Munich Weekend Part 1: Crazy.

DISCLAIMER: This post about my weekend in Munich contains a lot of weird, bizarre, crazy, puzzling, confounding, other synonyms, and downright insane events/people.

Back in November, while sharing a lovely Thanksgiving dinner with my friends Hannah, Michelle, and Annie, someone mentioned that the band The Lumineers was doing a European Tour, and would be coming to Munich in March. We quickly learned that all of us love the band, and within a week we had bought tickets and booked a hostel, four months in advance. This means I've been looking forward to this weekend for a super long time, and now that it's over, I can say with full confidence that it vastly exceeded the already high expectations I had!

Our adventure began before we even got to Munich. While on the train from Salzburg to Munich (which was delayed because of technical difficulties, and which continued to make terrifying creaks and groans throughout the journey, causing us to at several points fear for our safety) we encountered several interesting folk. About 20 minutes after leaving Salzburg, we heard an awful retching sound, and once an unpleasant odor arrived, our suspicion was confirmed: the gentleman sitting behind us had vomitted on the train. We're not sure whether he was drunk or sick, but either way, it was unpleasant. While Annie and Michelle went to seek out a new place for us to sit, Hannah and I watched our stuff, but when the scouts returned, they brought more crazy news. Apparently just after we crossed the border into Germany, a pair of gentlemen in plain clothes walked up to a passenger, asked for a passport, and when he failed to display one, took him into another car, patted him down, and eventually handcuffed him, and took him off the train at the next stop. I was sitting down, so I couldn't see this happening, but Michelle was giving me a play-by-play, which made the situation all the more dramatic. Of course we began speculating what could have happened, and my mind jumped immediately to "international fugitive taken by undercover agents just after crossing the border into their jurisdiction, drugs or heist money may be involved" but a conversation with a nice Austrian woman later on revealed that it was likely an immigration issue, which apparently happens relatively often (she rides this same train every week, so I imagine she sees it a lot). Either way, it was quite intense. 

We then engaged in conversation with this nice lady who gave us some gems of wisdom as her parting words: "Don't fall in love with any men from around here. It get's complicated." Good to know.

As we were getting off the train we met some nice Mormon boys on their mission from (you guessed it)  Utah. They even had name tags that said "Elder _____". I then had "I Believe" from the Book of Mormon stuck in my head the rest of the day.

And then, the first thing we saw when we walked into our hostel, was that we had two Orthodox Jewish boys staying in our room. Mormons on the train and Jewish boys in our room--hey there, diversity!

I'm jumping a head a bit, but to continue with the "weird" portion of the weekend, our hostel room turned out to be the home of an incredibly diverse and equally bizarre set of characters, including a boy who enjoyed power-walking in and out of the room several times before 6 AM, while wearing snow pants (there was no snow) so as to maximize the amount of swishing noise he made while walking. There was also a middle-aged italian woman who enjoyed waving to our skylight, charging her phone in Michelle's bed (even though her own bed also had an outlet), spreading her things all over everyone else's bed, and staring strangely at everyone, thereby freaking them out. This is in addition to the two Jewish boys, one of whom had his iPhone stolen at one point in the week, meaning the rest of us were freaked out about our own things--needless to say we were pretty relieved when we made it safely through the weekend with all of our things (and our minds) intact.

Anyway, enough of the creepy, onto the fun! Friday night was Michelle's birthday, so we headed to a traditional Bavarian beer hall to celebrate! The atmosphere in this place was absolutely wild. It was completely packed, but luckily we found a place at the end of a table. The other end was occupied by a bunch of 25-30 year old German men, one of whom was wearing lederhosen. The way these beer halls go, you share huge tables with lots of different parties, so we ended up chatting with these guys, and they proved to be incredibly entertaining. Even though we eventually learned some of their names, we like to refer to the main characters by nicknames which, I believe, convey their personalities well. There was "Tracht Tommy" (his name was actually Tommy, and he was the fella clad in Lederhosen with white classic Reebok sneakers, which completed the ensemble very nicely), "Mr. New York" (so called because he talked to me for ages about how much he loves New York), "Cartilage Piercing" (self-explanatory) and "Creepy McCreeperson" (also self-explanatory). They were actually super super friendly and very nice and interesting people, and I really enjoyed talking to them. It's nice to be in a place where the German is similar to the German I learned in school, without strange dialects or Austrian accents, so I could understand them so much more than the average Austrian. Plus, the food and the beer were awesome. This was definitely an excellent start to our Munich Weekend.

