WEATHER: Mostly sunny – I reckon 15C
HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Bike tour of Munich
BUMMER OF THE DAY:
BUYS OF THE DAY: My 6 litres of beer would have to be the buy of the day right?
WORD OF THE DAY: - Prost – cheers in German
Before departing sleepy hollow, aka St Goar, we got to visit a Beer stein shop. It’s a cool little shop right next door to the hotel and is full of, yep beer steins. It has the world’s largest stein in there (not for sale of course) but the guy went through the drinking process and it seems the Germans take their beer drinking quite seriously. There is a myth that I will clear up out of this visit and that the beer doesn’t go hot if you are drinking from a proper stein ( being a liter it could sit there for a while ) because they have a lid on theirs that they keep closed and that keeps the beer cool, fresh and the bugs out. I also took a visit to the cuckoo clock shop, I was tempted to buy one, as they ship to Australia, but I thought by the time I get back home next year, I’ll look at the clock and wonder why the hell I bought it, so I fought the urge and kept my purse in my bag.
We arrived into Munich at 2pm and had a quick turnaround at the hotel before heading into the city for a bike tour. Yes people, I got on a bike! I was trying to think the last time I rode a bike and I think it would have been like 8 years ago at Couran Cove. I think I may get a little saddle sore tomorrow, but the bike tour was AWESOME!!! We rode in 2 groups of 25 for 1.5 hours around Munich City and what a beautiful city it is. The day was magic, and it was sweet to feel the wind through my hair. I felt like Kermit the Frog on the bike, but I had fun! The highlight was the park they have in the middle of the city, it is 25% bigger than Central Park in New York, it was massive and really glad we got a chance to ride around part of it. We did have a stop at a place where there were surfers, yes surfers, riding a man made wave in the middle of the river. It was so cool and so unexpected with these guys riding their boards in the middle of a capital city, it’s called river surfing and gets really popular in the summer and the only place in Europe where it can be done.
No visit to Munich is complete unless you visit a beer hall, in particular the Hofbrahaus. The most famous one in all of Munich. The Germans have 5000 types of beer, 10% of Europe’s beer consumption is drunk by the Germans and 80% of Europe’s breweries are in Germany! Now that is some pretty impressive beers stats!!! They obviously don’t sell 5000 beers at the Hofbrahaus, there was only a selection from 4 I believe, so I stuck to the original version. I was always planning on consuming at least 2 steins (a stein for the record is one liter) and by the end of the night I had set a record and had consumed SIX!!!!!!!!! AND the thing that makes this record even more amazing is those 6 steins were drunk in a space of 3 hours! Come on I dare some-one to beat that record………I asked Mark if there was a Contiki record, and he said no, so I have started the record with 6 as the bench mark and we’ll see if any of Marks other tours will beat it. I am sure it will get smashed but it is a pretty good start right! Bernie the beer drinker!!! It was a great night, with about 25 of us staying until the Hofbrahaus closed at 11.30pm. It was after all a Monday night! So we all caught taxis back to the hotel, and as if 6L of beer wasn’t enough, we hit the hotel bar and pumped a few glasses of vodka down till that bar closed at 2am!!! Sometimes I think the best nights are the unplanned ones!!
We leave Munich tomorrow and head to the Austrian Alps for the night, before heading into Italy. It is day 4 of the tour and we are all getting along dandy. We are all hung over like bastards, and we sleep like babies on the coach but all getting along fine. Romance has hit the bus, some drinking stories are starting to surface and we are all having a ball.
Germany this morning, Austria tonight and Italy tomorrow. This is my life and I LOVE it!
