In and Around Bavaria

So... sorry for the delay, but the last two weeks have been chock full of excursions and activities! The weekend I left off, I was at least mostly productive in writing that research paper. I did take a break on Sunday to join Hans at the Residenz. This is the original palace of Munich where the Bavarian royal line watched over the city. It's a gorgeous building and has some impressive rooms. It also has one of the apparently more impressive treasury collections in Europe with crowns and jewels from the 1000's up. Monday and Tuesday involved a lot of getting ready and finishing up. Wednesday morning I met Matt at the subway station. His girlfriend was coming in the same day as Steve, so we went together to pick them up from the airport since their flights were only an hour apart. I dropped Steve off in my room and ran to my German Lit class, then picked him up again at 4 for the two hour Munich walking tour that I'm getting so much better at now. :) We ended this with a trip to the English Gardens so he could have his first liter of beer and as-large-as-your-head pretzel. Our weather was happily gorgeous. Thursday, a group of nine of us (Matt, gf, Hans, Kristina, Tim, and two girls from Hungary) took a day trip to Chiemsee. Chiemsee is the largest lake in Bavaria and has two islands on it, Herreninsel and Frauen insel (Men Island and Women Island). They have a monastary and abbey on them respectively. Most notable is one of Ludwig II's three castles that is on Herreninsel, which he named Herrenchiemsee. It was built to be a model of Versailles because apparently Ludwig II was mildly obsessed with the French and specifically Louis XIV. Like Neuschwanstein, the palace was never finished (it was about a third of the way through) and is considerably smaller than Versaillse, but the famous "Hall of Mirrors" was actually more extravagantly completed as its model in Versailles. After touring the palace and the old monastary (which is actually the Old Palace), we took the ship to Fraueninsel and wandered around before taking the train back to Munich. Then Friday, Steve and I hopped on the train to Innsbruck where we were warmly greeted by Andrea, Hannes and Lisa. I "toured" Steve around Innsbruck in the afternoon... touring being the extent to which I remember the city from three years ago. We hit the main sites though. That night we crashed early because he wasn't quite over jet lag yet. Satrday morning we walked around Hall. After lunch, Andrea and Lisa accompianed us to Wolfsklamm. If any of you remember from my Austria blog, I went there once with Lisa and a handful of exchange students. It's this hike up a mountain to a church/monastary on top. The best part, though, is that you're climbing up through waterfalls. It's absolutely gorgeous. Steve managed to set a pace up that had Andrea panting and apparently we made record time... 35 minutes instead of the expected hour. The trip was well worth it. It was as beautiful as I had remembered and I'm pretty sure Steve appreciated the waterfalls. After dinner that evening, we followed Lisa out to Innsbruck. I'd been promising her that I would go out with her in Innsbruck since my first trip in October but for some reason or another (I was tired/she was tired/she was gone) we hadn't yet managed. So we met up with some of her friends (and one of my old classmates!) at an Irish Pub in Innsbruck. Sunday morning, we went with Lisa up the new cable car to the top of Innsbruck's moutain. I say Innsbruck's mountain because it's the closest mountain to the city... in fact you can travel between the city and the top of the mountain in less than a half hour, most of that being the transportation up the mountain. You can't find that just anywhere in the world. It's actually the same mountain I learned to ski and snowboard on... because it's the mountain that the Planks have their cabin on. We saw the cabin on the way up, actually. From where the cable car let us off we hiked the remaining 50 meters of so up to reach the peak, marked with the typical cross and then we pretended we had hiked the entire thing. The view from the top was breathtaking. Afterwards the three of us met the group from last night at a lake about 15 minutes outside of Hall and experienced the "summer day" favorite past time for Austrians. Any day it's above 70 degrees it's warm enough to lay out in the sun, preferably by the lake. More the relaxing side to counter the mountain hiking we'd been doing. That evening we headed back to Munich and the following morning, bright and early, we were on a train to Neuschwanstein. By the time our train reached the desired stop, the remaining 10 people in our car were all eurotripping American college