Post-dinner nighttime stroll through the snow-covered Oktoberfest grounds to see the massive Lady Bavaria statue

Schweinbraten mit Kartofelknodel und Dunkelbiersoße
yummmmmm

On Saturday morning we went into the city center to see the famous Munich Rathaus Glockenspiel, which went on for about 15 minutes, and was kind of a let-down, but still fun! The clock is in the tower of the Rathaus, the city hall, and there were TONS of people lined up to watch. Before the "show" started though, we had to stand around and listen to this awful man who was speaking into a microphone in the square (you can see his white canopy in the picture below) about his fierce opposition to the proposal to build a Mosque nearby. Apparently this guy (or his cronies) are out there and in various other parts of the city for hours and hours every Friday and Saturday, spouting their hateful crap, and they were actually successful in getting people to sign their petition. Of course, he has the right to free speech, so he can say and do what he wants, and there were police around to make sure nothing got out of hand, but it was incredibly infuriating. Anyway, there's a video of the Glockenspiel below--sorry it's sideways, I can't figure out how to turn the video around!

After the Glockenspiel, we did a lot of wandering, visiting the Frauenkirche, St. Peter's Kirche (including a climb to the top of the tower, 306 steps up, to a stunning view of the city around us), the Viktualienmarkt, and the famous Hofbräuhaus (another very famous Beer Hall, where I got a pretzel that was literally bigger than my head, and we all know that I have a really large head). The Hofbräuhaus also had a really awesome atmosphere, that I tried to capture on video below, but it's kind of a lame attempt. You can hear the band playing though, which is super fun!

Inside the Frauenkirche, the major cathedral

From the top of St. Peter's

View of Rathausplatz from the tower

Frauenkirche from above

Lunch of Currywurst with Bratkartoffeln at the Viktualienmarkt!

YUM

The band! More people (actual customers) were dressed
like this throughout the hall, too!

The whole place is huge and beautiful--I love the painted ceilings

We had a few hours before the concert that night, and the sun had finally come out by then, so Annie and I decided to wander a bit more and see more of the city. Munich is a really really beautiful place. We saw lots of pretty buildings but the best part of this adventure was the part when we accidentally stumbled upon a huge gathering of teenagers that turned out to be a Harlem Shake Flash Mob. We had NO idea what was going on but we saw a bunch of people wearing funny costumes and some people with cameras, all gathered in this public square, so we waited around as more and more people showed up. The next thing we knew we were in a gigantic crowd of people jumping and chanting and screaming and cheering, and we went along with it, hoping we weren't joining in on some kind of fascist political rally, until we finally asked some girls behind us what was going on, and they said this was the making of a Harlem Shake video! Considering I didn't even know what a Harlem Shake was until about 2 weeks ago, this was quite a new experience! It was hilarious and so much fun, and I've since been searching YouTube daily to find the finished product! This video shows the kind of crazy going on, but I imagine eventually a video will actually be edited into a "classic" Harlem Shake and then I can say that I was part of this ridiculous internet phenomenon, albeit accidentally!

Hofgarten in the sunlight!

Beautiful church next to the square where the mob happened

State Opera House

FINALLY Saturday night rolled around and the main event of the weekend was here: The Lumineers Show!!! But I'm going to give the event its own blog post, to properly convey its awesomeness, so stay tuned for that, coming soon