Day 3: St. Goar to Munich

Imagine being in Germany for your first night then at 5am you are woken up by an air raid siren. I didn’t know if it was some sort of wake up call or if something was happening but needless to say after the almost a minute of full on siren (and several more off in the distance)….I went back to sleep.

After getting up for the second time we all assembled for breakfast and then we had a stop at the beer stein store next door. The store had all sorts of steins and the owner himself also designed and made them. He explained a lot of history behind them and also showed us a few of the collectibles ones. I ended up buying a couple of steins for myself. After the store, we got a little bit of time to take some pictures of a castle on the hill and some of the valley and then we drove off through the Rhine Valley. During our drive out we found out the source of the sirens at night. It turns out a ship had capsized in the flooded river so they were sounding the alarm went it start going over.

After a scenic drive through the Rhine Velley we arrived in Munich. After getting to our hotel and taking a shower we headed out to the old part of Germany for a walking tour. We got into town and walked for a bit to near the Marienplatz where we met up with our tour guide. Our tour guide started taking and it was in perfect English…a very familiar accent…turns out he was a fellow Canadian who had moved to Europe 5 years ago from Vancouver to be a tour guide.

The guided tour was really good and we got to see some really interesting building as well as learn some really interesting facts about Germany pre and post both World Wars. I was really fascinated by some of the buildings which had the textures painted on after they were rebuilt after the war because Germany did not have enough money to rebuild them to the way they were after they were destroyed during the war.

After the walking tour, it was time to drink massive amounts of beer at the beer hall Hofbrauhaus. The beer house was awesome. A server just walked around with five 1L steins in each hand and just asked who wanted beer and then he put them down the table. The beer was probably the best beer I’ve ever had. Our tour guide Joe said the only ingredients were hops, barley and water so it was the purest beer you could have (and he promised if we only drank beer we would not have a hangover). The beer was really smooth, crisp and it went down pretty easy.

For food, most of us ordered the pork knuckle which was pretty much a giant piece of meat on a bone with a piece of fried fat on top (crisp) served with two german style dumplings. The pork knuckle was really heavy and filling so I’m sure it did a great job soaking up all the beer. By the end of the night I ended up drinking 2 steins which was probably equivalent to about 6 beers. I chugged the last 1/3 of the second beer which turned out to be a really bad idea.

After the beer hall, most of us got on the coach and made our way back to the hotel where my roommate proceeded to pass out after having about 4 steins.

Tomorrow we will be heading to Innsbruck, Austria.

- Kyle

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