kids. One was from St. Louis and one was from Chicago. We were lucky on weather. Once again it was absolutely gorgeous which was a plus since the last time I'd been it had been quite cloudy. I did realize it had been exactly three years since I went with the Planks though. It was the weekend before Penecost then, too! We decided to see both castles (well, that was actually probably me... I hadn't seen Hohenschwangau yet and wanted to) so we started with a tour of Ludwig II's parents castle and then did Neuschwanstein. The first castle was actually relatively small and not very intricate in terms of gold, but it was gorgeously painted. There were murals along all the ceilings and walls telling the story of the history of the castle. We decided to hike up to Neuschwanstein, and, specifically, to go via way of the Marienbrücke (Mary's bridge), which gives the most famous view of the castle. This required us to hike up a relatively steep grade for about 40 minutes. It was bordering on hot, we were out of water and I was exhausted and then we finally reached the bridge (turns out the castle is downhill from the bridge) and prepared for our amazing view! And guess which side of the castle is completely covered in scaffolding! Yup! The famous one! It was still gorgeous though and we determined (since we had made it) worth the strenuous hike up. It also gave us a view of the waterfall, which was neat. So then we toured Neuschwanstein. Surprisingly I got a lot more out of the tour in English this time than I did in German three years ago... I learned a lot this time! Then we rushed back to our train to Munich and went straight from the station to dinner. Erika had organized an "American" dinner which turned out to be pretty big since everyone had guests in town. It also luckily had German food so Steve got a real German meal. Schweinbraten and Knödel. Tuesday I actually managed to make it to some more of my classes (never fear, there was no class the previous Thursday (Christ's ascension to heaven?), and I have no classes on Friday so I had just missed two on Wednesday (Tim and Kristina took notes) and Stat on Monday). I dropped Steve off in the library and then after Orgo, swiped him in to the cafeteria with Kristina, Matt and I. After a quick tour of my campus in Garching, we took the train out to Erding, a suburb of Munich which happens to have a pretty famous spa. It's called Therma Erding. We went, however, for Galaxy, which is a big indoor water slide park. Exclusively water slides. It's got about 14 of them. Three are rated "extreme" and have a minimum age limit of 14 to ride. One (Steve tried this one) takes you up to 40 miles per hour in an enclosed slide. I finally worked up the guts to try the short red one that spits you out into the air so you go flying before you hit. Ow. That's all I can say. I felt that in my neck for the next two days. We both avoided the one that pretty much takes you almost straight down for the equivalent of two stories. We did appreciate the other ones though. It was pretty cool. You pay by the hour so we put two hours in. By that point it had started to rain and was, in fact, thunderstorming by the time we made it home. This was actually quite possibly on the second thunderstorm I have ever experienced in Munich so that was pretty cool. Wednesday morning I left Steve with my keys and instructions of how to get to BMW world, how to get to Marienplatz to see the Glockenspiel, and how to do laundry. I went to all three of my classes! I met him back at 4 and we both packed our stuff for Paris/Brussels. We managed to pack in my big green travel side pack and one backpack which I thought was pretty good. Then, because he hadn't seen it yet and we had some time to kill still, we circled Olympic Park and climbed "Olympic Mountain". The day was once again gorgeous so we got a very nice view. After a quick stop to grab our stuff from my room, we headed to Marienplatz and went to the famous Hofbrauhaus for dinner. If you aren't familiar with it, it's a world famous beer hall, or, as they translate it "Beer Palace". Steve's mom was very insistant that he have Wiener Schnitzel so we ordered that and Apfel Strudel and of course, beer. (well, I stick with Radler's, but...). We hung out there, surrounded by waitresses in drindls and a Bavarian band in Lederhosen until 10 and then walked to the train station to catch our 10:45 night train go Paris.
And with that I will end this post as it is already pretty long. Paris will be up shortly.

Pictures:
Inside the Residenz- the mirror room
Another picture of the Residenz
Steve and I at the Biergarten
The scaffolding covered Neuschwanstein
Hohenschwangau and the lake
Steve and I on the top of the mountain