have some creative menus choices, a lot which involved goat cheese. We found a restaurant a few shops down and grabbed a table. Menus were on the table, but it took what seemed like forever to place our order and then even longer to get our food. By the time we left, it was 11:30.

After breakfast, we packed the car and got going. The first hour went relatively smoothly and Mike was enjoying his last day of driving on the Autobahn while I napped. About an hour in, that all changed. For the next four and half hours, we would sit in traffic, be rerouted by the gps for a quicker route, and then sit in traffic some more. Needless to say, we were glad to finally arrive in Munich, even if it did mean having to return our rental car (we would be in Munich for the rest of our trip, which has excellent public transportation and we'd be drinking a lot of beer!).

We dropped off the rental car and navigated public transportation to our hotel. We stayed at the Radisson in Munich and were very happy to see how nice it was. We were a little disappointed to see how far out from downtown it was, but the quality of the room made it well worth it.

By this point, it was almost six and we hadn't eaten since our breakfast-turned-lunch at 11:00am. Mike had been to Munich before and knew that Marienplatz was the place to go. It has lots of restaurants, bierhauses (his main motivation) and pretty architecture.

I'm not even tired of all of the churches because they're all so pretty, especially against that sky

Our first stop was food and beer. Ayinger has a beerhaus in Munich, even though they aren't a "Munich Beer." In order to have a beerhaus at Oktoberfest, the beer has to be from Munich. That being said, we knew we wanted to go to Ayinger on Friday.

We arrived at Ayinger and it was packed. Every table was taken and there was a line of people waiting to get in. We were lucky, though, since we were only two people, they were able to seat us right away. The service was a little slow, but the beer and the food was so good! I'm not even a beer drinker, but in the spirit of Oktoberfest, I tried their Weiss beer and actually really liked it.

So happy to be in Munich!

Look at that pork shoulder! It's huge!

After dinner at Ayinger, we headed over to Hofbrauhaus, which is apparently the most famous bierhaus in Munich (I had no idea about any of this).

There are multiple floors and tons of people and tables on each floor. It's amazing!! It was super crowded though and we finally decided to just ask a group of guys if we could squeeze in at the end of their table. They agreed and we sat down and got to know our new friends. There were four of them, two of which lived in Brussels (I think...) and the other two lived in Seattle. They all worked for the same company and had all lived in Seattle at one point. One of them went to Virginia Tech, so I quickly introduced myself and then dropped the 21-16 score from when JMU beat Tech in 2010. Obviously starting off on the right foot :)

We had fun hanging out with them and drinking beer. Lots of beer.